I mean as in Spy x Family. Everyone has a secret they hide from everyone else, even their closest people.
Do you think real life is like that?
I wouldn’t call it a “mask”, because it implies deception. Depending on who you are around, you show (and hide) different treats of your personality: In an employment setting you do not act the same way you would act when you hang with your boys (or girls, respectively) - you show different aspects of your personality while you are with your significant other, rather than with your parents. Also, your online behavior would be different from your offline behavior when navigating public situations.
Different people around you and/or different social settings make you filter things regarding your personal beliefs and/or personal traits.
What’ll really blow you’re mind is when you realize we aren’t even honest with ourselves either.
Your mask you show to others is no more fake than the mask you show to yourself.
That is not universal, some of us have actually thought about things for a long time and are honest with ourselves.
I try to be honest with myself about everything, but I’m also honest with myself that sometimes I subconsciously avoid thinking about things consciously anyway
Acknowledging that sometimes you avoid thinking about certain things is part of being honest with yourself, even when it is subconcious. Being aware of who you are doesn’t automatically change anything.
My friend I’ve thought about who I am for 20 years. You are not honest with yourself if you believe you are honest with yourself.
People meditated on mountains for decades to be honest with themself. You didn’t accomplish that on Tuesday. Neither have I.
We get closer but to truly reach that point… we probably zero-sum and cease to be.
We learn to lie before we learn to speak. It’s part of all of us. You can’t escape it unfortunately. It is the default setup.
You are not honest with yourself if you believe you are honest with yourself.
That is a load of self defeating bullshit.
It is often difficult, but not impossible, to be honest with ourselves. Hell, there might even be things we didn’t consider because they slipped our minds, like whether we acted in a selfish way or not when we were 10 years old, but that doesn’t mean we are not being honest with ourselves. Being honest means that when we do think about something specific, we can consider our thoughts and actions and not hardware them away withiut thought. It also acknowledges that things are often complicated and how we see things and how others perceive us doesn’t align.
But being honest doesn’t mean perfectly perceiving everything, it means actually thinking things through and not letting our pride or other hang ups get in the way of introspection.
I stopped reading at self defeating. “ we can do better” isn’t self defeating it’s recognizing an issue lol.
You are not honest with yourself if you believe you are honest with yourself.
Saying that it is impossible to be honest with one’s self is self defeating. The rest of the post explains why, but if you can’t get past someone disagreeing with you then I can see why you struggle with the idea of being able to be honest with yourself.
Being honest with ourselves is how we can improve.
I didn’t say it’s impossible. I didn’t say you can’t be honest with yourself. I said if you think you don’t lie to yourself you need more introspection.
You can disagree with me as much as you like, that doesn’t mean I need to be silent on your arguments.
If I say you’ll never ride a dragon I don’t feel that’s me being negative. If you say you’ll ride dragons all the times I want some information from you…. That’s not an easily attainable thing that people just stumble apon. I have questions lol.
You’re talking about reaching a state of pure inner peace… please elaborate how you attained such knowledge?
I thought about things a lot and accepted my faults and bad habits without excuses.
I know exactly who I am and am at peace with being less than perfect, but aware of what I need to do to be better. Knowing doesn’t guarantee success though, sometimes it requires constant work.
I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about with the dragons. If you mean Komodo dragons, I sure wouldn’t ride those as they are fucking dangerous.
How does the mountain help one be honest with themselves?
How does the mountain help one be honest with themselves?
height radiation and also oxygen deprivation causes hallucinations which can have a psychedelic effect and help you figure things out about yourself that you wouldn’t otherwise know. also it helps that historically, there used to be very few distractions on a mountain because it was mostly un-inhabited.
If I could answer that I’d write a book. I’d make million dollars and never count it lol.
My point is simple tho, it’s not just as simple as “oh I don’t do that anymore. I never lie to myself”
Dude tell me everything?! Where’s your book? Do you have a commune I could attend?
This is profound information the world itself has been searching for and you have it? Tell me, please?
i think the reason why you feel like you have to go on lying and can’t be honest with yourself is because you’re worried that you’re just like the wind, when it stops blowing, it ceases to exist, because it turns into thin air. and the lies are what keep you going.
God I wish I had a very strained pun to reply with.
To summit all up, you get a peak at your inner… self?
We can workshop it, there might be something there.
Maybe you’re just really bad at it?
Yeah I kinda suck at grand spiritual enlightenment. Glad you figure it out. Any tips would be appreciated.
I know that was sarcasm, but stop thinking about it in pseudoscientific religious nonsense terms like “spiritual” and “*enlightenment”.
You’re a human, humans can be figured out, we’re not magic.
“Stop thinking about-“
No. I’ll continue thinking if it’s all the same to you. About everything all the time.
I continue working to enlightenment. Magic and all. It would be great if you could just let me know how you achieved enlightenment but if not I just keep thinking about things. Like people do. You know… like the human brain does lol
I personally am in the camp that people should think more but I don’t want to make a this political.
Let me break down that comment.
So, you want to feel better about yourself, but only through supernatural means?
And when I point out that that is getting in your way to achieving what you call “enlightenment”, you not only straight il refuse, but insist that magic is definitely a potential correct path.
And you cover it all with a nice sauce of insulting my intelligence.
You have a VERY long road ahead, and you’re currently walking at a right angle to it.
I find being honest with myself to be easy anymore. It’s not something I’ve always been good at but I’ve worked on it. Understanding myself is still hard at times. If I’m feeling a certain way about something, sometimes I have to pause for a while to think about why.
