Privacy, why are we all so hung up on “privacy”?

We all do stuff pretty much the same way at home. We make friends, we hang out with friends, we talk about the Game of Thrones and listen to our favorite music. We all follow similar traditions based on our culture, we have sex, we have babies, we raise those babies. We have no real difference in how we do things, we have the same things we like to do behind a locked door and we do similar stuff in public.

Yet, we worry about privacy; whether we are famous or not, we don’t want strangers peering into our homes when we are in our private areas.

But why? What do we hide?

We laugh at the same stuff, we worry about the same stuff, our emotional fields are more or less the same, yet, we look over the fence worried that our neighbors might hear. (I actually live so close to several neighbors, that I can hear their phone conversations through open windows whether I want to or not… And I really don’t.) We also feel stupid about trying to protect this stuff, because we know there’s nothing about it that we should feel embarrassed about, it’s Just Not Public Stuff.
[membership level=”1,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,29″]
the Normal Person* want to reserve their internal world to very close friends only. This means, that to make friends, they match the external factors to know whether or not a stranger is likely to “jive” with their internal world. Interestingly enough, the Savants* go directly to the internal world, they splash it on their public blogs and write autobiographies about it without a second thought, because they are trying to reach out to the few people who actually understand them. They don’t have many secrets in their internal world, at least for long – their secrets are acute; “I am currently trying to make sense about this” but as soon as sense has been made, the information is public.

This often creates confusion in the Normal Person*, who would never trust this stuff but to their closest of friends. When they meet a Savants* who dishes this stuff out like it was candy, without a second thought, the Normal Person* feels trusted and close to this person, when in fact, the Savants* is still just having a chit chat. What is “small talk” to the Normal Person* is very different to what is the Savants*’s idea of a nice chat with virtual strangers or casual acquaintances.

The stuff that the Savants* DOES NOT DO with casual friends is to ASK FOR THEIR HELP, their advice, or their opinion on how to do things. They might, out of curisity, ask someone how they like to do something, but simply because they like to map out how differently people think, but they would have no intention to do things the same way unless what they hear is exceptionally clever. They will gladly give guidance, help, advice or their opinion on anything if asked for it, but they will never ask for guidance or help from a person they do not both trust and respect. When help is offered or pushed to them when they didn’t ask for it, they will reject it brutally: “You are crossing a boundary you had no business crossing. We are not close enough friends for you to assume I would want to learn the first thing from you.” It is a privilege to be allowed to teach something to (as in change) a Savants*, because they love figuring things out on their own, and their “privacy setting” has more to do with the right to “write on their slate” rather than what they let you see about themselves.

The Savants* feel like you are trying to change them if you are trying to teach them something they didn’t ask for help with – it is the ultimate form of an insult: “I think you SUCK at what you are doing, therefore I will teach you. / I don’t like the person you are, therefore, I’ll try to make you into something different.” the Savants* would also never push their help on someone else; they may offer help on public blogs, and you can always call them for help, they’re there to help you out whenever they can (within reason) but they will never ask for help until they truly, profoundly trust you.

Also, the Normal Person* need to know a bit of background information to people in order to feel like they know someone. “To know you” to the Normal Person* means “I know where you were born, what your name is, which schools you went to, the names of your brothers and sisters and parents, and so forth.” To a Savants*, “I know you” means… “I can feel your energy and I know what you are like. I know how you smile when you feel a little sarcastic, I know what makes you angry and I know how not to make you angry…” To a Savants*, knowing someone doesn’t need ANY factual information whatsoever. Some of them can take one look at you and feel they know you (soulmates). When a Savants* is already in full knowledge that they want to join their lives with someone, the Normal Person* may feel interested or intrigued, but they don’t know why. They need to find out the factual information to know that it is safe to approach this person and to get to know them on a deeper level, leading to discussions that the Savants* would have been ready to have as soon as you sat down next to them at the bar. When  the Normal Person* doesn’t approach the  deeper topics that the Savants* wants to talk to them about, they feel rejected, in turn, the Savants* “keeping information about themselves to themselves” makes the Normal Person* feel they are not trusted but rejected.

