Not to put too fine a point on it, she was right. I no longer pour all my creative juices into a job where it's more important to spend 12 hours a day, every day, whimpering at one's desk, than to achieve meaningful goals. I never whimpered well, and the government only pays me for eight hours of brilliance a day, five days a week, excluding holidays and vacation. On the Web, I create and am judged by the quality of my products, not the form of my kow-tow. In fact, the Hydra called the Internet eats such pretensions for breakfast.
Many people go much further.
They reinvent their names, their personas, their very physical beings. They transform themselves into superheroes and dryads, ogresses and trolls, and their Internet acquaintances accept them as such. Some programs even provide avatars, allowing users to create digital bodies more in keeping with the person inside their mind and computer. It's important to speak of these realities and places in the plural too. The personal universes we create on the Web stack and overlap as easily as parallel worlds in mid-century science fiction.