“This is your chance to reinvent yourself,” says some guy in a movie I can’t remember the name of. He looks right at me — no, through me — and as the music swells I get swept up in the dream. “Yes,” I think to myself, “I can reinvent myself.” But just before I quit my job to start a coffee shop and live off the land I shake myself out of a Hollywood-induced trance. What am I doing? Why would I want to reinvent myself? What was wrong with the initial invention? Also, did I even invent me? Can you reinvent something you didn’t invent in the first place? So many questions!

Part of the reason we say we love Twitter so much is that it gives us a constant opportunity to reinvent ourselves.

Jason Kottke pulled together a couple of great posts about this in Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention:

Twitter feels like continually moving to NYC without knowing anyone whereas Facebook feels like you’re living in your hometown and hanging with everyone you went to high school with. Twitter’s we’re-all-here-in-the-moment thing that Matt talks about is what makes it possible for people to continually reinvent themselves on Twitter. [On Twitter] you don’t have any of that Facebook baggage, the peer pressure from a lifetime of friends, holding you back. You are who your last dozen tweets say you are. And what a feeling of freedom that is.

It’s easy to see the appeal of reinvention, of course. We all make mistakes. We say something stupid in front of a crowd, we make a mess of something at a job, we dress up as Darth Vader and ride around on a unicycle playing flaming bag pipes. How amazing would it be to erase all of that from memory (other people’s memories, of course — we don’t get to forget our own mistakes). How amazing would it be to just… start over.

So we adopt a new persona on Twitter, we start a new blog, we move to Portland, we… wait, what? Damn you, Hollywood, you did win in the end. You made me pack up my whole family and move across the ocean because it was time to get rid of all that baggage and become someone new. What’s that? I can’t blame Hollywood for this? It’s all on me?

Well, crap.

I guess I have to own up to that. Just give me a minute, ok?

Listen, we have to realize that when we say we’re “reinventing ourselves” we’re actually doing nothing of the sort. What we’re doing is trying to get other people to see us in a different way. The problem is that we’re not really changing ourselves in any way, we’re just changing how we present ourselves to the world. Even worse, we’re creating the illusion — even to ourselves — that we’re someone we’re not. So we relax and pat ourselves on the back for our courage and tenacity, but it’s all a sham.

This should come as no surprise to anyone but growing a beard and buying a bike does not, in fact, get rid of all the demons you’re trying to run away from.

And unless you stand firm and deal with those guys like a grownup, no amount of Twitter bio-ing and moving countries will make a damn difference to how happy you are (or how happy you make the people around you). So, by all means, call yourself “Dedicated father, loving husband, peace-loving unicorn aficionado” on Twitter, but remember that saying it on the Internet doesn’t make it so. The only thing that makes it so is acting so.

What’s that? I still haven’t owned up to jumping on the reinvention train to Portland? Oh, uh, geez, would you look at the time…