honesty

Never has it been so easy to not be yourself. Everyone can have a platform to project their persona. Whether you blog in detail about your daily life or fill Facebook with photos of your family, half the world can be invited into your life and they have no idea if it is really you.

How do we know what you are telling us is true? It is much more fun to make up a life, a past and present. Of course if friends and family in real life are reading your blog and seeing your posts on Facebook, they will know. If you have no friends in real life, even better, nobody out there will know the real you. Write about your dramatic decade or your perfect present, take twenty years off your age. Post pictures of someone else or recreate yourself in cartoon form. When you are on holiday take photographs of the view from ‘your house’. In the botanical gardens snap ‘your garden’. When you feel like a break from blogging invent a rare illness or a life threatening operation.

But will anybody find out you didn’t really spend ten years in the Amazon ( the real Amazon in South America ) Jungle. No. Even in real life you can recreate yourself every time you move to a new town. How often do you meet new people and believe every word they tell you about their life, which is far more interesting than yours. And your good friends; off they go to visit their highly successful son who owns a tropical island. You have never met the son, because he lives on his tropical island. Unless you actually go with them on holiday how do you know any of it is true?

Among writers Dan Mallory has apparently surpassed us all by being nominated for the British Book Awards, despite or perhaps because he cheated at being British. The best selling author also lied about having cancer and the death of family members. It should come as no surprise to hear that he writes under a pen name A. J. Finn. Perhaps he doesn’t exist at all, which would be an even cleverer cheat.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/aj-finn-dan-mallory-british-book-award-nomination.html

But what about the rest of us? Even if you are not outed as a pathological liar by The New Yorker magazine, do WordPress or Facebook know where you really live, can they pinpoint your location, see you sitting in your pyjamas at your computer in a corner of your suburban bedroom, instead of the pine summerhouse looking out over the lower slopes of the Alps. Yes, of course they can, but are they going to tell?