Pessimism and hope (2 of 2): Comparison.

The other week, I went to a Zoom networking event for the scholarship undergraduates of my college that I had participated in, and it was interesting to see everyone, now, including the new kids rising up and the recent graduates. There was the wealthy businessman who sponsored it - we're still in touch on email, on and off - and lots of students from different cohorts from the past 30 years. It was very, very odd, since in some ways, everyone was mentioning civic work and academic work or professional work, and I clearly beat them on *all* major fronts -- conducting a major early unionization campaign that was cutting edge for its time and made the press a decent amount, poking around now with this civic group that I'm a part of about maybe trying to revive this one savvy state-level police reform bill, putting together several major financial exposes that caused a big splash and resulted in real world change, achieving huge academic accomplishments that aren't just some b*llsh*t that you're hyping up like so many people were talking about, and that's all besides getting a number of articles on very different topics into different publications, a few major. All of those are substantive and any single one of them would intimidate people, and yet I have all of them, and yet somehow I live in a back alley cottage working as little as possible and doing whatever the f*ck I want on my time off. Life really is jacked now. It's interesting, too, since everyone there presents themselves in a way that I really don't have - some form of poise, this way of self-presenting, this odd way of making themselves out to be big without really talking about anything important at all. And my not having that and the gap between what I've done and where I am, just seems to have made me even more off-putting to people. They're like, "Who is this guy?", and you can tell from the way that they look at me that they find me somehow bizarre. Somehow though they're all on scholarship, too, you get the sense that they're economically at ease, or at least know enough to cover it up; there's no vulnerability about them, like I've had, where one bad turn will disrupt my chances for a very long-time, and the people who have ill-malice towards me can sense that. I also get the sense that none of them have dared, and that has allowed them an easy path to advancement.