

Why do we have so many lives? - LeonW
http://leostartsup.com/2011/12/why-do-we-have-so-many-lives/

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mechanical_fish
Because, if you can't keep one friend's secrets in a different box from
another's, you'll never have more than superficial friendships. People will
learn that you cannot be trusted and won't tell you anything important,
particularly if you ever publish things. There are all kinds of things I know
that I cannot publish, or repeat from one friend to another; that's the price
of intimacy.

Because the ability to change your focus, your attitude, or your mood – to
adopt, perhaps, a wholly different personality – by changing contexts is a
superpower, not a liability. Put me on the karaoke stage and I'm a big ham;
put me in a suit and I'm a professional; put me in a library with a math book
and I'm a mathematician; put me in the kitchen with a chef's knife and I can
make dinner. I don't try to solve complex math problems on the karaoke stage,
and if I can't stop thinking about cooking in the library I'm not going to
enjoy doing math problems. My programmer self turns out to be annoyingly
nonverbal when he's focusing, so it's a good thing he's not always around or
my poor friends and relatives would never hear from me.

And because the idea that one has a unitary, consistent, conscious personality
is ultimately an illusion anyway. I've read enough psychology and philosophy
to know this, but I've also met enough Alzheimer's patients to _understand_
this.

There are other reasons, but this is a start.

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jacoblyles
I pride myself on being able to move between many different worlds, being able
to communicate and befriend different kinds of people. I don't speak the same
way to my peers and to 50-year olds. There's nothing wrong with that. It's
challenging, but it's good for the mind. Moving successfully in different
cultural circles gives you better perspective on the cultural forces which
unconsciously shape you and your peers.

"Just be yourself" is one of those overly facile pieces of common advice that
is more harmful than helpful.

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crcsmnky
(I feel like the author doesn't say enough to distinguish the personality
differences between the example lives and the new "single" life.)

I'm all for reducing complexity in one's life but not at the cost of
surrounding myself with people that challenge my own understanding and
beliefs. They're not there to convince me to change my mind, instead they help
me solidify my position better. Having different parts of one's personality is
important to not become a narrow-minded or uninformed individual. Your own
personality facets shouldn't be so divergent that you change so much in
different social situations and never move beyond superficial communication.

If I only ever focused on one facet of my personality I wouldn't learn
anything. That seems counter to the approach an entrepreneur/founder would
need to be successful.

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karolisd
Do we really have many lives or do our lives have many facets?

I think there are some people who actually have multiple lives, but most of us
just have many sides because we have to deal with people in different ways,
but it's nowhere close to being whole other person with a different life.

~~~
mechanical_fish
The safe thing to say is that "having many lives" is just a metaphor that
means much the same thing as "having many facets of one's life".

But for an infinite amount of additional discussion, visit the local
philosophy department.

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DanielBMarkham
I saw the title and I thought: oh, an article written by a younger person. And
boom, sure enough, there it was.

I do not mean that as a ageist comment at all. It's just one of the things
I've noticed about younger people is that they feel there are all these
different lives. And somehow they must choose between them. To me, part of the
reason why is that they confuse who the actor and who the responder is.

To assume there are all these different lives, you must assume that there are
all of these different social groups that "tell" you what to do and how to
act. Then you respond doing as you are told. _It's not that this is a lie, it
is just woefully incomplete_. A better way of looking at things is that _you_
are the person communicating. As a good communicator, it is your job to
communicate things in ways various groups can consume. For my existentialist
friends, being deep does not preclude being authentic.

So no, I don't tell the same off-color jokes in a religious group as I would
when going out with friends to a bar, but that's not because I am a different
person, am trying to live a different life, or any of that. That's because I
have learned that to effectively communicate with some people, off-color jokes
shut them down. All communication ceases. This is bad for me and for them. So
I choose to adapt my communication style. They can still know that I like an
off-color joke -- I'm not hiding who I am or trying to change myself -- it's
just that I'm smart enough not to share those things with them.

Something I've been cogitating on for a while: I think that younger people
have kind of a hole in their life where they don't really know who they are.
Probably a natural part of growing up. Because there's this uncertainty of
their own personality, it's rather easy to begin to feel as if perhaps you
have more than one! (Perhaps people of all ages feel this way. For some reason
it is much more noticeable in younger folks. I know I felt this way when I was
younger.)

Having said that, I'd also add that there's a difference between personal and
public information. I am a firm believer in honesty and openness. But that
doesn't mean that I have any responsibility to dump my life story on random
strangers. It just means that for those things I choose to share publicly, I
choose to be as honest as possible about them. _Given the context._

In fact, for sake of argument I'll take the opposite opinion (I love being a
contrarian!) I'd argue that most people are really, really bad at being able
to adapt their communication skills to a wide range of audiences. Instead,
they seem to feel that nuance and depth are somehow deceptive. I blame this on
many things, but technology definitely plays a role. When everything you do or
say is public, it has a tendency to turn you into a one-dimensional person.
That's a shame. It lowers the level of civil discourse for society as a whole.

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drcube
"Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all." --
_The Great Gatsby_

