What we owe the world, and what we don’t

Not everything that’s true about us deserves to be known. The art of living well may depend, in part, on knowing what to keep to ourselves. After having lived a life of full transparency out of conviction, I’m starting to learn this and figure out if not sharing everything with people (whom I don’t know yet) fits me. It all depends on the type of society as I figured out so far. Here are the key learnings.

In the Netherlands, I lived in a culture that treated disclosure as a virtue, and rightly so. We were encouraged to share our ambitions, narrate our struggles, explain our choices, and make our private lives legible to others. Besides, on a global scale, visibility has become a form of social currency since the successes of social media and digital (influencer) marketing. Silence can seem suspicious, as though anything withheld must have something to hide. Because, truth be told, that’s usually the case.

I’ve always been extremely open, direct, honest, and no-nonsense to the point of being blunt. Gosch, I wrote a memoir, for heaven’s sake. It doesn’t get more transparent than that. The art of living contains wisdom and the proof is in the pudding. Since my move to Cyprus, I haven’t missed the Netherlands at all, only this Dutch mentality. Because I now live in a place where it’s exactly the opposite. I find that the hardest thing about changing countries.

Yet for the sake of understanding the Cypriot culture, I’ll try to make an argument against full transparency in this article. Whether I can commit to everything I’ll share now in real life remains to be seen.

Let’s start with the realisation that openness isn’t always honesty, just as privacy isn’t necessarily secrecy. There’s a difference between being truthful and making every part of ourselves available for public interpretation. A considered life requires not only the courage to speak, but also the judgment to decide what doesn’t need to be said.

Privacy, understood this way, isn’t an escape from the world. It’s a way of establishing a more deliberate relationship with it. Because, the risks in the Netherlands may be limited when people overshare. But in Cyprus, the risks can be real fiascos. Especially when the difference in class, education, and standards is significant. Envy is a real problem here, not only in case of tangible successes, but also in case of unaccomplished wishes and future self-realisation. A lot of people don’t want us to succeed.

The discipline of an unfinished ambition

An ambition is particularly vulnerable before it takes shape. In its early stages, an idea is less a conviction than a possibility, sustained by effort, uncertainty, and the willingness to continue without guarantees. Therefore, exposing it too soon can introduce a different set of incentives. Once an intention has been announced, the recognition it attracts may begin to compete with the work itself.

Speaking about a goal can create a sense of progress before anything has been accomplished. Approval offers a premature reward. Criticism can discourage an undertaking that hasn’t yet had time to develop. Neither response necessarily reflects the merit of the idea. Both can distract from the less visible work that gives an ambition substance.

This isn’t an argument for secrecy as a strategy or for treating other people’s opinions as inherently dangerous – which they sometimes can be. Discussing an idea with the right person can sharpen it, expose its weaknesses, and make it more achievable. The distinction lies between seeking useful scrutiny and seeking validation. And most of all, are the people who get to know about it sincere and do they want us to succeed, or do they sabotage and want us to fail?

Some ambitions benefit from being shared. In the Netherlands, sharing wishes publicly means receiving support in realising them. Other ambitions need time away from the pressure to explain themselves. The question isn’t whether to speak, but whether speaking serves the work or merely serves the desire to be seen doing it. The question is whether the desire to connect and be liked serves us.

Vulnerability requires judgment

Emotional openness is presented as an uncomplicated good, which it is, as well as a sign of maturity. Honesty creates intimacy. Naming our struggles is the first step toward resolving them. Allowing ourselves to be seen is essential to human connection. There’s truth in these claims, but they leave out an important consideration. Namely, disclosure depends on context.

Not everyone has the capacity, discretion, or goodwill to receive what we share. A confidence offered to someone who hasn’t earned our trust can become a source of embarrassment, misunderstanding, or leverage. Even well-intentioned people may respond to a complicated experience with advice that oversimplifies it or judgment that arrives before understanding. Or there’s simply a major intellectual gap, so they cannot level up and provide matching answers.

The solution isn’t emotional withdrawal, although I have to say that I do prefer that over noise. A life in which nothing difficult is spoken aloud can become as isolating as one in which everything is disclosed. The more useful principle is discernment. To recognise the difference between someone who listens to understand and someone who listens merely to respond and use the information against us.

Trust is demonstrated over time, through consistency, discretion, and the ability to remain present when a conversation becomes uncomfortable. How I’m learning this the hard way. Vulnerability has value because it makes genuine connection possible, not just because disclosure is inherently virtuous. We don’t owe everyone access to our inner lives, and we shouldn’t confuse universal openness with emotional courage.

Money, status, and the temptation of comparison

Now, specifically money is rarely just money. It carries assumptions about competence, independence, class, security, and worth. For that reason, financial information can alter relationships in ways that have little to do with the figures themselves.

Revealing income, savings, debts, or major purchases may invite comparison where none was needed. Financial success can provoke resentment. A setback can attract unsolicited advice or diminish the respect others extend. In some circumstances, disclosure is necessary and beneficial. In others, it creates expectations or tensions that serve no useful purpose.

