The fact that you can't even make out on a bench in Central Park without someone recording you on their iPhone and then posting it to social media as some kind of bit is everything that's wrong with society and I am not joking. The surveillance state (administered by an actual state or by the millions of people with phones who want to embarrass people on their TL) is essentially the least romantic thing imaginable in both the love sense and the living sense. It is anti-romantic and anti-life. Part of the reason why the before world was fun was the fact that you didn't have this kind of thing. The ability to do something without it being documented and recorded is the difference between being free vs an animal locked in a cage. There is a direct correlation between everyone constantly being afraid that someone is going to record them and post it somewhere and society becoming more neurotic, less fun, more boring, and less alive.
The self-administered surveillance state is the enemy of life.
Always choose clean pain over dirty pain.
Clean pain is the pain of telling the truth. The pain of leaving. The pain of disappointing someone. The pain of starting. The pain of being bad at something new. The pain of saving money instead of buying the thing. The pain of going to bed while the party continues. The pain of facing the blank page.
Dirty pain is the pain of avoiding clean pain. The pain of staying too long. The pain of lying. The pain of living above your means. The pain of being known inaccurately. The pain of watching your life shrink around a fear you refuse to face. The pain of managing the consequences of cowardice.
Clean pain is often sharp and brief, dirty pain is dull and chronic.
Self-respect is paying the clean cost early.