When Egos Attack!

These days, a lot of people are having or have kids. Inevitably the conversation turns to child rearing and just how the hell you raise a kid today without having them become a cam slut or the next Columbine kid.

Through all the anxiety one thing seems to come up time and time again, self esteem. If you raise your kid with a goal of giving them a defined sense of self worth then really, the rest should take care of itself. Sage Wisdom? Hardly. it's over simplification to the point of cliché.

However, as I ride jarringly down the tracks in the green machine they call GO I find myself reflecting as I often do on my own hopes, dreams and aspirations for the future.

Add to this the recent addition of facebook into my life and things start to get complicated. Each day I find myself with 2 new elements to my reality. Finding out:

1. What my peers have been up to for the last X years since I saw them last. Now, don't get me wrong, I am largely very happy to hear from everyone but, it really is a scorekeeping moment no matter how much you claim 'not to care'. Here is a group of people who, on paper, all had the same skills, abilities and opportunities as me. A decade or so we were set out on the world and now we find ourselves at a way point of measurement. The good news is catching up with old friends on facebook is basically the plutonic version of lavalife, best case scenarios and over exaggeration, so where one grain of salt is usually prescribed, use two.

2. Finding out what my newly reconnected network is up to daily and often hourly. Funny how you can go from not having spoken to someone since before there was reality tv to now being apprised of their every mood change? I guess this acts like an I.V. drip versus pushing the full needle every 10 years.

Now with the world's most verbose precursor in place, I digress.

Self esteem, we're supposed to have lots of it and if we do this is what's supposed to bring us happiness and good decision making skills. But I got to thinking tonight, what if having a lot of self esteem gives you a false sense of importance in the world?

I see my lost friends and their comfortable lives and their charming new families and I ask, so is that it? Are they happy? Are they at the finish line and now it's about the generation behind them?

At this point if you're one of those people you're thinking, screw you Oliveira! Who do you think you are?

EXACTLY! This is my point, who DO I think I am? In my heart I truly do think I am somehow destined to do something important or be someone great. While not looking down on the lives of others, I know I would never find mediocrity acceptable for me.

And so I wonder has an over inflated sense of self importance fueled by years of building good self esteem actually cursed me to live a life unfulfilled or is it this constant state of dissatisfaction that pushes great people?

As a tangential point, all of this may be moot because greatness, like a nickname, is probably not something you declare upon yourself?

Yours truly,
Alex 'the iceman', 'ace' Oliveira