Is There A Point In Keeping Too Many Secrets?

It’s never been hard for me to keep a secret… even when I don’t see the point in keeping half of them.

Photo by Vitolda Klein

I think we have far too many secrets. Don’t get me wrong, secrets are useful. We don’t need much of something that is useful, though, just because it is useful. The same way we don’t have ten hammers, however useful a hammer is, we don’t need to make everything a secret.

Secrets are useful because they give us an advantage. We all know this to be true even if we can’t remember when we first found about it. I think it may be one of the first pieces of knowledge we acquire as children: hide this toy here, and I can always be the one to play with it first. We keep all sorts of useful secrets, from passwords and PIN numbers to fears and past wrongdoings. This is information that, unless kept secret, would be useless or make us vulnerable.

Then we keep secrets that aren’t all that useful but that there is no point in making public, such as our sexual or religious preferences. Just like we don’t walk about naked, although there is nothing intrinsically wrong about that (weather permitting), we don’t have to pester everyone around us with unsolicited points of view.