A Normal Person* feels that they need to know about your past to know that you are ready to trust them with that information. An Savant* might not care about this information because they already see YOU, but also they may feel weird about giving information that has to do WITH OTHER PEOPLE: “My mum and dad and where they live are not for you to gamble with. Even if I trust you, they don’t have to.” the Savants* may also be very aware, that the people they want to make friends with and form long-term relationships with would be people their parents would  hate, so they’d rather not talk about their parents at all.

the Savants* often feel very separated from their family, their schools, and wherever they grew up; they feel that information has NOTHING to do with them, therefore they feel weird talking about it because they always feel different to everyone else. For instance, if you know what a stereotypical Finn is like, you will have NO IDEA what I am like. Also, if you know me through and through, know that I am a Finn, you can trust me when I say you have no idea what other Finns are like. That information provides you nothing more than misinformation, therefore it is purely factual; Yes, I was born and raised in Finland, and that has left a mark on me, the country wrote on my psyche, but in ways that you could never know without ME telling you how, and THIS is where the Savants* only start perking their ears. An Savant*, then, would tell you: “I am Finnish, and because of that I have experienced…” A Normal Person* would end the sentence at “I am Finnish” expecting that information to suffice for now. An Savant* wouldn’t even mention it unless it came up in some philosophical context or because the person they were talking to was curious about the weird accent, and upon receiving the explanation to the accent, the nationality wouldn’t be brought up again until it became relevant in the context of what made me the person that I am today.

the Savants* often feel very separated from their family, their schools, and wherever they grew up; they feel that information has NOTHING to do with them, therefore they feel weird talking about it because they always feel different to everyone else. For instance, if you know what a stereotypical Finn is like, you will have NO IDEA what I am like. Also, if you know me through and through, know that I am a Finn, you can trust me when I say you have no idea what other Finns are like. That information provides you nothing more than misinformation, therefore it is purely factual; Yes, I was born and raised in Finland, and that has left a mark on me, the country wrote on my psyche, but in ways that you could never know without ME telling you how, and THIS is where the Savants* only start perking their ears. An Savant*, then, would tell you: “I am Finnish, and because of that I have experienced…” A Normal Person* would end the sentence at “I am Finnish” expecting that information to suffice for now. An Savant* wouldn’t even mention it unless it came up in some philosophical context or because the person they were talking to was curious about the weird accent, and upon receiving the explanation to the accent, the nationality wouldn’t be brought up again until it became relevant in the context of what made me the person that I am today.

So this leads us to a curious situation of protecting one’s privacy.

When the Savants* are always “probing” for the internal stuff before they’ve told you what brand of coffee they prefer, the Normal Person* want to know what brand of coffee the Savants* drinks before they’ve even talked to them about anything real. Essentially what the Normal Person* wants to keep private for  longer, the Savants* needs to know before going anywhere near the Normal Person* public stuff and vice versa. This creates, in both groups, the feeling that the other group is always probing for inappropriate stuff too early on, or at least approaching it in weird ways. An Savant* will understand that their family members and future employees would want to know where they went to school, but a potential friend asking where they went to school, to them, feels like their assessing whether or not they went to a good enough school to associate with. This is true only if the Normal Person* went to a similar school, but whether the answer is positive or negative (right or wrong) depends entirely on where the Normal Person* themselves went to school. The Normal Person* wants to make friends who have similar backgrounds, where the Savants* want to make friends among people who think like them.

