Nicknames and identity crisis

Over the last few years I've changed nicks multiple times. First it was shame, then I fell into the opsec trap. Ultimately I think I've lost the capacity to attach to a nick for too long; I don't even care about opsec or anything; I think there's something holding me from having a lasting nickname. I feel alienated from the idea of building a reputation for, say, IRC channels and other communities. I can't touch my geist anymore, I don't know where it'd go. Has anyone else felt this way? I think I am afraid of having a static identity because my mind always tries to be dynamic and fluid. And refusing to be like this would be staying at the anchorage. I know there's no map but I would still like a compass.

names are just a tool for identifying yourself. if you don't like the idea of using a name because the name would come to define who you are, then maybe you have placed too much of your heart in the hands of people who haven't earned your trust yet?

in any case, i dealt with similar problems. everybody has a constantly changing sense of self, you don't have to play-act the perfect incarnation of some intangible name, and anyone who actually holds you to that standard is close minded and you don't have to care about them at all.

Names are magical spells that attach hidden meaning to an individual. While many do not think of it consciously a name does influence how you see yourself and others see you. But you have to keep in mind that how people see you will not always change with how you see yourself so they may want to see you as one thing while you see yourself as another. This does not inherently mean they are uninformed, it's just a matter of perspective.

Personally I do the same cause I have no desire to be known by anyone online safe a few special people. But also I did do it before I even had all the people I have in real life, when my social presence was also mostly online. I may have vented about this before but its an armchair theory I almost dont want to write because it would make for a good pseudo think piece; its a strictly online identity diagnosis that while probably leaks into real life is only disordered online. Thats a whole other topic but I actually believe (whether it matters or not ans i think it doesnt) there is the formation of a standard neurotypical online mode of presenting and then those that are atypical or disordered. This is independent of whether the person in real life has a mental disorder or not its strictly online. In fact someone with schizophrenia who also acts schizophrenic online is not what im talking about, and actually the online schizophrenic might be high functioning and not disordered online while in real life they are. The dark sad metric is the same but very dystopian (or some would say more dystopian) online in that the criteria for being disordered online is that it interferes with your digital life, relationships, digital wellbeing and digital productivity. I call people like you social/ideological germaphobes. Features are: - Highly developed internal language - Pretending or exaggerating moods online - Refusal to accept common ground in discussions - Constant name, avatar, and bio shifting - Refusal to answer personal questions and even becoming antagonistic at them - Refusal to play into group dynamics in discords, servers, websites, etc. (ie lets count to 100 in chat!!) - Rapid switching between genuine opinion and highly riddled/ironic nonsense (sometimes even in the same sentence). - Highly moral in a specifically virtues/principal way. The less moral another online agent is perceived the more the fear of contamination and the higher intensity of the above. - Frequent abandoning of spaces over sometimes incomprehensible perceived boundary breaches - Despises intrapersonal statements "You value this a lot dont you?", "Your this kinda person huh?" Etc. Even when not antagonistic and designed to affirm a friendly online relation. I call it idea/social germaphobia because while it often starts as concern about opsec or being doxxed or whatever it often turns into an outright refusal on principle to open up or allow any idea or person in, especially those viewed as "contaminated". Fixing to a name or identity or anything online runs the risk of introducing ideological contaminants associated with whatever word or picture or anything you are using. Likewise using terms or words in common use is the same. Whether the person is left or right or off in a third direction the person will heavily police at least their own language to such an extent by the time they are typing at the keyboard they don't even have to think about it. The internal language usually was alreast forming in real life by the time they brought it to online, and it was forming in real life for the same reasons of not wanting the contaminants (baggage) of words widely in circulation. With every person, interaction, and idea online a risk of contamination is assessed, using terms in that persons internal language and not the ones im using. There is a permanent background anxiety and panic about every interaction where too much was "let in" or that got "too deep", under the skin. The sad part is that of course in some sense whether for reasons of opsec, pipelines to various ideaologies, algorithms trying to read you and force things on to you, digital surveillance, etc. this response should make sense (to become idealogically/socially germaphobic). However in real life, having this same germaphobia with regards to real advertising, surveillance, media, etc. (not people cause its only online a person might also be the prior things) had already been established as disordered. Again most of us who are online germaphobes are actually not real life ones, a few of you guys specifically might be in real life and im sure you have been offered or are on medication.

