The private self is a rather recent invention. Human beings have lived communally ever since the original forager tribes. That means the whole family sleeping i

The private self is a rather recent invention. Human beings have lived communally ever since the original forager tribes. That means the whole family sleeping in a single room, and then getting up in the morning to go out and collectively hunt or gather, and then coming back and sitting around in the camp talking and engaging in other activities. With farming you are still doing things as a family. With both foraging and agricultural societies, anything important that happened in a person's life would be known to everyone else, and original thoughts contrary to the cultural consensus were virtually unknown. More recently in the modern era, thanks in part to Greek philosophy, city living, and the printing press, the idea developed of a private self that needed to be protected against the culture and society. Now with social media we have gone back to the public self, but unfortunately it is in various ways much more dysfunctional than the original communal self was.