This is the material world and if one vice doesn’t do you in, another one surely will.  If nothing else, there is the obvious and ongoing erosion of each present self, the sly voice within us that lurks beneath the most laudatory of our triumphs.  Mortality renders the measurability of our accomplishments to be largely at our own discretion.  Sometimes this reaches us during the overwhelming silence of 3AM insomnia, sometimes during the most blissed-out of moments, when we’re trying our hardest to keep this knowledge at bay.