Saturday 5 December 2015

My blogging persona - honest yet radically incomplete

It seems that I may have misled some readers recently: I am not, in fact, in any kind of desperate psychological state - but I can see how that might have been the impression created.

My sincere thanks to those who have expressed sympathy and offered assistance.


Although I do not blog about it, because it is private; I am, perhaps more than anybody I know, a family man. My life is rooted, and much of my time every day is spent, in this close and loving environment - with school age children still at home. I have indeed been exceptionally fortunate.

The blog is my public face, and not the most important aspect of my being - it is written by a persona: honest (so far as it goes - although not completely and explicitly truth-full, because that is illegal and dangerous in Britain); and certainly not false, but it is radically and deliberately incomplete. 


So, inevitably, blog readers who know me only from blogging, probably do not know me in an holistic fashion; because the most important thing about my life does not get onto this blog.

Therefore, when the voice who writes this blog seems to be miserable and desperate; it is quite possible, indeed more than likely, that the man behind the voice is 'in a good place'.

3 comments:

David Stanley said...

Perhaps the central cause or symptom of our peril is the degeneration of the family. If you can hold that together you will have achieved more than most of us and this will perhaps eclipse your academic work in its long term effects.

Bruce Charlton said...

@David - That would not be saying very much! - but of course the motivation about family has little or nothing to do with long term effects (in this world); and effects are incalulable. But indeed, the rewards are so qualitatively great that it makes little sense to talk as if of sacrifice.

Nicholas Fulford said...

We all have different voices that we use, and of course the blog voice is a rarefied form of a particular aspect of our personality. If you spoke with me in person you would detect that the voice I write with was present but it would be tempered, partial and not dominant. This media tends to reduce us, and we also do our part to keep in character. I don't want to be perceived as vulnerable or foolish, so what I present in the digital media space is not that, even though those other characteristics do express themselves in my *real* life.

Even so, be well and happy, (not that I am worried that you will be suddenly overcome by a wave of nihilism and drowned in the deep dark void.)