With the end of obligations and the possibilities of a multi-options society, a space has opened for the individualization in society. As a result of that, we are forced to take our life into our own hands. In order to get attention from others, we have to stage ourselves.#discrepancyoftheself ‘Products become artifacts; our body evolves into a playground: I am the clothing I wear, the food I choose to eat and the body in which I reside. The constant work of maintaining and developing identities is exhausting.’¹

While things, like traveling and cooking were once practiced primarily for your leisure time, we now share our experiences via our digital communication channels in order to express a lifestyle. It seems like 'only shared experiences serve to create an identity'.²

As Erving Goffman (1956) considered our social identity as roles we use to perform on our ‘front stage’, our identity is formed by distinguishing characteristics, attributions und expectations in relation to others.#philosophy Therefore, we create attention to get recognition, especially in social networks.#perception#participation He compared the whole human behavior with a play, in which we take roles to sell ourselves the best. While Goffman is thinking in the process of identity building of a truly embodied presence of people, Schmidt (2011) and Krotz (2003) are including the aspects of media and social networks of the web 2.0. Schmidt is defined that ‘identity-management’ plays a significant role in the process of identity creation in the 21th century. For him new media and the social web are offering playgrounds of self-constitutions and new ways of self-representation. He sees a problem in the way of self-representation in the social web and is questioning the authenticity of the identities that gets created, because they are influenced by social networks as an identity-resource. 

 Also Krotz argues that media and social networks can influence the constitution of an identity. For him communication and presentation of the self, influenced by media can offer roles for the own action and the ascription to others. With the focus on visualization and communication in social networks, he claims that there is one of the most extreme forms of self-representation happening, because a variety of identities can be build – he is even talking about collective Identities. 

With this background, you can see the ongoing social competition because nowadays it is easy to give a ‘heart’ or an ‘x’ to judge or give attributions to others. We are individualists that want to fulfill themselves with the result that we more and more assimilating to each other.#perception We are in a condition of constantly self-optimization and seeking for the superlatives. To be in a relationship means therefore to let someone into your process of self-optimization and we are not willing to this more and more. 

When I look at my parent’s life compared to mine or to a life path of someone belonging to my generation, I do not see children or houses, in my generation we are delaying phases of life and make important decisions very late.#storybehindthekeyword 

Things in the private and professional sector have shifted in a way. The course of education have extended and communication has shortened. So it is no surprise to live in a shared apartment and be too young for children if you are in your mid-thirties. 

What indeed is belonging to your process of self-fulfillment is your occupation, because we have this mentality that hard work is the price to pay for your self-fulfillment.³

The private life and your job are no longer separated and your work is an expression of your personality. This border is melting away and the center of our life has shifted to our professional success. The personal self is our own big project and we create products of ourselves.⁴  We model our life, we work on our career, we optimize our body and delete or recreate our self-representation as we like. And ‘our tolerance for the imperfect decreases the more transparent our life becomes, the more we are determined by perceived expectations of others’⁵ during this plan of life.

So the non-committal mentality and the inability to keep up a relationship is nothing else than a desperate pursuit of self-fulfillment, of perfection. I can really see the paradoxes in here because these are problems if you have a particular standard of living and you are able to give these problems the inappropriate importance they actually have.#blackbox#firstworldproblems