personae, revisited
You know …
On rare occasions, I get impulses to say really stupid things. To sow disinformation, to shitpost on forums, to send nasty email to anonymous jerkasses on the internet… stuff like that.
Recently I caught myself thinking … “I could combine TOR and privoxy with anonymous email addresses, and create myself an ‘id’ persona, and vent all of my negative urges through that”.
Some people would even say that that’s a good thing to do. That in order to be healthy, you need to do a certain amount of venting, to let frustrations out.
I’m of a different belief though. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that habits and activities, like floodgates, are REALLY hard to close off once they’re opened. We learn by repeatedly doing. Channels rewire themselves, and we continue to repeatedly do, until the doing is second-nature. Whether that’s thinking in general, or thinking about math, or riding a bike, or swearing conversationally, or just speaking. So it follows that negative outbursts lead to more, more refined negative outbursts.
Maybe “refined” isn’t the right word though. I guess the point is, if you’re building things, you get better by building them. If you’re doing things, you get better at doing them by doing them. If those things are negative, they grow into more negative things over time.
So, I’m not going to schism. I’m not going to turn my negativity onto TOR and the internet. I’ll remain the whole, single “me” that you see now. I think it’s better that way.