I have been pondering a post for some time which I think has found its moment, mostly because T and I were talking about it the other night. Oh, and because Facebook is making yet another bid to take over the worl-- er, your life.
Last year at about this time, I wrote a post about an episode of Mad Men, pondering our ability to reinvent ourselves. Lately I have been thinking about the same thing, but with a different twist, compliments of the all-knowing interwebs. That Mad Men post asks the following questions: if you spend a good portion of your life pretending to be someone else, at what point do you cease being the person you once were? When do you become the person you're pretending to be?
Think about Don Draper. He came back from Korea and, until his wife started digging around in his desk drawer, was able to completely reinvent himself. He didn't like what he had been, so he changed it. He became someone else.
Today, in the world of offsite data storage, undeletable profile information, and digital interconnectedness, I don't think that's something we can do anymore. We can never reinvent ourselves, not totally. Maybe we can change who we are, but we'll always have to defend who we were. We'll never be able to hide the past; all that information about us that's online - e-mails, address books, Facebook pages, photos, shopping habits, vacation plans, all of it - will always be out there somewhere.
Maybe no one - not even Don Draper - can be free of their past completely, because it's what got you to where you are. But Don was able to keep that past to himself. Like cocktail hour and business dress at work, that's not a luxury we have anymore.
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