relationships and community on Anonymity

A few years ago, a journalist named Joseph Blackman wrote an Op Ed on an interesting subject, “Why Clubs are Dark.” That is, why is it when you walk into a nightclub or a bar, the lights are off, or a...

For those of us who live in the shadow of self-doubt, who may wonder what meaning a life of relative anonymity may have in a society filled with the cult of celebrity in which likes, reposts, and digi...

Should his heart break and the grief pour out, it would flow over the whole earth, it seems, and yet, no one sees it.

Editor’s Note: This story is often told as a true story, when in fact it is probably fictitious. Nevertheless, there is a significant illustrative point: sometimes the things we fear most may in fact ...

One of the early hits of the internet had to be eBay. Suddenly getting rid of your old junk, or otherwise unnecessary “stuff,” could be sold, not just to your neighbors in a yard sale, but to anyone w...

As a mother you learn what it is to be both martyr and devil. In motherhood I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and more terrible, and more implicated too in the world’s virtue and terror,...

My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me.

Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.

As the speed and choices of the digital age send us hurling toward impatience and shallowness, they culminate in its most damaging consequence: isolation. Social media, in particular, lures us in unde...

And so, like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves...

These days, a common trick people use to remember someone they’ve just met is to save their first name along with the place where they met them—like “Matt PTA,” for example. I recently realized I stil...

The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts: I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has see...

Another feature of shame’s presentation is that of hiding. Whether it is the involution into the silence of our own minds or the literal turning away from someone with a downcast facial expression wit...

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

To be nice means to silence ourselves in some way, and in doing so, we compromise our authenticity and give up freedom to act and speak. On the other hand, niceness may facilitate the shedding of resp...

Evading self-acknowledgment of our faults enables us to avoid painful moral emotions: guilt and remorse for harming others; shame for betraying your own ideals; self-contempt for not meeting even our ...

Don't waste your time explaining who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

George Herbert Mead, an influential early 20th-century sociologist, coined the term “generalized other” to describe the vague group we consider when shaping our actions. How often do we behave a certa...

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

Our true identity is to love without fear and insecurity. Our higher potential finds us when we set our course in that direction. The power of love and compassion transforms insecurity.

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that ...

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

Digital connections . . . may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." , February 25, 1933

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

After surveying an incredibly diverse cross section of college students across America, Donna Freitas found “the most pressing social media issues students face: the importance of appearing happy”—and...

The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.