i used to use nicknames but now i just use my first name, or my initials for short. after i grew up and became a regular boring adult with a job who spends a lot of time in the real world touching grass and interacting with people face to face i stopped viewing computers and the internet as some kind of alternate reality mmorpg and it just became a tool, a tool that i've become kind of tired of. i don't really care about people knowing my real name because i realized at some point that there are 8 billion people in the world and i'm not famous or important at all and absolutely nobody cares.

>>98044 Nobody gives a soykaf about you after 30. When you're young, you think you matter and you're the center of the universe. You aren't wrong, people only care about young beautiful beings full of life, hope, energy and potential. When you're not young anymore, your life is basically over. Can't go to parties, can't make new friends. Can't get a date without a high paying job - can't get a job without years of experience. Solvable problems if you're young, completely impossible to overcome if you're not. If you missed your chance, it's over. Might as well succumb to alcohol and kill yourself at that point.

>>98461 >Nobody gives a soykaf about you after 30. Wrong, the people around you care about you and thats all that should matter >When you're not young anymore, your life is basically over Wrong >Can't go to parties wrong >can't make new friends. still wrong >Can't get a date without a high paying job wrong >can't get a job without years of experience this one is partly true, employers are mostly short-sighted and retarded, not that its easy to get a job without experience at any age >might as well succumb to alcohol and kill yourself at that point. Your view is highly skewed and it is highly immoral to spout nonsense like this. Things aren't black and white where "people" care about you and at some point they don't. Who are these people? You seem leave things as vague as possible because you know that world is not like you say it is. Surely you yourself realize how exaggerated your post is

>>98018 I believe identity as a whole may be a flawed concept, rooted in human egoism. Not a bad thing to be innately dispassionate about identity.

>>98461 >if you can't be invited to parties with the cool kids or be attractive to teenage girls or impress your boss you might as well kill yourself donald trump mentality

i've created different nicknames depending on what platform im using, so that i can keep some modicum of op sec while keeping an identity. usually the nickname is related to the community, if it's about vidya, i use a vidya relted nickname etc.

>>98036 Samsies we be twins but honestly this is just called being safe. Most women online aren't real and i'm starting to think most people are just bots or threat actors of the FBI or the DPRK or just some psycopath or russians >>98461 Damn dude that hits diff ngl but all jokes aside I relate to this and feel like doing KMS by august

To keep oneself "dynamic and fluid" while refusing any anchorage is to stay anchored, static, and solid, while being able to lie to oneself. That being said, there is a plethora of anchors to keep oneself grounded. No need to condemn yourself, especially for something like not being too attached to online identity, unless this is causing actual suffering to you.

