Online Congruency

I’m sitting in a diner in Birmingham, smelling the ground bean wafting through the air and sifting through emails from friends. One missive stands out in particular…

A close friend is amid the tedious med-school application process, and she’s worried about her Facebook account being used against her by the folks who review applications. Now, I don’t even have an undergraduate degree, so I’m likely an unfit advisor on grad-school matters, but then again I don’t really see this as a collegiate affair at all. Rather, it’s a matter of congruency.

For the longest time, I myself led two separate lives: professional JFM and personal JFM. There was Corporate Me, prim and proper, ostensibly flawless; and then there was Creative Me, flawed but beautiful (beautiful because of the flaws, perhaps). For obvious reasons, the two mixed about as well as glass rubbing against concrete. So I kept them segregated. Corporate Me didn’t talk about his love for writing, and Creative Me loathed hiding himself from the world. It was almost as though both sides were ashamed of each other.

Over time this took its toll, until eventually I realized that living two separate lives was exhausting, even disingenuous. So instead of hiding one half from the other, I decided to change my activity to align both halves.

In my friend’s case, she wanted to go as far as changing her name on social media. My advice: Do you do anything online that you’re not proud of in real life? If so, I wouldn’t change my name; I’d change my online activity. Your online persona should be a mirror of you—nothing to be ashamed of.

For me, there isn’t an online self and a real-life self these days—just myself. Whether I write something online, speak to a crowd of people, or have a one-on-one conversation with a friend, my life is congruent.

Don’t get me wrong: I still have a private life. Like most people, I enjoy having sex and sending tarty text messages and walking around the house naked. I just don’t share those details publicly, not because I’m ashamed but because they are private (and because they don’t contribute to the greater good). There’s a big difference between between a public online profile (i.e., an extension of one’s self) and a private intimate conversation (personal interactions not meant for public consumption).

Deciding what’s private and what’s public is a personal matter. Share whatever you’d like. Just don’t be ashamed of who you are. Shame is ugly, and you’re far too beautiful for that.

– by  Joshua Fields Millburn 

BECAUSE I DESERVE IT!

We all want to make good choices, the correct selection, the most righteous decision. It goes without saying.

But of course our impulsive, mammalian brains like to get in the way and muck it all up, don’t they? Which means that instead of relying on reason and data and facts, we seek to validate our bad decisions via any-means-necessary-type justification.

One of the worst forms of this kind of rationalization is Because I deserve it!

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten good at using this excuse to push aside logic and give grounds for our screw ups. This sense of entitlement is a slippery slope, though.

Sometimes the excuse is benign (at least initially): After my long day, I deserve an ice cream cone! Sure, most of us won’t experience negative effects from a single dessert. But this fact is quickly torpedoed when one cone turns into two, which turns into four, and so forth. After all, if you deserve one treat, why not more? Why not every day?

Even if you do deserve it, or even if the decision is the right one, there’re myriad good reasons—rationals based on sound reason, logical thought, or even personal intuition—to make the right decision. Because I deserve it! is never one of them.

[Read more at The Minimalists]

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