Although a modicum of humility is socially preferable to unbridled boastful pride, self-deprecation isn’t always an acceptable trait. Want to be star in a movie or in a TV series? It’s not a good idea to approach a producer in a self-deprecating manner. Producers gamble millions on shows, and they don’t need to spend effort pushing the meek and timid. It’s not a good idea to demean your talents in such circumstances. Being a diva works as long as the behavior isn’t over-the-top obnoxious.
 
Self-deprecation can be a persuasive tactic, especially when one needs a favor from someone in authority. Yes, genuinely expressed self-deprecation might convince the self-important to yield to a request or to provide a charitable gift. Feigned self-deprecation, however, once detected, becomes a negative force.
 
There is, however, a circumstance in which self-deprecation seems universally appropriate: Comedy. The late John Pinette was good at using it, especially during his early comedy routines that centered on his weight and size. Other standups have also made a living on self-deprecation. Audiences get the jokes, but they go to such performances already primed to laugh.
 
Some comedians make their living by deprecating others. Don Rickles has done that successfully for decades. His audiences, of course, know beforehand the nature of his routine, and they expect some degree of humiliation by the quick-witted comic’s tongue. But elsewhere in society, deprecating another is typically anathema, bordering on defamation, and cause for litigation.
 
Do you have a sense of humor when you are the object of derision? Are you a good audience for a “John Pinette” but a bad audience for a “Don Rickles”? Let me ask, “How do you feel about another person’s negative humorous assessment of your talent?” Seemingly, in an overly litigious society there’s a decline in tolerance for deprecating humor. People can’t laugh at themselves, but, in truth, people have long been intolerant of critical humor. You can imagine the ire of Dante’s political opponents at criticism of their personae in The Inferno some seven centuries ago.
 
It’s pride. Pride, the antithesis of self-deprecation, recognizes nothing humorous with regard to the Self. Pride feeds only on deprecating others, often in the service of Envy and Greed. In a sense, some people (maybe many) live their lives as though they are characters in a medieval, allegorical morality play. Personification makes characters from characteristics in such plays. Virtues, vices, and abstractions play concrete roles, as those played by Good Deeds, Knowledge, and Beauty in Everyman (15th century) or Dante’s main character in The Divine Comedy. And that appears to be the way some live with regard to deprecating and self-deprecating: Characters in a modern morality play that personify some behavior, mood, and quality.
 
Are you the personification of a vice? Of a virtue? Of a conflict between both? Are you open to a bit of good-natured deprecation? Are you a “John Pinette” or a “Don Rickles”?

When two adjacent alpine glaciers move downslope, they gouge parallel U-shaped valleys separated by a long narrow ridge called an arête. Another areté, the Greek (ἀρετή), a word variously defined, largely suggests “the straight and narrow” in an ethical sense. There is yet another Arete, this one the name of the mythical queen of Scheria and wife of Alcinous. Arete was a model of virtue and hospitality. And there is one more: Arete of Cyrene whose father, a disciple of Socrates, taught her philosophy. This Arete became an authoress and a philosopher of moral philosophy in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and she was reportedly renowned for her own virtue.
 
Both arête and areté are difficult paths, both are narrow, and both have precipitous sides. Interrupted by breaks called cols, alpine arêtes offer remnant, isolated spires as perilous challenges for rock climbers. Interrupted by doubts and difficult choices, the paths of an ethical life are also challenging. They offer no guardrails to prevent a “fall,” and, like their mountain counterparts, they provide no more than treacherous footing. Many, having tried to walk the “straight and narrow,” have tumbled from the path.
 
An ethical life never follows a wide and easy path. Maybe if we thought of walking the “straight and narrow path” as similar to clambering on an arête, we would be more cautious about our footing and would fall less often. And there’s another reason for thinking of living ethically as a risky climb. What would we feel if we accepted the ethical path as a physical adventure? Alpine climbers no doubt undergo a suffusion of dopamine from their conquering high elevations. Walking the narrow path of an ethical life might not seem to be the source of the rush that mountain climbing provides. However, were we to convince ourselves that an ethical life is as exhilarating as climbing an arête, we might be motivated to be more like the mythical Arete and the ancient philosopher Arete, both known for persistence in walking the straight and narrow path of virtue that for them—as it is for us—was bordered by precipitous sides.
 
