Everyone has many personas. Storytellers and actors are experts at crafting personas and switching their minds in and out of them, but it's not an activity that's restricted to artists. Everyone does it.
I have an authorial voice when I write on HN. It isn't the same as the voice I use in the rest of the world. For one thing, I don't speak in carefully edited three-to-six paragraph essays.
I'm also a different person to my wife than I am to my coworkers, a different person at a funeral than I am at a blue-collar bar, and a different person when I'm healthy than when I'm in chronic pain.
This isn't some kind of lie. It's how human personality works: Your personality isn't some Platonic ideal that lives alone inside your head; it's embodied in flesh, conditioned on environment, and constantly retuning itself in reaction to society.
Your example undermines your point. Richard Feynman deliberately adopted a variety of public (and private) personas and switched between them depending on the circumstances. For example, he consciously adopted a different persona in front of a general audience than in front of other expert physicists. He explicitly discusses this in his book. After winning the Nobel Prize he would try to give a seminar, and they'd stick him in a huge auditorium full of everybody in town, and he'd feel so guilty about putting on his experts-only talk that he'd switch into his general-audience mode and give a general-audience talk. But he missed being able to give expert-level seminars so much that he started giving seminars under a pseudonym. Yes, he invented a handle. Very hackerly of him.
There are degrees to which that is expected, and healthy. Covering it all up and trying to ensure no one can connect together your various personas crosses an important line in my opinion.
Presumably you have never had the experience of being a dissident, fleeing an abusive situation, or simply being embarrassed by some of your friends or coworkers.
Or, say, being a grade-school religion teacher who wants to have a sex life. Or being a counselor: Psychological counselors are explicitly forbidden by professional ethics from interacting with their clients outside of work, for very very good reasons; how this will play out in the era of ubiquitous Facebook will be... interesting. I wouldn't be surprised to see counselors adopting pseudonyms, if not actual disguises.
I believe it was Danah Boyd, among others, who pointed out that it's much easier to believe in the one-identity theory of humanity if your identity is that of a white well-off Ivy-educated professionally-successful male American. It's certainly a description that fits Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg to a T.
Were they?
Everyone has many personas. Storytellers and actors are experts at crafting personas and switching their minds in and out of them, but it's not an activity that's restricted to artists. Everyone does it.
I have an authorial voice when I write on HN. It isn't the same as the voice I use in the rest of the world. For one thing, I don't speak in carefully edited three-to-six paragraph essays.
I'm also a different person to my wife than I am to my coworkers, a different person at a funeral than I am at a blue-collar bar, and a different person when I'm healthy than when I'm in chronic pain.
This isn't some kind of lie. It's how human personality works: Your personality isn't some Platonic ideal that lives alone inside your head; it's embodied in flesh, conditioned on environment, and constantly retuning itself in reaction to society.
Your example undermines your point. Richard Feynman deliberately adopted a variety of public (and private) personas and switched between them depending on the circumstances. For example, he consciously adopted a different persona in front of a general audience than in front of other expert physicists. He explicitly discusses this in his book. After winning the Nobel Prize he would try to give a seminar, and they'd stick him in a huge auditorium full of everybody in town, and he'd feel so guilty about putting on his experts-only talk that he'd switch into his general-audience mode and give a general-audience talk. But he missed being able to give expert-level seminars so much that he started giving seminars under a pseudonym. Yes, he invented a handle. Very hackerly of him.