>>98475 i think I mentioned in my post in spite of all my armchair pathologizing it isnt a pathology in the sense we typically say because it is arguably at least the beginnings of the only response to the panopticon that actually treats it as real or an intrusion on all levels. There isnt any retaliatory response that wouldnt be pathologized. Even something like gangstalking while misdirected and often debilitating for the person suffering from delusions of gangstalking, it is in some ways the only interpretation to being casually surveilled always not for a police state primarily but largely just for the sake of abstract capital that actually creates a sense of urgency or need to react in the person. The rest of us even many of those like you or I feel we vaguely understand that our data and face and tracking and whatever are just commodities be it for a company making a product or the police, and we vaguely feel these companies and this policre are unreachable and intangible and that it makes sense to us they would be. But not too long ago it all would have been incomprehensible, even (most not all) of the future facing authors who saw a surveillance state didnt imagine the surveillance would come so casually and disparately and naturally (as in not forced) as a result of this data commodification. What really is the knowledge of it working like this worth, how accurate can my breakdown really be over the person who says their neighbors and the government and the local library are in a concentrated stalking effort to bring them down because they are jesus 2 when my, our, breakdown of this inspires no radical action and just complacency while the schizophrenic gangstalked are sometimes acting so radically to such a degree that the state must step in and put them in the bin for a week with forced meds. If we all truly stopped abstracting it as something happening to everyone and following a chain of events that surely makes sense and instead a threat happening to me or you specifically in this instant it would have had to stop dead in its tracks and it would have been said we cant mass surveil because its just human nature, its just too much pressure and too incomprehensible on an individual level, its too much of a psychological hazard. That was likely the thinking of the people who wrote about future surveillance, it was incomprehensible that we would buy into it and instead surely it would only exist as something the government tries to do in secret or potentailly as an "open secret" but nonetheless one we would only get by being a cohesive society on if we at least pretended it wasnt happening. I have no idea what you mean by why women specifically online arent real but I agree its best to assume no discourse, infighting, whatever that you are seeing if it seems stupid or nonsensical is real. It likely always has real people partaking and spreading it (because they cant help but interact) but I think the origins or why one ragebait discussion or issue gets pushed at a given time are indiscernibly not driven by people and so even the real people commenting rather than raging at them or getting cynical about humanity remember this is someone just going about their day who had the most rage inducing presentation of an idea or concept or whatever presented to them and has also had it happen so many times now that they are primed to give the most knee jerk seemingly braindead take that then gets pushed to you as ragebait so you can go "ahh my strawman of people who disagree with me was dead on, i knew they were retards" and then thats pushed to someone else who gets meta mad AND STILL interacts to rant about how its not representstive of the other side and you arent as smart as you think you are cause dont you realize everything im saying rn. Just default assuming when you see like infighting over stupid soykaf or a headline talking about how people in jersey where you have never even been are smoking super crack and spreading super aids is all bots or at least heavily bot driven isnt just helpful to focus on what matters it will also make you vastly more empathetic, see more good in people, and see more paths forward as you realize real life is not online and in real life people change their mind for someone they love or concede things or reach across the aisle for a greater cause all of the time. That wont be the case though if everyone believes x bot number 9292992848493 who posted a thread incited to start a race war between filipinos and mexicans or whatever was something that organically just totally happened and wasnt something an algorithm or bot predicted would generate a lot of response.

>>98036 It took me a while to realize that I'm like that in real life too. Every time I join a new group of people or I get to know someone else, I present a clean mask on my face that both me and people around me can paint on until I eventually disappear or they stop bothering with me because they realize I'm not being "honest" (It happens rarely though, they mostly never notice). I wonder if this process started when I lost all contact with previous friends and I realized I could be anything I wanted. Posting on anonymous image boards probably didn't help too, since I can act a way in a thread and act the opposite in the next (although I never do this, but the possibility is there). I don't feel chained to an identity in both meatspace and cyberspace, and when I do, i just "change nick". To reply to OP, I never use the same nick for opsec reasons. But I think I don't have a single identity I show to people in real life for the same reason as well. I'm unable to let people in or be vulnerable to others and I'm scared of people hurting me. But I think it's fine to do so online. I wonder if you also do something like this in real life.

