On difference, and right & wrong.

A conversation that stuck in my mind from 2019 was one about how much of one’s personal life one should share online. Whether people who are more personal in their posts are somehow ‘better’.

My posts are often quite impersonal. I like to post about ideas, theories. I identify with Marie Curie’s sentiment, expressed above. I struggle to understand why anyone should care about how I feel, or how I spend my spare time. What team I support, what I think of TV programmes. It is the ideas, not me, that matter.

But this is not the point I want to make – not some shoddy post-rationalisation of my own personality.

My point is that I notice these differences a lot: people who are more expressive than others, people who are more cautious than others, people who think in concrete terms, others who are more abstract – people who crave authority, people who detest it.

The mistake is always the same: to name what we ourselves are as ‘best’. To set up a system of ‘rights and wrongs’ that favours our own tendencies. This – at heart – is how a person, how a people, come to reject difference and diversity.

I have made this mistake; I will be trying to make it less in 2020.