To repent just means you simply look honestly in the mirror and see your own flaws and weaknesses and don't make excuses for them, don't deny them, blame someone else for them or justify them.
The problem is, living off approval and applause, and deriving your sense of self-worth from the praise of others, may feel great, but it also produces great problems. When it comes to being worshipped, human beings just don't make very good gods, something the Good Book warns about repeatedly. Worship is meant for God alone. But when humans are idolized and worshipped – and when they lower themselves to accept that homage and bask in its glory – major conflict mysteriously appears within the idolized star.
Perhaps you're more familiar with that other feel-good "drug," which has the same effect of making you invulnerable to seeing your own faults. It's called hate. For example, the main reason Islamic culture is so notoriously non-introspective, blaming everyone and everything else for its own gargantuan problems, is because so many Muslims (though obviously not all) have been pumped up with hate. Hatred for Jews in particular and all "infidels" (non-Muslims) in general, as well as hatred and blame toward women, or toward the other varieties of Muslims, and so on, renders them literally unable to see themselves and their faults. Their hatred acts like a narcotic drug that takes away their conscience-pain and recognition of their faults that would otherwise naturally impress itself on their minds. They are filled instead with the ecstasy of false righteousness based on infidel-hatred.