Arête:
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/gallery/aretes.html
Col:
https://www4.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/lemke/alpine_glacial_glossary/landforms/col.html 

As the spacecraft Juno approached Jupiter for its July 4, 2016, encounter, it recorded the oscillations in plasma caused by interactions between the planet’s magnetic field and the solar wind. NASA turned those oscillations in sound, and they are posted online by ScienceNews.* We get to listen to Jupiter. Imagine what the ancient Greeks and Romans would think if they could hear the voice of the chief Olympian. Imagine their expressions as they listened to sounds we would identify as static.
 
Not a difficult thing for us. We’re used to sensing the world, in fact, the universe, in multiple ways. We see TV weather reports that show us Doppler radar images enhanced by yellows, greens, and reds that show storm intensity and direction. We hear static on AM radio when we drive through a magnetic field surrounding power lines. We see radio telescope images of distant galaxies, not as they appear in visible light, but rather in images that show us the normally unseen radio waves. We know the world of vibrations as we listen to seismic energy from earthquakes and eruptions. We hear sounds and deal with images that the ancients could not understand. Our world is more than what their five senses naturally perceived.
 
Here we are, capable of listening to the voice of Jupiter, and we can be blasé about the experience. Ho-hum. Jupiter. What else do you have for me? So, it’s a big, fast-rotating planet that emits more electromagnetic energy than it receives from the distant sun. What’s new?
 
Have many of us lost that sense of wonder that infused the ancients? Is ennui our natural state? Stimulate us with a bit of new something or other. We peak. We fade. We oscillate. We can even “see” the oscillations in brain scans. The sounds of the king of the gods have already for some become no more than the sounds of whales: Interesting for a moment or two. What’s next?
 
In truth, if we could transport Pericles or Caesar to our century, we would see that, once acclimated to our technology and experience, the oscillations would emerge. They, like you and many others, would probably ask, “What’s next?”
 
* https://www.sciencenews.org/editors-picks/juno-mission-jupiter 

Earth formed by the accretion of planetesimals. The process was violent. Rocky and metallic bodies of varying sizes, from sand grains to boulders bigger than a continent, banged into one another, breaking up, reforming, repeatedly colliding, and eventually accumulating into a planet. Gravity and chance played their roles in forming the planet. Accretion of planetesimals is the reason that you don’t really have to worry about a bolide impact. As the planets grew, their gravitational pull increased, and they swept their orbits relatively clean (but not completely clean). Before 3.8 billion years ago, Earth was under constant bombardment. Having swept its orbit relatively free of debris about that time, it then entered a more quiescent period, one interrupted by occasional large impact events, such as those that left craters like Vredefort (South Africa, 2 billion years old), Sudbury (Canada, 1.8 billion years old), and Chicxulub (Mexico, 66 million years old
 
 
You, too, seem to have formed by accretion. No, not of planetesimals, but of experience and idea. You might think that the process has been relatively smooth and peaceful, but in every instance, some new acquisition, say, of an idea, has resulted in some breakup of what was there and an eventual amalgam. Paradigm shifts in thinking occurred during and after big impacts. Think philosophical change. Have you always thought the way you now think?
 
Each planet’s impact history is different, just as your intellectual development differs from that of others. Geologists have been able to date the time of impacts that left their marks on the changing landscape of our planet. Can you date the impacts that have changed your ideas?
 
Are you in a quiescent period? Have your ideas remained unaffected for years or decades? Or, have you suffered through a large impact that has altered the way you think? Have several smaller impacts altered your way of thinking?  
 
Yes, there are those whose lives will go uninterrupted by some external idea. They will live through a long period when everything makes sense, when everything fits into a unified explanation and an overriding metaphor for life’s meaning. Their orbits either by chance or by design are free of intellectual debris.
 
As for me, I’m a bit like the early Earth. I keep getting hit by new ideas that reshape my thinking, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Well, maybe the accretion of ideas is always for the better, maybe amalgam is what enables a person to survive the next impact. It’s not that I don’t trust the “solid ground” on which I now walk, it’s just that I know that at any moment some idea that I never encountered but that shadows my orbit will, most likely by chance, cross my path, do some breaking, and add its mass to the mass already accreted onto my life.