The need to feel smarter than yourself

One of my autumn staycation traditions is reading Anthem by Ayn Rand. It's a soul-lifting story, and as long as I only read it once a year, it stays good and relevant and doesn't get inflated. (I've started applying this "once a year" principle on other good things in my life as well, and let me tell you, it makes all the difference. But more on that later.) I read the same copy of Anthem each time, and I highlight all the words and sentences and ideas that I find relevant at that particular time reading, that particular time in my life.

This year's reading session was supposed to be just like any other. Except that it wasn't. You see, I had forgotten to bring that one copy home from the office, so I had to borrow one of my partner's copies, an untouched one with no pre-highlighted parts whatsoever.

Here's what happened:

Seeing the completely virgin text, I was constantly guessing which parts in my copy I had highlighted, so as to not highlight them in vain.
I had to highlight something, so I tried my best to pick sentences that were a little out of the box.
I was constantly stressed out by the idea that I was only highlighting things that I had already highlighted before, which, if true, would mean that I haven't gotten any wiser with the years.

On Saturday, I got my hands on my original copy with the yearly highlights - and exactly so: On Friday, I had highlighted only one sentence in the virgin copy which I had never highlighted before in my own copy. Others highlighted ideas I had already seen before. So ergo:

I'm mostly as smart as I was a year ago, or
The one brand new highlight was proof of the essential difference between last year's me and the current me.

And finally, here's what I can do with this information:

Choose to believe conclusion number 2 above, or
Realize that all this is mainly trivial neuroticism-feeding overanalysis, because in reality, I'm becoming dumber with every passing year.