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Key points
- People have always relied on close friends and family when making difficult decisions or seeking validation.
- Being “let in” on certain private information is both an honor and a sign of trust.
- Social media has expanded the number of people with whom one shares what was once privileged information.
Any discussion of privacy in the year 2024 tends to refer to digital privacy. Within this sense of the word, “privacy” means your right to prevent others from accessing certain information about you that is on the internet. While this is certainly important for anyone who regularly uses the internet for social media, shopping, or banking, it is but one kind of privacy.
If one steps back even further, one can find an even more elemental meaning of the word “privacy,” one which refers to the ability of a person to retreat into their mind. For Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, this ability to withdraw from the noise of the world, when coupled with the ability to engage in critical thoughts, was referred to as ensimismarse, which is usually translated as “to become engrossed in thought.” For Ortega y Gasset, this was a unique human capacity on which he predicated our species’ great intellect. It was also our way of coping with the difficulties of the world. According to him, we are confronted with and frustrated by an obstacle or difficulty (alteración); we retreat into ourselves to devise a theoretical means of overcoming the problem (ensimismarse); and we then reemerge and apply the theory developed while deep in thought in the real world (praxis).
This process accounted for not only our intellectual abilities as humans but also our individualism. Each person confronts problems to which only they can respond and for which only they are responsible. As Jean-Paul Sartre succinctly (albeit dourly) put it, “We are alone, with no excuses.”
Friendship and the Hive Mind
While the individual may be responsible for their own behavior, and they may be the ones who must retreat to a kind of Walden of the mind to contemplate the practicality of an action or to ponder their own mortality, they are not alone in their day-to-day lives. One regularly relies on friends and family for advice, guidance, and validation. These are people with whom one feels comfortable “bouncing ideas off of” and speaking informally. People may not consult this inner circle before every decision they make, but most of us ask for some advice from this group before making major life choices because we trust their judgment and value their word. They stand as a kind of intermediary between ensimismarse and praxis.
In the past, this inner circle tended to be an intimate group of perhaps a few family members and friends from one’s immediate community. These relationships were forged over months or years, and they were galvanized not only by time but also by trust, loyalty, and shared experiences that included joys and sorrows. As the Roman philosopher Seneca advised, “Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship, but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.”
Admission to this group was an honor. It was also closed off from most other people—i.e., it was private.
Within the last 20 years, advances in communications have made it far easier to expand who gets included within this once-distinguished group. What was necessarily a closed circle based on extensive relationship- and trust-building can now be reduced to a wide net that is cast indiscriminately into the abyss that is the internet. Whatever gets caught (family, friends, Facebook “friends,” acquaintances, LinkedIn “connections,” “followers”, trolls, or bots) ends up being your inner circle. More than just being superficial and, consequently, lacking in the capacity to provide intimacy or a rewarding friendship, these relations can become an individual’s source of identity and validation.
Expanding the circumference of one’s friend group to such an extent not only cheapens the value of the relationships; it also deprives the individual of the ability to have meaningful conversations about major life decisions or complicated topics. Instead, they ask “the fam” on social media and receive a blizzard of responses from people they may barely know. In addition to being overwhelming, most of these responses come in the form of a few hundred characters or emojis. Even if they are sincere, they lack the depth and lucidity of a serious discussion, which, in the past, would have happened at a pub or a café or in one’s home and strengthened the relationship between the two or three people engaged in private conversation.
The Value of Confidants
Having a close group of confidants is not something that just happens. It takes time and effort. Moreover, it’s not something that people will automatically recognize as being a virtue upon becoming teenagers or adults. Children have to see how valuable these relationships can be if they are going to grow into people who appreciate emotional investments and take them seriously. It’s a lesson they learn as though by osmosis as they watch the adults by whom they are surrounded (not just their parents, but extended family, neighbors, clergy, coworkers, and friends) benefit from having close friends and a strong community.
This does not require explicit teaching, but it does demand an environment where social bonds are conspicuously valued. Conversely, these lessons can’t be taught when the entire family is staring at the screen of a computer or smartphone for almost all their waking hours.
As much as Ortega y Gasset’s notion of ensimismarse is a necessary part of problem-solving and something that is conducted in private, it is not necessarily done in solitude. Having friends, colleagues, and mentors who can engage in a reciprocity of counsel and an exchange of ideas is vital to psychological wellness. Outsourcing these crucial relationships to social media flattens one of the most enjoyable parts of the human experience. Moreover, it sends the wrong message to children, since the more we normalize this kind of behavior, the more likely it will be that our children will look into the house of mirrors that is the internet for validation, moral support, and a sense of identity.
