Two heavily pregnant women share a hospital room. Talk turns to the men in their lives, the fathers of their soon-to-be-born children. The similarities are striking. Both discover he's about the same age. Travels interstate a lot. God help them – he even has the same name. Surname, too. Same guy. Two lives.
He's not the only one. Sydney doctor runs a practice in the city four days a week, then leaves his family every Friday to oversee his country practice. After his death his mourning widow sees another woman crying at the funeral. "How did you know my husband?" she asks. "He was my husband, too," replies the other.
The clincher? Man living a suburban life. Busier than usual. Work, mortgage, helping to raise nine kids. Once again, fella has to travel a lot. Two suburbs away lives his other family – partner with three kids. They know all about family number one. But they're sworn to secrecy and family number one remains unaware of their existence until, many years later, the truth is finally revealed.
Extraordinary stuff, right? But let's put aside the initial distaste, even horror, at the duplicity and unfairness of it all – not to mention the sense of wonder over how anyone can live two entirely secret lives, balancing the stress and all the little and big lies that go with it. And for so long.
These were just three stories that came to light on talkback this week. Abnormal? Certainly. But perhaps not as uncommon as you might think. We all have secrets. We all lie. The kernel inside all those little fibs and exaggerations is often the same – an attempt to retain some privacy, to shield the real us from the rest of the world.
Now consider those three men with extraordinary double lives – call them brave, call them scoundrels, it doesn't matter. They should be grateful they could get away with what they did for so long because it's a fair bet that in the near future all the lies that cloak our modern lives – from exaggerating on that CV to lying about your war service record to having that affair with your co-worker or neighbour – will disappear.
It's one of the more bizarre and unexpected outcomes as we race towards a world with no privacy. Pundits have been warning about the dangers of an Orwellian world for decades. But they could never have imagined that our surrender to this state would have been done so willingly and easily.
You can now walk from one end of Sydney to the other and be followed on CCTV vision. But that's nothing. Science has already created cameras the size of grains of rice. Ideal for medicine and other intricate procedures, right? How about millions of them scattered across cities and suburbs, a digital carpet created to record every step you make and every action you take.
Just in case they can't find you by tracking the chip in your cards or your phone.
Suddenly you're screaming about privacy and civil rights. But wasn't it you who has been enthusiastically waving the white flag in recent years by surrendering your personal data? Each time you clicked on the "I agree" button when you bought something online, or joined a mailing list, you also signed on to a small clause allowing someone or some corporation to take your online history and details and sell it somewhere else.
Researchers at the University of Connecticut inserted a small clause into the terms and conditions of a fictitious social networking site they created for a study into our gullibility. The clause ensured that as payment for joining the site you would willingly surrender your first-born child. Ninety-eight per cent of volunteers in the study did not notice the clause and signed on.
It has been estimated the average person would require 40 minutes every day to read through all the terms and conditions associated with our various online and offline commitments. What the big corporations – and governments – long ago realised is that we are all too time-poor and, frankly, too lazy, to pore over the pages of fine print. Now, combine all the data we have surrendered about our good selves and add to that a complex algorithm that can warn a bank when you may be likely to default on a mortgage payment, or an insurance company whether you will get divorced or die in the next few years and cost them a hefty payout.
Where is the moral outrage? The growing anger over such a blatant intrusion?
Someone will always be watching. Someone will be listening. They already are. And the idea of keeping something secret from the rest of the world will be as ridiculous and far-fetched as the idea of leading separate lives with separate families.
Garry Linnell is co-presenter of The Breakfast Show on Talking Lifestyle.
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