Example: the wife and I have an argument about something (which is rare) and I take offense to something she said. She never says anything with the intent of offending me. I know this even though I’m feeling angry. Instead of just reacting in anger, I like to put a pause on the discussion, be alone for a while, and think about why I was offended.
The reasons vary but I pretty much always figure it out, after which I’m ready to resume the discussion with, it nothing else, a little more clarity.
Huh. Did not expect a SPYxFAMILY reference here! わくわく!
Linkin Park said it 25 years ago, “everyone has a face that they hold inside,” I think that was in Papercut, the opening track to their debut album, Hybrid Theory. Good song about that.
I don’t really believe everyone has a true self they hide. I do believe we don’t share certain things with certain people, sometimes for good reason.
What I do believe is that we are a different person to every person who knows us. That is to say, if your parents are still together, you have these two people who have known you since you were an infant, but they have different views of you. Or if you have a decent sized friend group, each of these friends sees you slightly differently. I think this is more useful to us. Knowing who we are to each person we meet; rather than focusing on the persona we share with others, understanding how another sees us and acting accordingly can be used to great influence and effect. Find the people who underestimate you and show them what you can do. Find the people who don’t like you and show them kindness. Things like that.
No. We change how we present but that doesn’t make those presentations “false” or what we don’t share more “true”.
Masking is how I get through the Christmas season as it’s a time of year I really struggle mentally.
That said, I think their use of it is more tied to the Japanese concept of “your three faces”. One you show the world, one you show your closest friends and one you only show yourself.
https://www.pranshuwrites.com/2025/01/The-Three-Faces-Japanese-Psychology.html?m=1
No. I think people are extremely diverse in how they experience and engage with their individual subjectivity. I think a lot of people are like that at least some of the time, but it’s more complicated and probably a nonconscious behavior for most people when they are doing it. Describing it as a “mask” I think is potentially misleading because I don’t think that’s necessarily how people experience this phenomena subjectively.
it’s called roles. we play the sibling role, parent role, friend and SO role, our job role. there is no true self, just adjusting to meet the role’s needs.
Or persona per the psychologist Karl Jung IIRC.
So definitely a thing for basically everyone.
I’ve always thought of it like a d20. For every role we occupy, we show a different facet on top. Some facets remain visible despite not being the “dominant” one, but others are hidden on the other side.
No single face is our “true self” but they are all a part of who we are.
Everyone has 3 personalities.
The person they are around strangers.
The person they are with friends and family.
The person they are when completely alone.
Like most things, I believe it’s on a spectrum, with some people being very much who they seem, and some people being completely disingenuous. We all do things that we know others would frown upon (to one degree or another), so it’s always tempting to hide those things, sometimes to the extent that we hide the whole part of ourselves that would do then.
Yes.
Love, -A formerly closeted queer person.
Some social scientists say there’s yet another self even beyond these masks: your true self. They say you can never really know your true self.
The Johari window describes the 4 “views” of who we are. Oftentimes, the masks we choose to display do not come across to others how we’d expect.
Real life is indeed like that yes
I do have filters on what I say in different contexts, but do not consider it a mask as I will always say the same things outside of the filtered contexts. So while I don’t bring up a lot of things at work, it is simply because it isn’t relevant to work and isn’t something I want to talk about at work. There isn’t a presentation of something else.
Like I don’t bring up hobbies for the same reason I don’t bring up my sex life, it just isn’t relevant. I don’t consider anything like that to be a mask.
The closest would be that I phrase things at work in a more positive and less critical manner, but it is pretty subtle and if that is considered masking then the word loses a lot of meaning for people who behave completely differently from who they are due to social pressures.
I think I’d go further and say that there isn’t really any such thing as a person’s “true self.” People present different aspects of themselves in different circumstances. It’s like asking which orientation you should hold an object against a light to see the “true shape” of its shadow.
I believe thats whats called in Buddhism as having No Self. You are who you are at that moment.
Could be, I’m not deeply familiar with Buddhism. There’s still a core “something” in there that’s casting the shadow, but it’s not something that can be interacted with directly so I don’t know if it would fit the normal definition of a “self”. You can only directly interact with the shadows it casts and those shadows are situation-dependent. It doesn’t think or act in isolation.
I suppose one could just pick some specific set of circumstances and call the self that emerges under those conditions the “true self.” For example you could call the version of you that emerges when you’re lying in bed alone at night thinking about the dumb stuff you did during the day your “true self.” But that’s a bit arbitrary.
But that’s a bit arbitrary
Exactly. It’s no more “true self” than any other. Even by themselves, most people play a role for themselves: they replay events of the day or tell themselves other stories and then believe whatever gives them an emotional fix. But it’s not real, and that is true for every other person as well. You are not your story about yourself, you are not someone’s story about you and nobody is your story about them.
People have different facets. The way I interact with my partner for ten years is different to my close friends I’ve had for 20, different to my co-workers, different to my family. But my family and friends and co-workers see how I act with my partner.
I mimic people to some extent treating them similarly how they treat me. There are limits though, I’m bounded on that scale by my personal values which mature as I do. So I’m still never going to act outside the bounds of my morality and values, but I’ll still treat my partner with unconditional love, and my friends with the best times and silly jokes.
These I don’t consider masks, but not everyone sees me the same. They’re just facets.
Yes. There are many different traits that I would all call a part of me but how much I act out on them is different between different people.
In some groups there are topics that define me for the other members, while in other groups the members don’t know I even care for this topic
I overact some traits but what topic I overact os different in each group
