I always hear this advice. Yet I don’t know what it means.

No one can actually live this way. Or do business this way. Or form deep friendships this way.

The idea that we must run our personal lives around legal and comms strategies that no one can stick to avoids the problem. https://twitter.com/msuster/status/1279451483155529730

This comes from the same place as our password choosing advice from Tech:

“Choose a very long password that is not remotely a word and with weird combinations of carachters, that you change frequently, use on no other site, tell no one and never write down.”

Who follows this?

Or try putting this kind of advice next to human centered advice.

“You *must* be *vulnerable*. Just talk about how you *really* feel. You know those thoughts we don’t want to own but *must* be confronted to make *progress*? Just remember to share them so they are NYT-printable.”

I remember asking the first person who ever told me “Ignorance of the Law is *never* an excuse.” how that was possible. He said it was. So I asked about the one tiny area of law I knew a little bit about. He didn’t know it at all. Yet he was a lawyer while I was still a kid.

So if you find yourself in some situation where something you said is put into the public sphere for ridicule or financial ruin, go easy on yourself. This isn’t advice that anyone can really follow. This is the advice we give to let ourselves off the hook to blame future victims.

We don’t even know that we do it. We just know there is no solution yet so we tell you to abstain and wear a “life condom” at all times.

My advice? Send your love texts. Just try to avoid falling in love with people who will screenshot them to plug the needy hole in their souls.

Just don’t cheat yourself out of a life because Tech, Journalism, Politics and The Law haven’t caught up with the need for privacy inherent to the human condition and a life well lived.

Be careful. Just make sure that you don’t run your one and only life around “Comms 101”.