>>98018 I want to change nick names and not be tied to a single name but more importantly not to be tied to my past self. But I am not good at making new friends so I try to keep a name active so the people who know me can find me. I have shifted away from my unique names and now I just use generic 4 letter names. This is a nice middle ground between constantly shifting names to not leave a trail and plausible deniability because that name is so common its used 1000 times over. I dont know why I do this because im not crazy with my speech or actions anymore. I just exist and lurk like a ghost in various places and sometimes rarely does someone notice.

staying anon is best op. you choose yourself when you appear and can stay unbothered elsetime

Something I'm noticing having recently returned to real life socials is that I barely talk, instead opting to be a good-listener. This generally works as a lot of people love talking about themselves, but once they get to notice it the tone shifts and I'm suddenly not so cool to be hung around with. Thing is, I don't really have much to say. I struggle to communicate ideas that I do have and barely respond to social cues. I think someone was asking me to spend the night drinking in the country last night but I didn't get it. How this relates to identity - I've done the same thing online for years, mainly in mmo gaming but it varies a bit. Constantly deleting characters and 'reinventing' myself against new inputs and influences. It is like kicking dead whales down the beach to drop genuine connections and feels bitter and self-destructive, but somehow also compelling. Something tends to happen in real life too, namely that if I meet two people by chance I don't know how to act between them both - I've never really noticed myself maintaining different personas (literally 'masks') but I definitely struggle with people perceiving only part of my personality, then feeling obliged to only be that from then on. Sometimes I like to dress adjacent to a hobo and sit in the street - god forbid those who've seen the smarter expression of myself witness me then! There's a local woman who appears to have taken a liking to me lately, but I'm so embarrassed for her because she doesn't seem to realise I'm retarded. She called out to me drunk in the street the other night - the thought that her friends now know she's expressing interest in me, I feel almost humiliated on her behalf.

>>98018 For most of my childhood I went by a nickname. Like, all the way into high school. Teachers called me that and everything. So, going into university / the real world and having people call me by my given name was a bit jarring. On the internet though I've used alot of different identities on alot of different platforms. And I'm workshopping pen names for trying to publish soykaf under. It doesn't feel very odd on the internet, though. Probably since I'm used to hopping identities and having been on imageboards for a while and generally preferring the concept of anonymity to being known online by a discrete identity.

>>98018 Switching is cool in theory but bad for sense of self. Both for obvious reasons. My advice is revert to whoever you were. Or who you want to be. The old fogies are right about this one. It is also OK to use whatever or be whoever you want online. Pseudonymity and anonymity exist for a reason. The difference between healthy and otherwise is usually in the boundaries you draw. Try drawing some and see for yourself. As for myself, I find names are more for the namers than the named. I can be who I need to when I must, but with myself I will always be me. Do with that what you will. Good luck.

>>98475 oh i agree, look at any youtube comments. who are these people writing same soykaf everyday and liking same soykaf everyday? its either some organization connected to one specific video like "Here is your homework, have fun in the comments! To pass, you need to exclusively use words and sentences from the Validated Comments List! The person with the worst result is going to be grind up into ground meat for the rest to eat!!!" or just bots. like fuarrrk i'm not complaining about the buzzwords or jargon but the joke and concept gets boring at some point. not to them, whatever they are, apparently.

>>99506 >>99506 >Switching is cool in theory but bad for sense of self. Both for obvious reasons. Good. The collective ego of this diseased culture needs to be destroyed. The internet nearly achieved this, but the outstanding hegemon realized what was happening just in time and swooped in to concentrate this new form of cultural production and recreate the identity spectacle therein.

>>98018 >>98036 prioritizing dynamism makes communication impossible. if you keep dissolving yourself to avoid being anchored you’re just erasing your own ability to be understood. eventually you just lose the capacity to speak at all

>>99826 good point. >>98036 interesting insights. a slight twist is to be a chamelon rather than silent. a place like your favourite image board can provide a shroud to hide behind. everybody talks about "anonymity", but it is rarely as advertised, only pseudononymous. People reveal a lot through their names and so on, because the system is geared to present a hyper-specific part of oneself. It's just branding. What's your brand? Dissociating teenager with no strong worldly connections. Maybe not even any hope. Or a dead inside, bleak 10,000mi stare. We know these people afk, but we never know them. Those ghosts. Being the type of empty husk in the wired usually reveals the shell of former people in meatspace. But now, they're just ghosts. t. the topic of this post