A friend of mine recently posted the following in a Facebook note:

“Over the last year, I have come to realize that humility is one of the best traits that a person can possess. I’ve also realized that humility is something I sorely lack.

These last two semesters, I’ve found myself learning more and more humility. Some of these lessons have taught me grace and how very blessed I am. Things like gifts I’ve received, getting into college, the people I’ve met, and the people I share my every day with. These have been some of the positive ways I have begun to learn the importance of humility.

I have also gone through a lot of difficult experiences and learned a lot of hard lessons that have humbled me. Hurtful words, embarrassment, having unintentionally hurt those I care about: many of these experiences were painful for me, but I feel as though I’ve learned from them.

For those of you that know me, whether we are friends or not: I realize that I can be an insufferably arrogant, obnoxious, sometimes even hateful person. I have a way of saying things and acting in a way that makes me seem as though I think I’m better than others. I say things without thinking, I interrupt people, I boast of my accomplishments, and I find myself sometimes talking down to people.

It’s annoying. It’s irritating. I alienate people. This has become very apparent to me in the last year. I sincerely apologize to anyone whom I have hurt with my attitude. Anyone whom I have hurt or made to feel belittled. My pride and arrogance are some of my biggest flaws.

I have a long way to go, and lot more humility to learn. I am working hard to humble myself. I only hope you can forgive me for my mistakes and my arrogance through the years.”

As you may have guessed, this friend of mine is currently a senior in high school. The sentiment, coming from a person his/her age, is fairly common. What I find so intriguing is that he/she chose to post this on Facebook. I should mention here that I was not “tagged” on this note, but it showed up on my news feed. Putting something on Facebook, in this day and age, is the equivalent of setting up a soap box in Times Square and shouting whatever you’ve written to the gathered masses of tourists. (Because, of course, no native New Yorker in their right mind would ever venture near that hell-hole of neon and glitz that is Times Square). Yet still, people have no second thoughts about posting their deepest thoughts publicly. A generation ago, this would have been written in a diary and locked away, possibly never to be seen again. We seem to have become a soul-baring generation, unafraid to tell our deepest, darkest secrets to whoever might stumble across our blog. Many of us even extend this culture of full disclosure all the way to our sex lives (which, to be entirely honest, I don’t understand in the slightest).

What I’ve discussed so far is nothing that people far smarter than I haven’t talked about a million times before. What I want to get in to is (1) Why we’re so willing to do this and (2) What implications it might have on the world in the upcoming decades.

I think the answer to the first question is deceptively complicated. It seems easy to dismiss this by saying “Because it’s there”; “Of course kids are going to post about their deepest feelings online–previous generations would have done it too if they’d had the internet.” I think this is only part of any serious answer. Why, then, do they so often choose not to utilize, say, the “private” feature on LiveJournal? The fact that these proclamations of deep feeling are so public is a huge part of the question.

The world that we are coming of age in is dramatically more complex than the one our parents came of age in. Yes, they had to worry that they might get sent to Vietnam and shot at, but at least there was a lot that they knew. In the internet age, we don’t even know what is truth and what is fiction anymore. See an enthusiastic product recommendation on a forum? They must be paid to promote the product. Someone wants to chat with you on AIM? They might be a sexual predator. The Internet allows for the distribution of tremendous amounts of information, but so much of that information is false, or misleading. This makes our generation incredibly cynical. There’s very little we trust these days (yet, somehow, we trust Wikipedia). Perhaps exposing our deepest, darkest secrets allows us to feel more real in a world where no one knows what’s real. Perhaps it’s intended as a signal to others that we are real.

Moving on to the second question: What does this mean for the future? The future will only become more complex, as we develop many more technologies to communicate with other. The world will become smaller and smaller. I think our ability to express ourselves will bring us together. We will begin to see more common ground with people of other races, other religions, other classes. We will learn that while a working-class Puerto Rican immigrant and a wealthy WASP might have dramatically different life circumstances and expectations, we will learn that they have a lot of the same concerns–friendship, love, identity. While I won’t be rushing off to join the masses of people blabbing about their deepest feelings in a Facebook note, it does give me hope that our future will be stronger, more peaceful, and less antagonistic than the world we live in today.

I fully expect that at some point in the near future, the person who wrote that Facebook note will stumble upon my blog and read this entry. I won’t regret a single word of what I’ve written, and I hope he/she doesn’t regret writing what he did, either.