The Equalizer and Me: A Confession

Sometimes I worry that after I die I’ll find myself in an office, sitting across from a man who has a printout showing how I spent every minute of my life. He isn’t using the information to decide my fate. He’s just doing some research on the gulf between who we are and who we claim to be.

“Now, you claimed to be passionately interested in literature,” he says, “and you believed that Tolstoy was the greatest writer who ever lived. But I see here that...