A big part of life, David Perez writes, is figuring out what and what not to share.
To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of
a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying,
when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true
and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valour is
discretion, in the which better part I have sav’d my life.
—Falstaff, Henry IV Part One, Act V, Scene 4
Shakespeare sharply noted through the voice of the cowardly Falstaff that discretion and valor are often connected solely by the urge for self-preservation. To be sure, there can be honor in discretion. But whether one is deciding whether to watch a television show, or deciding what parts of ourselves we show to the rest of the world, discretion is often a means of shielding one’s self from harm. It is tricky business, and adulthood often seems one long exercise in making unpalatable decisions about what we keep to ourselves and what we share with others. Such are the complexities of human life and what we deign intelligence.
There are certain facets of our lives that we keep hidden from others, out of shame or fear or plain cost/benefit analysis. In the past six months, I have shared extremely intimate parts of my life with the world—my battles with depression, my struggles to reconcile with my absentee father—and yet there are several, seemingly lesser secrets I harbor that I wouldn’t dare share with anyone, much less the world-at-large. I admit that this comes from a place of pure fear. But they are my secrets, secrets about my life and secrets that I hold in trust for others who have confided in me through the years, and it is my right as an individual to keep my own counsel.
Keeping chunks of one’s life hidden from the view of others is not always a particularly healthy way of going through life. Eventually, you have to trust someone: a confidant, perhaps a lover or a friend, maybe (in select circumstances) even a parent. When you do this, there is always the chance that your trust will be misplaced and betrayed. This is one of the most painful experiences one can have in life, and it can damage a person’s ability to trust others, to say nothing of the damage that indiscretion, vindictiveness, and plain malice can cause to people’s lives. Sometimes, there’s no way to tell if someone is an untrustworthy scumbag until it is too late. It’s a risk most, if not all of us, take, even if we don’t mean to do so. The only thing that can rival the hurt of betrayal is the stark solitude of loneliness.
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On a more prosaic level, such conundrums are a constant feature of living within a culture that is thoroughly enmeshed with the culture of the Internet and its attendant devices. Social media presents a particularly fascinating challenge to the model of withhold/share because we are constantly asked to ‘share’ and consume what others are ‘sharing’. Most of the time, it is un-illuminating nonsense, a vast torrent of detritus from a global hivemind of content that you and I contribute to daily. Occasionally, souls are bared, affairs are conducted and exposed, and work of genuinely high quality is produced and spread to the delight and/or agony of us all. Often, however, we’re not sharing much of ourselves at all. Even the people who seem to share every waking moment of their lives with the rest of the world aren’t actually baring their secrets or their intimate selves when they update their Facebook status for the third time before noon.
Yet we are warned that we fail to realize just how much ourselves we are sharing with the world online—and with good reason. Information is a valuable commodity, and in an era where the goods and services people consume and produce increasingly consists of nothing more than information itself, there is a value to what we share that is very real. The value of the consumer data that Mark Zuckerberg holds at his undoubtedly well-manicured fingertips and the information we withhold from others are not equivalent or comparable. Some secrets may have incredible value to you, but they are utterly meaningless to others. There are other secrets, though, that would have significant impacts on the lives of ourselves and others were they revealed. That’s where discretion comes in, and it is all too easy to screw things up. Being human is tricky business indeed.
The vagaries of human nature are in part why governments exist. Thomas Paine noted at the beginning of Common Sense that:
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
We demand that government exercise better discernment skills than many of us exhibit in daily life in spite of the fact that government only exists to keep us from killing and stealing each others’ shit. It feels hypocritical, in part because it is. Yet we demand transparency, with just cause. After all, if we suppose government to be a necessary evil, then we’d better make damn sure that the bastards we’ve put in charge are doing the right thing. They’re human, after all. Yet a vital part of life as a human is withholding information, justifiably or otherwise. Sometimes, we expect our rulers to keep a secret so that our well-being is preserved. We hold those who govern to different standards because the stakes are quite high. Experience has proved this double-standard wise, for the plain truth is that we are left to place trust and power in fallible humans who will almost certainly make errors of judgment. It is what it is; and until someone figures out how to make anarchy work (or the robot revolution), the governed must hold governors to what may very well be an unrealistically high standard. Governing, like the rest of human existence, is a messy affair.
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Upon examination, it occurs to me that the secret that gnaws at me the most is not one that I keep. Instead, it is the fact that my existence itself is a secret. When my father absconded from his legal and moral obligations as a parent, he decided to settle down with a woman who knew about and overlooked his absenteeism. Eventually, they had two children who are by all accounts wonderful, bright, and happy kids growing up in a neat suburb of a major American city. They are, genetically, my half-siblings, but we are, in reality, strangers to one another and will likely remain so for some time yet.
I found my father about a year and a half ago, and he could have very easily rebuffed my entreaties to open a dialogue. It was a risk I took because I trusted that his conscience would be pricked. Fortunately it was, to some extent. Apart from a humiliating trip at his wife’s behest to a clinic behind an unmarked door to have a DNA test that he and I knew was a foregone conclusion, he’s treated me with something approaching dignity. Eventually, though, he and his wife are going to have to have a very difficult conversation with their children. I will never force that issue, because if it were anyone else I could empathize. When they do so is, of course, a matter of discretion; and in a situation like this, it is nothing more than a well-considered guess. Valor has nothing to do with it.
—Photo DerrickT/Flickr
On the flip side, keeping some aspects of yourself private from everyone else is ESSENTIAL, rather than unhealthy. Unconditional trust is a strategy of guaranteed failure, humiliation, and exploitation.
Shopping habits? Sure, go nuts online. Personal feelings and experiences of your childhood? Keep those very close and double-lock the door. The key, as you note, is deciding who can be trusted with the more personal and vital aspects of yourself. Pragmatically, that should be a very short list indeed (and the woman you’re dating shouldn’t be on it).