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We All Have Secrets, Here’s Why We Should Keep Them
They make you who you are
If I were to ask you what your most hilarious secret is, what would it be? Are you keeping embarrassing moments from high school to yourself? What was the last time you didn’t voice your opinion but kept quiet? We need secrets, we all have them, and some of them are good.
We need secrets to figure out who we are.
Sounds a bit off, right? But think about love, faith, and betrayal — none of these would exist if it weren’t for secrecy. By keeping some of our secrets to ourselves, we begin to give them meaning. In other words: Secrets are the fuel that keeps our inner monologue going. And because I’ve never thought about secrets that way, I’ve tried to find positive aspects and why it makes perfect sense to keep certain secrets.
We decide what we say to whom
Each of us has 13 secrets, according to an extensive study of 10,000 subjects of all ages by American researcher Michael Slepian of Columbia University. These secrets range from relatively minor ones, such as faking the flu to get a day off work, to something more sinister like leading a double life. Be it innocuous, like the recipe for the best curry, or dramatic, such as large debts, or having an affair, on average, we have five secrets we…
