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We saw the start of this shift, this loosening of our death grip on a rigid series of roles, in the Beats and the Hippies, and moving into the sixties, the idea that intentional willed inner change could be a positive force began to gain ground. The counter culture of the sixties rejected the whole idea of masks imposed by social roles and rules, embraced "doing your own thing", revealing your "true" face, living an authentic life. In practice, of course, this often meant simply exchanging one set of masks for another, the specific lineaments of our masks no longer straight and square, but now hip and groovy. The real importance of this shift, however (in this context, at least), was that the existence of such metaphorical masks was acknowledged, their power and influence no longer hidden and secret.
The rise of the Human Potential movement in the seventies continued this process. This movement, along with related phenomena like the New Age and Neo-Pagan fronts, encouraged the acceptance of this idea that willed inner change could be a positive and healthy force, that the shifting and changing of roles (and masks) was not only to be acknowledged, but embraced and encouraged as a strength, rather than a weakness.
At the same time, we saw the rise in popularity of role playing games like the popular "Dungeons & Dragons". On college campuses around the country, young people began to experiment with trying on different shapes, being different characters. No matter that these "other selves" might be mythological creatures like Elves, Trolls, Gnomes, beings that no one had ever seen in "real life". For the players of these games, characters often became as "real" as anyone they might meet on the street, and at the heart of this experience was the shifting of shape, the stretching and morphing of the self, the opportunity to experiment with what they might become, free of the judgmental gaze of society and the role that society imposed on them, the masks it demanded.
The advent of the internet and email, chat rooms, MUDs (Multi User Domains, essentially similar to chat rooms, where role-playing games are enacted), has facilitated this process even further. From behind the "mask" of our mouse and keyboard, we may shift our shape, our gender, our station, and to the extent we are able to convincingly enact a given role, we can "be" anyone at all.
As the rigid boundaries of our former social roles relax, work roles become flexible as well. Many of us no longer punch a clock, as companies increasingly employ flex time, telecommuting and consultants. We work from home, we change jobs and job definitions, augment our incomes with day trading and entrepreneurial experiments. Under the influence of the web, our "career selves" are presented with as many opportunities for fluidity and flexibility as our "social selves".
Freed from the necessity of wearing a single, unchanging social mask, opened to the possibility of the myriad permutations of self that may be available to us, where do we turn? What do we become? How do we manage such flexibility of self, without losing entirely our sense of what the self truly is?
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