"I was somewhat amazed when he started the video series since, as far as I saw from his posts on other forums, that he had "bowed out."

I worshiped at Jay's alter for years until my personal excommunication. It always seemed like he was going to "bow out", but he always came back. Everyone needs some form of recognition to keep going especially after most of the illusion is striped out of your life and you begin to stand on your own two feet. We are all guilty of it or we would not be in these forums “strutting” our stuff. I'm surprised to see him go on a radio broadcast; things must be getting really lonely in Hawaii. Time to preen those beautiful feathers again...
==AC

The basic question the person wants to ask and answer is "Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? What value does it have?" And we can only get answers to these questions by reviewing our relationships to others, what we do to others and for others, and what kind of response we get from them. SELF-ESTEEM depends on our social role, and our inner-newsreel is always packed with faces—it is rarely a nature documentary. Even holy men, who withdraw for years of spiritual development, come back into the fold of society to earn recognition for their powers. [Friedrich] Nietzsche said of [Arthur] Schopenhauer that he was a model for all men because he could work in isolation and care nothing for the plaudits of the human marketplace. The implication is that he had his sense of value securely embedded in himself and his own idea of what his work was worth. Yet this same Schopenhauer spent his lonely life scanning the footnotes of learned journals to see whether there was ever going to be recognition of his work....The anthropologist Robert Lowie once said that primitive man was a natural peacock, so open was he in self-display and self-glorification. But we play the same game, only not as openly. Our entire life is a harangue to others to establish ourselves as peacocks, if only on furtive and private inner-newsreel images.
~Ernest Becker