Okay, clarification...BUT, your last post...I don't buy that stuff either. This whole nobility brought on by adversity stuff is just a new twist on victim status. It sounds like some kind of Morgan Freeman: "victim" and yet "sage" role. That's total BS. Its as tied to phenomenology as the victim argument. The whole, "You don't know what its like to walk the hard walk until you've done it..." It denies the notion that there is a set of guiding principles which, if followed, tend to produce a better life. Whether we've found those principles early or late, living them is the issue...not the road we took to get there.