John Steinbeck wrote a great essay about his friend Ed Ricketts, describing the most generous person he'd ever known. But there was a limit:

His feeling for psychic pain in normal people also was philosophic. He would say that nearly everything that can happen to people not only does happen to them but has happened for a million years. "Therefore," he would say, "for everything that can happen there is a channel or a mechanism in the human to take care of it—a channel worn down in prehistory and transmitted in the genes."

I like to think that's true—about me, and about you.

But just in case: