Imperfect

create more characters

Inspired by Lazar's who's in a name?.

Names, personas, and identifiers you live through can sour quick. Recall how subpar, tiresome, or unwieldy have any of them become. How can that be rectified?

I present one of many possible solutions at the end of embrace creative exchange:

Go wild with character creation. You don't even need to assume a worldly, tangible, corporeal identity. What is even Imperfect besides intangible commentary on perfection, imperfection, and related topics, attitudes, and behaviors? As far as you know, I'm just a cat that typed this out and published it.

Imagine players creating new characters in role-playing games. They roll for new stat allocations, then reroll when the numbers don't go their way. They select from dropdowns and tweak sliders to adjust their in-game representation's appearance. They sift through further settings, guiding how the game plays out via difficulty, storyline, and other crucial factors. This visualization by plurality can pull you toward the attitudes, people, and spaces your inner child wishes to inhabit most. Let your dreams inform, if not sculpt, your reality.

Naysayers may deem you psychotic for even thinking about how to embrace multiplicity out loud. I can see how closely the practice can relate or descend into associated personality disorders. That said, history is rife with successful examples. Think of how prevalent nicknames, stage names, and alter egos are. With that in mind, what could the naysayers' main concern be?

Many-to-one personal identity mappings can be found troublesome. Online or offline, you can adopt as many names as you please, intertwined as tightly or as loosely as desired. See how personas can match the dynamism of their creators. Trickery is the default with how often the people we know, ourselves, and names involved change under our noses. Could it be more of a valid, mutual strategy than a problem to solve?

Does adopting a diverse set of personal identities rock the boat like similar data privacy measures do? Those mitigating future risks of their heightened threat models skip using their real name unless it's absolutely required. The same goes for their other personally identifiable information. You would be surprised at how often divulging such details isn't necessary. Even within the workplace, you can make yourself internally identifiable without having to leak details externally.

Although, how thoroughly can you compartmentalize your presence? I think about what Kevin describes in The strange way AIs can inherit hidden habits and how true it could be for humans too. If so, how does such subconscious imprinting poison the efficacy of our otherwise decoupled personas and personal spaces? Then again, not all personas survive, let alone as long as we wish they would. How can you save them?

Should you ever want to transition out of pseudonyms and the like, divergent pseudonymity shows a way out: gradually, towards who you actually are. Instead of cleaning the blank slates of your past selves, you can keep them as snapshots that show how far you made it in comparison. Instead of moving shop, you can graft facets of yourself that deserve their own spaces elsewhere. Just like how websites of yours can sit idle for long yet be perpetually under construction, so can selves within you. Should you ever come back to them, you will have that much more of a story to tell.

I see the virtuous cycle of settlers in games like Civilization as a neat parallel to Lazar's signpost-box dichotomy used toward names. They get sent out from their home village to found a new village elsewhere, from which more settlers can venture out. However, villages themselves don't just sit still. They change over the course of the game through all kinds of advancements, catastrophes, and other events. Some villages get neglected and others get conquered. A select few grow to become crucial for an empire's success. Yet, they all contribute to one identity surface area, perhaps bigger than the parts themselves.

Flipping from maintaining this solitary virtual home toward building a thriving, multipolar online ecosystem seems valuable. I don't have to resort to being constrained to any brand of web in that I can embody balanced longevity. I can maximize opportunities most don't, selectively bridging across as many of my independent-enough online personas as I wish. Could you also enable abundance for yourself through similar processes of character creation and upkeep?

Want to reach out? Connect with me however you prefer: