I will definitely check out Beyond Good and Evil.

While we’re unpretentiously dropping names— have you read any Sartre? He’s my go-to-man. His philosophical essays are dense and difficult and his fictional narratives are awesome and heavy.

Something else that I struggle with is that it’s not always easy to be honest online, since far more people can see what you project. It’s easier to be honest among friends, since it stays limited to that sphere. On Twitter, and more and more on Facebook, anything that gets posted is available for the world to see. I aspire to be more transparent on social networks, because that’s really when they become valuable, but the fear of having something come back to haunt me is always there.

Also, in the least pretentious way possible, I would like to recommend Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche as a much better read. Sure, it’s about the most pretentious thing in the world to name-drop Nietzsche, but it’s still a better book. I still had to look up how to spell his name though.

Another unfortunate disconnect in the explosion of social media is the presence of virtual pretense. For example, I get to say that my favorite book is The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, or I can upload only pictures that make me look fashionable and well-liked, or I can update with witty statuses. But in reality I stumbled through The Myth of Sisyphus and probably only grasped half of the meaning, I’ve been wearing the same jeans for years and I only have two friends a wife, and it takes me 30 minutes to think of what to say on Twitter. But it’s hard to be completely honest on internet profiles because it can make me sound cold or apathetic (maybe I am?). Even though people can see tons of personal “information” about me, it’s difficult to present my actual, “real” self.
I find it much easier to try to be absurdly hilarious instead of brutally honest.