Living in porous, glass houses

Privacy is extinct, self-inflicted. Within selfies, tweets, and blog posts, we open the floodgates to our mind.

The internet normalizes exposure. Nothing to hide, we all build glass houses around our lives. Shine the light on us, we declare–pay us with your attention in the currency of likes and shares.

Scroll and refresh, the influencer relishes the spurts of fame, gaining celebrity status behind a wall of edited images that declare their importance.

What is privacy anymore?

Writes Rochelle Gurstein in Self-Invasions and the Invaded Self:

“When the boundary between public and private becomes as extremely porous as it is today, we lose far more than “that kingdom of the mind, that inner world of personal thought and feeling in which every man passes some time,” which would have been disastrous enough.”

An obsession with exposure can get some to the top, making amafessionalism acceptable. No one appears competent to do anything, heart surgery done by a mere Googler.

Mistaking publicity with skill, the deception is our own speed of digestion. It’s too easy to start, to show that we’re all worthy candidates of recognition.

But the skills remain scarce. Talent, built in private, is something to behold in public. Until then, it’s back to the closet.