Aspiring for a Well-Hidden Life
What does it mean to lead an 'anonymous' lifestyle in the digital age?
If you ever want to feel seen, just walk into your local airport. With every step, you’ll catch an epidemic of eyeballs. It’s not your show-stopping Crocs more than it’s the swarm of people with only the invigorating flight schedule signs to look at. Eventually, you become a more interesting observation than Flight 219 to Seattle.
Sitting on the airport tram, I make eye contact with a grinning baby. Of course, I smile, make a little face, and wave to them. I’m not a psychopath. The mother of the baby does not appreciate the gesture. Perhaps I’m annoying, or perhaps it’s just 5:00 AM, and she’s at the airport after a night of no sleep. She turns the baby away from me in her seat and disassociates back into her own world.
Fair. I’m way too much of a morning person.
Later, I’m the one making eye contact with people for a bit too long. People watching when I can get away with it. There’s a weird code of conduct you abide by at the airport: if you make eye contact with a random stranger, look away immediately. Do not smile. Do not make pleasantries. Do not acknowledge that you’re in the same space as a thousand other people and that this might happen. Look. Away. Immediately.
The difficulty of this game will escalate as you go into the airport matrix. Don’t stare at the influencers videotaping themselves with a ring light. To watch them in real life would be rude. Try not to stare at the dogs. Especially the little ones in cute outfits. While this may become increasingly hard, it’s basic manners.
At all costs, remain anonymous.
Incognito Mode
When we’re at the airport, it’s pretty easy to understand the desire to remain incognito. After hours of travel, we don’t look, feel, or act our best. Why would we want to be known for the hours were in limbo?
However, when we get to our destination on the other side of the airport, we become walking billboards of photos, reels, and Facebook posts. Look at this. Look at me in front of this. Look at me, here, there, and everywhere. It’s a curious paradox that seems to only happen on vacation. Who turned off Incognito mode?
What’s Your Identity Investment?
What’s interesting about the concept of time is that it is never really “spent” as we like to say. Rather, it’s invested. In what? Your future. Whether that be more rest, higher status, more followers, stronger family relations - it doesn’t matter. Your right now is an investment towards something. Even your time spent on the Internet.
Speaking of, the Internet has become a marketplace for every life experience imaginable. Do you want to watch someone recover from a breakup? Do you want to watch grass grow on a ten year time lapse? Do you want to watch someone have an unmedicated birth? Don’t fret, you can! And someone becomes “Internet famous” in the process.
Only Murderers in the Building (one of my fave shows) has a joke on this concept. There’s a character who is outwardly “obsessed with Christmas.” He leaves Christmas up year-round, is always in a sweater, and becomes a suspect in the case the trio is on.
As we dig deeper into his character, we learn that he’s only obsessed with Christmas because his Christmas workout videos are the only ones that go viral. His real passion is fitness, but he feels he can’t be seen unless he’s decking the halls. (Spoiler alert: he doesn’t even like the season!)
The joke was funny, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a deeper meaning here. How often do we do we place a higher investment on “being seen” than we do on our best interests and true desires?
A Life Well-Hidden
When you think about who you are and what you want to become, I’m willing to bet 95% of the work is done in secret. Maybe 5% of it has an audience.
A great musician invests in the learning and practice of their craft in solitude. They don’t just play when they have a stage.
A good teacher must take time to learn. They practice as students more than they lead as teachers.
A good writer writes and studies in solitude. A great writer doesn’t publish half of what they write.
Deep down, we know this. But, we’ve sold our minds to the machine that tells us we can be an overnight success. We sell our identities short by investing in “being seen” rather than embracing the beauty and refinement of a life well-hidden.
Any Others
“It’s a difficult point to admit that we are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves.”
- Joan Didion | Slouching Towards Bethlehem
This might be my favorite quote of Joan Didion’s. The devastating linguistics of “any others, all others” cuts to the core. It’s a tragedy that we waste our life’s potential peering out the window at others.
We trade our lives away to take a front-row seat in another’s audience. We see their 5% and say, “Why can’t my life be like that?” making it into our 95%. And we end up leashing our passion and purpose onto a hashtag, a niche, and an audience that only diminishes over time.
“Why isn’t this sustainable?” We scream as people leave the show without realizing that Christmas isn’t year-round.
