I think the realization of everything that one has done can be too devastating to confront for some.

This is true in other areas of life and for a great many people. But, our actions are not in a vacuum. We were lead to believe certain things, false things about ourselves and others or about circumstances, and we acted. We may have acted selfishly or desperately, both, or flippantly, but we probably learned that behavior from seeing it done to us or to others. A life time of regret is no way to live, but a sober look at one's own life might lead on there if there was nothing else.

If we spent our life chasing our desires and our "passions" (in the not just older but literally ancient sense of the word) instead of mastering them and seeing what's behind them, well very few win that game. I don't know that they are better off for it though.

I remember talking to an older weightlifter and we got philosophical at times. We talked about how "when I was younger I did ..." this or could do that and how calculation ability in math seems to decrease with age as does chess strength. What then, we wondered, is the point of a long life to the person living it? We do not go out in a blaze of glory. Looking back on those who did, we see a waste usually. But why? At the time all I had was the idea that there was something else we could gain or do, that could not be done younger-- I was very fuzzy on it though. I thought maybe there was something we might gain by reflecting on all of it when we were older, if we our minds were not limited by dysfunctions or if we lived well enough to be wise (stoicism I guess is what I'm dancing around). Sharing one's wisdom without concern for shame, either for our failures or our weaknesses or just shame for our misdeeds, didn't really come up, but that seems like something worth coming up with.

People who resist that confrontation with themselves, as you say above, refuse to be humble. That's a real shame. I believe this "true self" people so often run around looking for is there to be found after choosing humility (a tough choice, and elusive even when chosen). Real honest humility is a virtue for a reason, regardless of how little it is respected today. Especially when we think of just how short our lives are, how little of human history we lived through and how that, those cultural norms that are also so fleeting, may have blown us around like a leaf in a tornado. In the end, if we are able to step back and reflect on it: did we rise above it all, all the BS, or were we dragged down into its muck pretending the muck of it all was the point?

I don't know that I have answers (other than what worked for me), other than to say: the muck of it all is not the point, and that my life in this moment of time should not be stained by this moment of time even though it is. I look at the powerful and the rich and the famous, and I find them detestable. I listen to those telling us what to think, who to hate, what to do, and I'm disgusted. And yet I mock, and get angry, I get frustrated, I hold resentments, I pretend I'm not still making up for humiliations I felt so long ago I can't properly remember them.