The professional life: This is our most public face, the life in which we are focused on our career and the image we want to project to the general population. We live this life when we’re at the office, at professional events (although these sometimes blur into the personal and private), and doing public tasks associated with our roles. For instance, a mom attending a PTA meeting, a writer sending a query, and a businessperson attending a party for the primary purpose of networking could be said to be living their professional lives.
The personal life: This is still often a public part of our lives, but it is focused on a life outside of jobs, careers, and professional-related goals. This life includes such things as friendships, relationships, family, and hobbies, although only to a certain depth. It might also involve your religion (particularly if you attend church, thereby making your practice more public) and certain groups or communities you may belong to (while others of these will be private). Information (non-work-related) that you feel comfortable divulging in casual conversation with an acquaintance probably lands in this sphere. What you post on Facebook or Google+ often also falls into this category, unless you’ve made the decision to use these tools for strictly professional purposes.
The personal life can be an important component of professional relationships. We are often expected to have hobbies and interests so we appear well-rounded, for instance; there is also the stereotypical example from the ‘50s of the ambitious young man who is expected to get married (and perhaps even start a family) in order to receive the coveted promotion. The personal life plays a key role in the new trend of authenticity–allowing your audience inside your life so they gain the impression of really knowing you.
The private life: Most people do not want this life to be public. It includes the deeper aspects of relationships and friendships, facets of ourselves that we think we will be judged for, and certain stories from our pasts. If there is some part of your life that you do not generally speak of, or only to a carefully chosen few, that falls into your private life.
Everyone has different comfort levels and therefore different boundaries that constitute the private life, but we have certain societal norms for what we tend to share and what we don’t. When someone doesn’t share these norms or has parts of the private life come unexpectedly to light, the result is often scandal and/or controversy: for example, when Penelope Trunk tweeted that she was at a business meeting and in the middle of a miscarriage, or when a politician’s unconventional sex life becomes headline news.
The secret life: According to Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Galileo’s Dream, we have seven secret lives as well:
The Practical Free Spirit 
I really love your posts, Amy. Thanks for the quote by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s so true. I’ve let my love into these extra secret worlds, but yes, few others! Lol.
I haven’t read any of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, but based on that passage alone, I am very impressed with his writing.
This is a good meditation on identity and life.
I feel in the last decade, much of internet communication has been used for the purpose of marketing; and the problem with marketing is that it seeks to simplify human beings. To render them down to a few archetypes and simple data points, the better to target messages. Our social lives on the Internet have been heavily targeted by marketing forces and corporations, and whether intentionally or not, a side effect has been to turn people into cartoons of people. To convince people that they’re simpler than they are. That things like “communication”, or “openness”, or “integrity”, or “authenticity” are shallow things that can be reduced to a social network status message or a “like” button.
I think we have a generation of people who may not appreciate their own humanity and have grown up engrossed by this marketing driven social world. Some pundits have pointed to them as proof that we don’t really need things like “privacy” or multiple lives… but I think it’s the other way around. Those people are that way because they’ve been convinced to behave so by marketing. Not because it is a great revelation on the nature of human beings.
I would agree that the internet has had a profound impact on communication and possibly even ideas of selfhood, as those who are fairly active on the internet are in the process of creating some kind of expression of themselves (or a part of themselves, anyway). It does seem to encourage superficiality to a certain degree, although it’s hard to know how much this has changed from the past, having not experienced that myself except as a child.
My husband likes to say that in the small communities that characterized earlier civilization, there was no such thing as privacy either, but that privacy became more in vogue during the mass migration to cities (1600s-1800s depending on where). So now we might be experiencing a shift back in the other direction again. Privacy or lack thereof does seem to be a product of society as opposed to an innate part of humanity. But of course this doesn’t take into account personal preference.
I really like this post – it’s something I think about a lot. The boundaries between these lives, and how we move people in and out of them, makes up a lot of the “detail” in my mental landscape of friendship. What we share, what others know, and what we’d like others to know (or not know) is really at the foundation of most important relationships.
Good point. It’s true that I usually feel closer to the people with whom I share more–I suppose there’s a certain point when I share enough for them to move from my personal or professional lives into my more private life.
Have to disagree with the final paragraph. Always felt that I could indeed experience other people’s experience of themselves and their world view (strangers on a bus, for example) just by looking at them and sort of inhaling or imbibing their embodied experience, their gestalt as it were.
Just try it some time, I think you’ll be surprised.
I can certainly imagine what other people may be experiencing or what they may be like, but I don’t find that to be the same as direct experience. Plus I know specific examples in which I’ve gotten things wrong and made incorrect assumptions. So I guess that is not a skill I currently have access to.
Seems a good way to divide things up.
Personally, I believe that private lives should be minimized as much as possible. In other words: if you couldn’t tell most people you know about something, is it really something you should be doing?
Of course, I’m not a party animal, my college years were tame, and I’ve never tried to pick up a hooker so there’s a shortage incriminating photos capable of existing.
The internet has created a blurring of these lines: making it harder for people to hide personal & private stuff that would impair their professional lives, blurring personal and private, etc. Part of the problem is while personal secrecy is decreasing, I don’t think hypocrisy has really decreased as well so we’re getting these 21st century technology-induced blowups where many of those publicly throwing stones do not have the right to do so.
Times like this i always like to reference Captain Picard’s epic line from the first episode of ST:TNG…
“If we’re going to be damned, let’s be damned for what we really are.”
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