Psych at Work

Recently I was thinking about how envious I am of certain bloggers and other internet celebs that I think have it really "together." They have a schtick and a theme and an identity that is, at once, comprehensive and beautiful, informative yet integrative. The bottom line is that I want one. That I've created several blogs and currently maintain several sites, I read blogs in a variety of areas and topics, I clip stories to about five places, and the contents of those clips varies enormously. Refusing to narrow myself down or pigeonhole myself is in many ways my own identity - I like a little bit of everything and worry I'd get bored if I got too immersed, too expert, too far down the rabbit hole of one thing. Oddly, this dilemma of online identity mirrors my current career struggle (which is a series of about 400 posts in and of itself, but I'll spare you).

But it all got me thinking about my own identities and what really unites them, if there's a real theme... the one thing I can think of is that I'm in my mid-twenties. I'm a Gen-Y, Millenial, whatever. I was going to try to connect this all to some scholarly text, or something written about the generations who has a bit more expertise than I, but I found something that makes me feel better about myself and this crisis of coherence, this failure to create my own personal narrative and faithfully represent it online - from "Welcome to the Occupation," Paul Smith's HR-f0cused blog, comes his post titled "I'm a Me." (It's from May 2010, but still good - I found it while searching through my subscriptions.) He talks to his six-year-old nephew about what it means to be a Generation Z (as in, post-Y) and I'm tempted to take the tongue-in-cheek "interview transcription" too far and analyze it, but the end result is that his nephew refused to be pushed into a category, refuses to be defined.

To be fair, I tried to group myself into this age group/category, but at the same time, I wonder how other people reconcile their online identities... do you all keep the sites separately? Or if you are HR focused, is it easy to keep your Tweets and clippings and blogs you read focused on that? Or do you just divide into folders and let them flow together when desired?