Transparency, you could argue, is a notion that is foisted on us, or that it’s something culture has moved toward simply because of endless opportunities for self expression. Rob Horning posits that the opportunities to post outweigh the things we can confidently share about ourselves. The dopamine cycle of sharing for likes is addictive, so we start to share curated content, or worse borrow from our future selves: 'the push towards a self-concept of perpetual becoming would seem to thwart subjectivation as a kind of social control. But the more we construct identity through these means of social media, the more we self-assimilate into the incentives built into them, which is to turn all experience into more and more strategic expression.’

When we move into the headspace of ‘content creator’ subconsciously or otherwise, the tempation to over-share is always looming. Byung-Chul Han writes in ’The Transparency Society’ , ’‘Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long term planning impossible.’’ This applies to us too. Once we start to talk about our hopes and goals, the seed of intent that is still nebulous and unformed is out in the open - the energy has sprung a leak.

To go back to the analogy of the rose, think of over-sharing like gifting someone a rose bud; not yet opened or formed. The bud could die, be nurtured by it’s new owner, or worse - you could be handing over a bunch of thorns.

Research from NYU, led by Peter Gollwitzer, found that goals shared publicly risk widening the intention - behaviour gap 'when other people take notice of an individual's identity-related behavioural intention, this gives the individual a premature sense of possessing the aspired-to identity.'

In a world over-wrung with content, we're all used to parsing data, sharing it and quickly digesting it before scrolling onto the next thing. Having a practice of reflecting might feel foreign or slow.