Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

The passage stages a characteristically Wallacean moral self-interrogation: the fear that one’s ethical life is inseparable from performance, craving approval, and self-deception. It probes the gap between being good and seeming good, and whether that gap can ever be cleanly known from the inside—since the very act of self-scrutiny can become another bid for reassurance. The final question (“bullshitting myself”) echoes Wallace’s recurring concern with sincerity in a culture of irony and self-consciousness: moral intention is hard to verify, and motives are mixed. The quote’s force lies in refusing easy resolution, treating moral knowledge as an ongoing, anxious practice rather than a settled identity.