It seems people with a high public profile almost never publicly discuss or reveal their private lives and thoughts. They try to maintain as large a scope as possible for personal privacy. They don’t post pictures of their kids at the park, or status updates about fights with their spouses, except when carefully crafted to present a certain image. That image is typically constructed and maintained not as a way to let people in to their lives, but as a protective barrier to keep people out of the real thing.
People with no public profile on the other hand, who are not household names, tend to put themselves out there with regularity. You can learn astounding amounts of highly personal information and get a real slice of the personality of non-celebrities today through the prolific sharing on social media. People voluntarily offer huge glimpses into their private affairs, perhaps hoping that more people get to know them.
I’m not sure what to make of this. It seems possible that, the more people know who you are, the fewer people really know you, or at least the harder it is to get to know you; and the fewer people know who you are, the more people have a chance to get to know you easily. I don’t know if this is because your preferences change as you become more well-known, and you no longer seek to be known as much as rare privacy, or if it is because the type of people who put everything about themselves out there all the time are also the type who do not have the qualities that tend to result in becoming famous. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. I’m not done with this thought. Maybe I’ll come back to it in another post.