The Public Private Life
Most people realize how much information is on the internet. If you know what you’re doing, you can get employment history, real estate data, and lots of random information just from a person’s name and location. And especially now, with social networks, there’s so much you can get from a simple search. In fact I just did a test search right now, and I pretty much found everything I mentioned (and creeped out my friend along the way).
So it’s pretty easy to find information on almost anyone. Thanks to social networks, larger parts of our lives are out in the public than ever before – and that’s not just for celebrities. What interesting is how we keep any sense of privacy in our lives, in a world that’s becoming ever more public. We can go around accusing others of being facebook creeps and stalkers, but I don’t have much sympathy for the so called ‘victims’. If you’re putting the information out there, don’t be surprised when someone unexpected finds it.
In fact, I’m skeptical to think anything on the web is truly private. If you have some top secret Gmail thread with a friend, I don’t think the guys at Gmail would have a lot of trouble reading the message. That is, if they cared in the first place. But the point stands – if you have something so secret that you don’t want anyone else to know, then don’t put it online in the public domain in the first place.
The thing is, I don’t think a lot of us have these “top secret” bombshells to hide – at least not as many as we claim we do. Yes, I absolutely believe there are a few things that are truly personal and should be kept personal for good reasons. But we go to such lengths to hide things that I just don’t understand.
Things that come to mind are grades, relationships, salaries, jobs, most failures, etc. I get that a lot of these things can associated with disappointment, and so it seems natural to hide them. If you have a low salary, you might feel lame. And if you’re making 7 figures, friends might judge you. Same goes for failed relationships, low test scores, etc.
But only two questions matter to me. Does the world care? And do I care if the world cares? (And by world I mean all the people you might try to hide things from, not the close friends and/or family that you do share your private life with.) A lot of the times, the world just won’t care. Say you break up with your girlfriend, and it sucks – you might even look at it as a failure. But is the rest of the world really going to care that you’re no longer in a relationship? Probably not, so why waste your time trying to hide something that no one is looking for?
And if they do care, if they are going to judge you, do you care? Here’s my example. When I bombed a midterm, I felt like shit. And yeah, it is embarrassing, I’m not denying that. But if someone asked, I openly shared, and I shared without being asked too. Most of the people I shared with were close friends, and weren’t ones to negatively judge. But even those who did think I was dumb for bombing the test, I really could care less what they thought. I felt shitty because I had failed my own standards, not because I was weighed down by the disappointment of others. The disappointment didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt either.
Our lives are more public than ever before. But privacy is, and will always, be necessary. It’s just overdone right now; we don’t need as much ‘privacy’ as we claim we do. So much is hidden, but not because it needs to be hidden. It’s hidden because we can’t deal with it. By falling to outside disappointment or judgment we just validate a self-created need for privacy. It’s not that we need to hide more, there’s enough of that already. We need to get better at dealing with judgment, that’s the crux of happiness in today’s public private life.
