Adulation Inflation

There's a bit of business that inevitably comes up whenever a friend or acquaintance has a brush with fame. I hear something like this: "Sure, I'm just a golf columnist [or singer/songwriter or ceramicist or small town mayor or juicing blogger], but sometimes I find that I actually made a difference. For example, I received an email [or text or YouTube comment or photograph of a tattoo] from someone whose blah-blah-blah was devastated with blah-blah-blah, and they told me that the sheer blah-blah-blah of my blah-blah-blah gave them the strength to get through." I've been through this more than a dozen times with other people (and more often on my own paltry steam), and I know my prescribed response. "My God," I'm supposed to reply. "That's FANTASTIC! You! Are! Fantastic!" But I can't manage it with conviction, because I'm crawling out of my skin with embarrassment knowing that anyone remotely prominent gets these stories by the bucketload. They're so formulaic that they seem…