`:Yes, there's something in that.  :I don't think I'm a particularly good judge of my own mental states, but my impression is that the more of certain kinds of administratorificizing I do, the darker becomes my view of human nature, and the more likely I become to see the worst in everything, which I suppose would color my blocking habits. Back in the days when anybody and his dog could merrily create new articles, there were periods when I'd take a quick look an average of a dozen or more new articles every day. (Of course thousands were being made, and some people were routinely checking fifty or more.) The great majority were horrible: they weren't decent stubs but instead for the most part unsupported assertions, often transparently about the author, his best buddy, his big brother, etc., and otherwise typically about the most trivial or ephemeral non-subject. Of course a number of these articles had the germs of the kind of thing that Nicholson Baker eloquently expounded on in his New Yorker piece, but these were rare. Why did so many people feel so compelled to aggrandize themselves, and why were so many lives devoted to this or that computer game? My mood got bleaker and bleaker, and it's likely that this aggravated my view of people making iffy or worse changes to legitimate articles. So I stopped this ``new article patrolling`` and felt a lot better.  :Actually my empirically unsupported hunch is that administratifying in quantity is bad for the ``soul``, and thus that people should not be encouraged to do too much of it. But for this not to result in collapse at the hands of exhibitionists and sociopathological drunks and teens, a lot more admins are needed. And RfA in its present form can't produce many.      `