There was a time within the last century when people could get multiple first chances.

You could pack your bags and hit the open road. After about 20 miles, you’d be free. Free from judgement, free from expectations, free from the familiar and the routine. You could stop in at a diner and be greeted by people you’d never seen or heard of before.

One of the few ways you would be recognized is if you were running for office, were a distinguished diplomat, or were an outlaw. The rarity of these encounters were such that epic stories and legends revolved around these chance encounters.

But today, we are all famous in some way. We hear regularly about the YouTube star, the one-hit wonder actor, the kid that started an overnight billion-dollar company, but how about the instagram pic or video that made us famous for a day because we were breaking a keg-stand record? Or that throwback video your parents posted on social media of you cross-dressing when you were 7 years old and marked your social circle in college? Those memories became forever public when they hit the web, no longer something for you to keep for yourself and chuckle about while sipping on a beer.

Today, you pack your bags and hit the open road. After about 600 miles, you stop at a diner. The hostess recognizes you from a viral video of a guy scolding a dog for pooping inside the house, and refuses to seat you. She tweets about how she stood up for all puppies #puppydefenders by not letting you sit at the diner. You keep driving. You hit an international border where border police notice you’ve been flagged for animal cruelty and are taken into custody. Your mug shots after a long, depressing day are circulated through the media and discussed on primetime news (because bigger news doesn’t get viewers?…). “Aren’t you that puppy killer?”

The tough truth is, today we are not free anymore. We gave up that freedom when we gave up our privacy. A majority of us have not even noticed that we’ve given up one of the most important rights as a human. Consequentially, the cost of failure has risen drastically. One failure will ripple throughout your career and be retweeted for the rest of your social media life. The web remembers everything.

To safeguard against this hostile environment, people have started to enhance themselves with highly specialized meds to cope with their own “deficiencies” to keep up with the inhuman pressures of perfection imposed by the workplace. We need to be environmentally conscious, give to charities, be a “global” citizen and know where St. Tropez is, work on weekends, have 6 degrees and have written and published at least 5 pieces of work that have been cited in professional journals in our field, have a dog that we run with every morning before work, be a good “story teller”, be able to whip up a webapp while nailing a soufflé and singing “Let Her Go” simultaneously. We’ve prepped up hippies given ourselves iPhones to capture our HD pixel-perfect life and called ourselves hipsters.

With all this oversharing, how are we going to continue to coexist without becoming further repulsed by ourselves? We’ve had 2 options so far, 1) disconnect, or 2) raise our threshold for notoriety. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been doing 2), increasing your tolerance for judgement, because there is just too much going on on the web and you feel out of control and begin to feel empathetic towards those who were condemned by the web because of a misconstrued past.