Where the Normal Person* sees the background something safe, relatable, and reliable, something to hold onto and grow out of, the Savants* very often sees their background as a limitation, a jail, and something to get away from, something to overcome like a disease of some kind. That is often why they don’t appreciate questions about their background; “This has nothing to do with who I am now, I couldn’t help where I was born and what my parents were like, so please stop asking me about them!” They often also feel uncomfortable talking about their parents or past in “civilized” company, because what they feel they WANT TO talk about in that context is all the hurt and trauma that their parents caused them, and they feel like they were lying when they simply say nice things about their parents so they’d appreciate it if the topic was left alone in situations where it would be considered rude or bad mannered to talk about your parents or hometown in a negative tone. The trouble is, any question that a Savants* is willing to answer requires about an hour of your time, and they might not be the slightest bit interested in hearing you tell your story – unless you entice them with a story only YOU can tell them about yourself: How did you become you. If your mother can tell them the same stuff you planned to tell them, they are not the slightest bit interested, unless they are TRULY interested in you, as in: “I want to marry that girl/guy”-interested.
[/membership][membership level=”1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15″]
At the same time, we might be dishing out our sexual history online or in our autobiographies under our own name while obsessing about whether our neighbors or fans know what color sheets we have on our beds.

Now… The Normal Person*, I think, will dish out the color of their sheets on their blogs without thinking. The Savants* would deem that information completely unsharable, for several reasons. While the Normal Person* wreck their minds about why anyone would want to talk about their sexuality in public, they discuss topics that no the Savants* wants to know about or would want anyone to talk about even though it makes no sense to keep that hidden.

An Savant* is always a little bit of an educator, as much as they are a rebel, the philosopher always wants to share IMPORTANT information about their lives to encourage others to live freer and stronger, more passionately, and to feel less fear or guilt doing so. Therefore, their private lives are used as an example to “just go for it”. A Normal Person*, however, feels completely out of touch with such thinking, and instead, they want to know if the Savants* idol is in any way relatable; “What brand of cutlery do you use? What brand of clothing you wear, car you drive? Could we be friends if I wanted to, if I wanted to make friends with you, would I fit in?” An Savant* feels icky; “that stuff should mean nothing to you. Why do you care what brands I use? That bears no relevance to the person that I am.” And yet, if it doesn’t matter, why do we keep it to ourselves so eagerly, or demand money for sharing that information, or are ready to lie about what brand it is, given enough money is paid to do so?

I feel the Savants* hide their irrelevant information because that stuff is for their friends to know. The people who they invite to their homes, The Real Friends. The Normal Person* are still out there shopping for real friends, the Savants* are creating encryption codes for their real friends to use once we move onto the next lifetime and we need to rediscover them. “The stuff that only a real friend would know.”

The stuff that we wouldn’t normally talk about in public, whatever it is, is reserved for our real friends to know, the ones that don’t really  ask, they just sit in our homes sipping coffee of whatever cup you like to pour that coffee into, and even if we paid no attention to what kind of a container it is, we know, in the next lifetime, that THIS is the type of a cup or a mug that My Friend would use to serve me coffee. Given enough of these subliminal messages, combining from favorite colors to fashion styles, we know “that is what he or she would do.” That is THEIR thing, and we know we are with our friend.

We know, instinctively, that people who pry on that information are looking for a way to gain our trust by recreating our friend or soulmate by mimicking our style. Or, worse yet, they are trying to become us, making themselves look like they were us… making friends with OUR soulmates we haven’t met yet in this lifetime, stealing our places. Maybe we are afraid they’ll become better at being us than what we are. 🙂

While the Normal Person* still make friends by matching the externals; the cutlery, sheets, the brand of car and the like, the Savants* may well get confused by these externals while looking for their soulmates, but they will find, eventually, that they’ve made a mistake and formed a relationship to a wrong person. While the Normal Person* won’t even be always able to comprehend WHY this matters; if they are as good as pretending to be like the other, why does it matter that they are not? If you can, then, tell the difference, why won’t you tell them HOW to be a better replica? Why go through the trouble of trying to find the real deal, when the replica is easily available and almost indistinguishable from – and eager to learn how to be – the real item?

[/membership]

Subscribe to get a Daily Message