I'll tell you, one thing that I appreciate about getting older, you really do learn to let go of your own bullshit.

It's not that life stops being full of day-to-day indignities for you and injustice for those in a worse station than you, it's just that you can learn how to give yourself a break. You really do come to understand which of your responsibilities are real responsibilities, and which of them is nonsense that you've self-imposed out of some combination of genuine concern and self-importance. I don't even think that it's a matter of losing ideological purity, or anything like that. I think it's a matter of recognizing that you can't do any good for the real, important causes if you are so busy beating yourself up about illusory commitments.

And you do count your blessings. When I was younger I could rage about injustice but had no perspective on how profoundly fortunate I was, or was becoming. I knew to say it always, like a preemptive strike, and I insisted on it in the academic sense. It has taken a rehabilitation of myself in my own mind to realize that good fortune in anything like a profound or meaningful way. My self-hatred and self-inflicted problems, I've come to realize, were not the mark of someone wrestling with an unjust world but were rather an attempt to crowd it out. 

The bias is always towards saying that you'd prefer to be your own age rather than younger. Most of us want to be younger, after all, but know that we're supposed to say that we're happy where we are. I'm not sure I can say either way. Here at 30, all I can tell you is that I am so much more of a healthy and fulfilled person than I was at 25, and I wouldn't trade this perspective for anything. 25 included. I'm trying to make 30 an age of letting go.