Meanwhile, a well-hidden life becomes a fruitful one. A well-hidden life gives us the safety to leave the audience and focus on our own lives. It gives us the strength to live for something other than the validation of others, making our life’s work quality for quality’s sake.
Isn’t that what all of us want, anyway? A life that speaks for itself.
The Self-Control to Be Anonymous
I love this quote by Tim Keller:
“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything.”
It’s hard to imagine a world where you’re really known and deeply loved by a handful of people. The list stops somewhere after God and in between your parents, your spouse, and maybe a friend or two.
Yet, I believe Tim Keller when he says it’s what we need, perhaps what we crave, more than anything. And I think many of us (Zillenial speaking) try to relinquish this need by oversharing our lives. We trade real love for a like button on the internet, an overshare with a person we met on the metro, the affirming comfort found inside a celebrity fandom. And it’s entirely unsustainable.
The first person in history who taught us the self-control to be anonymous is life’s greatest celebrity: Jesus Christ. Whether you’re Christian or not, the history here is interesting enough to entertain. For most of his life, Jesus was a master at hiding in plain sight. According to history, Jesus was born into an unnameable town where he was anonymous. The town itself was relatively unknown—and not for anything good. He went on and worked a modest career for most of his life.
The book of Luke tells us that Jesus was learning, asking questions, and refining His understanding of God. He was preparing for his stage rather than lusting after it. Luke 2:52 says that he grew toward a deeper wisdom and faith. (Note: not just born with it) And he did all of this in private. To the extreme at times, where his own parents couldn’t even find him. (Luke 2 again)
Even in his early days as a miracle worker, he was asking people to keep him on “the low.” Later in conquering death, he doesn’t announce his return (the greatest accomplishment known to man) but sits back and waits to be recognized by his friends.
No matter your belief —Jesus has billions of followers. People who want to walk the way that He did. I’m one of them. And I’ll be the first to admit that we’re doing it so loudly.
The public will never fully love you. And that’s a good thing.
Sharing your life and work publicly is not a bad thing. Not at all. I believe it’s necessary for a better society for all of us to use and share our gifts. But it’s important not to let sharing your gift take the gift away altogether. And I think it’s an easy trap to fall into. At least it is for me.
I’m not deleting my social media account anytime soon. But, I’m certain that I will never be fully known to my Internet friends. My readers will never fully love me. And that’s a good thing.
There will be anonymous seasons in our lives. There will be months where it feels like everyone is making progress but us. That this period of your life was just a blur of nothing significant. And no matter where you’re at today, those days/months/years are likely still ahead of you. The high of “the stage” only lasts so long. The attention of others ebbs and flows. Christmas can’t last all year, no matter how sweet the season.
The only way we can protect our emotional well-being is to exercise the self-control to sometimes remain anonymous to the masses so that we can be known to ourselves. (And to God) Stay dedicated through the quiet years. The rest will work itself out.
The Beginnings of A Well-Hidden Life
An in-person community you trust to fully see you and get to know you. I’ve found mine in the women’s group at my church.
Passions, goals, hobbies, and interests. Things that give life a real meaning. Keeping dedicated to a purpose or goal is healthy. PS: Don’t we all have a laundry list of hopeful hobbies? (Mine’s gardening. Dreaming to be like
. Don’t ask me about my 28% plant mortality rate.)Faith that God doesn’t waste any season of your life. If you don’t believe anything else I wrote, try and believe that. Because it’s true.
-linds
In other news:
I started a publication called Publishing Hypothesis for other independent authors looking to find commercial success, with all the details about how I’ve gotten You’ve Been Summoned into thousands of readers’ hands.
I’ve decided to start sharing my listicle content (like this article) on Medium. If you’re a writer or reader on Medium, please follow me! I’d love to connect and learn more about the platform. Substack will always be my fave, but I can’t deny the amazing SEO tech for writers there.
I’m on a self-proclaimed pickling journey. While I haven’t started yet, I believe in my pickling intentions enough to use the word journey. If you have trade secrets about pickled onions, cucumbers, or carrots, DM me for real.
& Happy October, friends! The self-control to be anonymous is one thing, but the self-control to not order a pumpkin spice latte for the next 30 days? No, thank you. Gotta have a little fun in your life, right?
Lindsey,
I loved this read and it spoke to my heart! Keep writing and inspiring!
Hugs!