Mahreen Munawar 

ENG 1121

October 19, 2020

Word count: 452

Carey, Benedict. “The Secret Lives of Just About Everybody.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 Jan. 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/health/psychology/the-secret-lives-of-just-about-everybody.html.

The article is mainly about a series of experiments conducted by scientists about human behavior when they tend to keep a secret. There are some positive and negative examples of what keeping a secret can do to a human being. The positive is that they feel like they are more in control of their life, when everything around them is normal and transparent and it feels like they’ve lost control over themselves and their surroundings, keeping a secret helps them gain that power back. It makes them feel dominant compared to the people around them. On the other hand, keeping an unhealthy secret such as hiding a drinking problem or pretending to be a heterosexual when you’re really not to keep the relationships around you can drive you insane. It creates unhealthy paranoia which eventually has a heavy impact on the person’s mental health. I personally agree with everything the author is saying. I think at some point in life all of us have kept some good and bad secrets like hiding the excitement of a surprise birthday party or trying to hide the crash on your mom’s car that you took without her permission. Depending on what the secret is it can really make you feel like you have the upper-hand on the environment around you which is a good feeling. This genre is super effective for my topic because it has a series of experiments that were conducted by well known scientists, which also makes it reliable. The author’s reason for writing this article is to inform and educate people about what keeping secrets can do for them and back it up with scientific evidence. The author’s writing style is very effective and straight to the point which makes the article interesting to read. This specific article tells me a lot about my research question for example, the double life that most of the first generation Muslim teens are living probably leaves a really bad impact on their mental health. They are in a constant state of fear and paranoia that their parents might find out about their secret lives through a relative or some social media post. 

Quotes 

  1. “The ability to hold a secret is fundamental to healthy social development, they say, and the desire to sample other identities — to reinvent oneself, to pretend — can last well into adulthood.”
  2.  “quite often a secret life can bring a more lively, more intimate, more energized part of themselves out of the dark.”