Maybe I'm just a pessimist
So I was reading this David Brooks article in the Atlantic Monthly. It's fascinating, because it essentially describes a world completely alien to me. When I look at the person I am and the people I know, I don't see a generation of people basking in their artificially inflated senses of self-worth, their existence validated by meaningless benchmarks like the color of their credit cards; rather, I see the exact opposite: a group of people always striving to live up to ever-increasing standards, who, despite a large quantity of objective evidence of their intelligence and abilities, still believe that they're not as good as everyone else out there. While Brooks believes "we are convinced that we are running our own lives quite well, whereas the idiots around us are screwing up theirs," I often feel like I'm the only one who's unable to keep his own life together, while everyone else is able to do a great job running theirs, and I know that this viewpoint is hardly unique among my friends, either.

Ahem. That ended up being a little more bleedy than I wanted it to be.