Take off your mask and live!

The creators of the world's first mask could not have imagined that, more than 9,000 years later, the concept of the mask would become multidimensional, not only a symbol representing the soul to connect with the spiritual world, but also to talk about a choice, a lifestyle, a disguise - a disguise of personality.

It has become so common that the word mask, which should be in quotation marks to indicate a figurative meaning, is no longer needed. A mask is not a mask, it is a mask - there, without quotation marks, people still understand it as usual. How many masks have you worn in your life?

The Japanese have a philosophy worth pondering: “Everyone has three faces. The first one you show to the world. The second one you wear only when you are with your close friends and family. And the last one you never show, it is the truest reflection of who you are.”

From ancient times to the present, no, it must be even further back, from the time humans appeared in this universe, they probably had many faces on one face, to ensure that they were exactly who they wanted to be in the eyes of the other person. You are A in the eyes of your parents, A' in the eyes of your friends, A'' in the eyes of your spouse, A''' in the eyes of your colleagues... You are still A, but the essence of A is sometimes covered, obscured by commas, so many commas that form a sophisticated mask so that you can quickly and flexibly change your words and actions to suit the person you are communicating with. The core inside you is A, but what you show to the world is the type of A you want; that is you but also not you - a shell that wraps the true self inside.

From birth, it seems that the separation of the ego and the social ego is a pre-installed genetic code, no one is an exception, even those who are considered the most honest and straightforward. This is no secret, ancient linguists also took the word “person” from the Latin word “persona” - stage mask. That is, people wear masks, always wear masks, are attached to masks, even - are masks. People are never satisfied with themselves, deep inside they also understand that their nature is still imperfect, far from the good things they imagine and want to become, so they naturally wear invisible masks.

The only difference here is that a kind person will not lose his core humanity no matter how many masks he wears on the outside; while a cunning person easily identifies with those masks, letting the masks swallow up his inner self. Wearing a mask for too long will cause that fake outer layer to corrode the real skin inside, the fake becomes real, the real becomes fake, the real and the fake are mixed together to the point that even the wearer cannot distinguish which is his true self.

Human masks have become more and more sophisticated and complex since the advent of the Internet, specifically since the advent of social networks. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram… have tremendous appeal, the algorithms that stimulate interactions quickly draw people into the virtual world, turning them into a (several) completely different versions of themselves than in real life. We become witty, intelligent people on Facebook - completely different from the quiet, taciturn us in real life; we are humorous, perceptive, and know all the principles of life - completely different from the slow, sluggish us in life; we have long legs, big eyes, and white skin - nothing like us with short legs, single eyelids, and honey-colored skin.

The masks we wear on social networks are extremely rich, today they can be like this, tomorrow they can be like that. Everyone knows that, because they are as virtual as us, just watching for information, praising for fun, but how can we believe it! Yet we compete to be virtual, if we rank them, there will only be more virtual, not the most virtual. Gradually, it turns out that the mask is not used to show off, to show off to the world, but mainly to satisfy the desire to show off, to deceive ourselves.

There is a simple question like this that many people cannot answer: What kind of person are you? It is quite difficult to describe yourself, because you have been so used to wearing a virtual mask for so long that you have forgotten what you used to be like. You can guess what kind of person you are in the eyes of your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors… but when you look back and ask yourself, you don’t know, you don’t know clearly. There is a misty border between the mask and the real face, between the disguise of personality and personality, between the self and the social self, between the virtual world and real life… How can we make the mask just a part of the self and not corrode and swallow the self? We have to take off some of the masks, and live!