Depends on your definition of life. You could argue that you can lock yourself away from people, stay in solitude, and spend all your time learning and trying

Depends on your definition of life. You could argue that you can lock yourself away from people, stay in solitude, and spend all your time learning and trying to make money, and that gives you a competitive gain. But that ignores how important and useful friends are. Like it or not, people today talk a lot on Facebook. I talk to people back at my high school fairly often. I keep in touch with people I couldn't keep in touch with otherwise. And with the various dramas and photos and notes that appear on Facebook, I've both had some interesting experiences with people and I've preserved memories of things that've happened offline. Maybe I lose something by having that all online (mind you, in a place where only 90 other people can see it, rather than in some place public), but I gain far more. It's similar to how I'm willing to write about personal matters on my blog. I can imagine an employee coming across my writing about a failed relationship or about incidents about college, but I gain more from being able to publish my thoughts candidly than I lose from their disapproval. My line of thinking goes: if my employer is such an ass as to search through my past to see if I've done questionable things, then either I've done a piss-poor job of making myself into a good candidate, or he's not somebody worth my working for. Either way, the fault is not my past: it's my, or my employer's, present.