Financial privacy, then, isn’t about shame or the pretense that money doesn’t matter. It’s about refusing to let personal finances become a public measure of personal value. The decision to share such information should depend on the relationship and the purpose of the conversation, not on a general obligation to make one’s circumstances transparent.

There’s also a broader point here. When every achievement becomes evidence of success and every purchase a signal of status, life begins to resemble a continuous performance. Money becomes something to display rather than a resource to manage, and the pursuit of security can be displaced by the pursuit of recognition.

A more independent relationship with wealth begins when we stop treating other people’s perceptions as the final measure of our circumstances.

The private life of a relationship

Then, relationships, which are formed between people, but they don’t exist in isolation from the social world. Friends, relatives, and acquaintances often feel entitled to interpret a couple’s decisions, assess its difficulties, or offer opinions on matters they only partially understand.

Sharing relationship problems can provide perspective, particularly when a person needs support or faces harmful behavior. But repeatedly inviting outsiders into private disagreements can make resolution more difficult. A temporary conflict may acquire a permanent audience. An offhand comment can harden into a lasting judgment, and the partner being discussed may be reduced to a version of themselves constructed from someone else’s account.

This doesn’t mean that relationships should be protected at all costs or that private loyalty requires silence about mistreatment. Secrecy can conceal serious harm, and seeking help is oftentimes essential. The distinction is between asking for support that makes a relationship healthier and circulating its most vulnerable moments without a clear purpose.

A relationship needs room to develop beyond the opinions of those watching it. Some conversations belong between partners. Others require the perspective of a trusted friend, counsellor, or professional. Maturity lies in recognizing the difference, rather than treating either total privacy or total disclosure as an absolute rule. And relationships in Cyprus tend to still be extremely traditional and male-centered, not to be mistaken with the strengths of conservatism in general.

Silence as a form of agency

Silence is often interpreted as an absence. Namely, an unwillingness to explain, a failure to participate, or a refusal to be understood, because it usually is. But silence can also be an active choice. It can create the space needed to think before reacting, to separate a considered belief from an immediate emotion, or to let an experience become intelligible before attempting to describe it.

The pressure to explain ourselves isn’t always explicit. It can emerge from the expectation that every decision must be defended, every change justified, and every private boundary accompanied by a convincing account. Under such conditions, explanation becomes a form of permission-seeking, also known as fawning. We begin to act as though a choice is legitimate only after others have understood or approved it.

But decisions don’t require a public rationale. We can change direction without turning the change into a statement. We can decline an invitation without presenting a case for the defense. We can revise our beliefs without submitting each stage of that process to an audience.

This isn’t a license to evade accountability. Choices that affect other people may require explanation, and silence can be used to avoid difficult but necessary conversations. The point is more precise. Accountability should be proportionate to our responsibilities, not extended indiscriminately to anyone who demands access. To know when an explanation is owed, and when it isn’t, is part of becoming an autonomous person.

The limits of other people’s judgments

Every act of disclosure gives others material to interpret, but interpretation is never entirely under our control. People understand what they hear through their own histories, fears, ambitions, and assumptions. Even an honest account can be misunderstood, while a carefully considered decision can appear unreasonable to someone who lacks its context.

This is one reason to be cautious about making external approval the basis of self-understanding. If our confidence depends on being interpreted correctly by everyone, we place our sense of self in the hands of people who can neither know us completely nor agree with one another consistently.

That doesn’t make criticism irrelevant. Other people can recognize our blind spots, challenge our rationalizations, and identify consequences we’ve overlooked. Independence isn’t the refusal to listen. It’s the ability to evaluate what we hear without automatically surrendering our judgment.

A mature sense of self develops through this tension. We remain open to correction without treating every objection as a verdict. We accept that others may misunderstand us without assuming that misunderstanding proves we’re right. And we learn to distinguish between criticism that reveals something important and criticism that merely reflects a difference in values or perspective. The aim isn’t to become impervious to judgment. It’s to prevent the possibility of judgment from dictating every decision.

What privacy makes possible

And so, a private life isn’t necessarily a hidden life. It’s a life in which the boundaries of disclosure are chosen rather than dictated by social pressure. Some experiences become more meaningful when shared. Others lose their shape when exposed before we’ve understood them ourselves. Some questions deserve discussion, while others need time, reflection, or simply no audience at all.

The challenge is to resist two equally limiting ideals. The belief that authenticity requires total transparency, and the belief that strength requires emotional invulnerability. Neither leaves much room for judgment. One turns the self into a public document. The other risks making it inaccessible even to those who have earned our trust.

I guess that a more thoughtful approach recognises that openness and privacy aren’t opposing virtues. They’re choices that require context. We can be candid without being indiscriminate, independent without being closed, and honest without surrendering every part of our lives to public scrutiny.

The deepest form of self-possession may be the ability to decide what deserves expression, what requires protection, and what can be left unexplained. Not because the world has no right to question us, but because its curiosity doesn’t automatically create an obligation to answer. And life needn’t be fully visible to be fully lived.