quasimatt

Posted on Apr 16, 2021Read on Mirror.xyz

coming out as me

i've recently been fascinated by the way people marry their professional and personal lives online—something i've never felt i had the ability, or maybe the courage, to do. while i've been using twitter to network (in the most generous sense of the word) for years, i never felt it possible to meld my online presence with my career even though i saw how doing so could be beneficial. after reading kendall pennington's article on the fluidity of personal and professional brands, which details how she got her job by tweeting, i began to think more about the relationship between my online persona, quasimatt, and my professional persona, matt van ommeren. as a result, i kind of had a mini identity crisis.

the relationship between quasimatt and matt van ommeren has always felt like it had to be unidirectional; i could post my linkedin on twitter, but i would never post my twitter on linkedin. i could post online about my life, but the things i posted couldn't be referenced in other realms of my life. over the past year or two, quasimatt expanded to medium to write thinkpieces (that were often deleted within days), wrote and released the book it's not abstraction it's literally just lying, started a podcast, and bombarded twitter with memes, irony-drenched tweets, and occasionally satirical pseudo-intellectualism. matt van ommeren took a backseat, transitioning from a corporate job in new york to studying philosophy and economics in germany all while spending a lot of time holed up in his room trying not to get covid. although matt van ommeren is literally my birth name, i began to associate it with a professional persona from which i truly feel detached.

quasimatt felt expressive and relatively unlimited—he just said shit, really. sometimes it felt like he had hardly any quality control, and so quasimatt felt natural because he was uninhibited. matt van ommeren was detached and alienated—he became a costume for quasimatt to wear when he had to go to a job interview or meet someone for the first time. the delineation between quasimatt and matt van ommeren was no longer established by an "online persona" but rather became an actual fissure of my identity—quasimatt was a mode of operation that was a little reckless, almost never serious, politicized in a way that matt van ommeren couldn't be, and honestly sometimes a bit contrived. it was like i took my values, hyperbolized them, and used them to create a character to embody.

sometimes i think matt van ommeren, which i sometimes half-jokingly refer to as my "bootlicker identity", approaches the ideal of homo economicus, playing a one-dimensional materialistic game in order to get something. quasimatt approaches something like an enlightened communalist who transcends material desire (except the desire for cold brew from dunkin) and has stronger moral commitments. basically, matt van ommeren tries to get checks while quasimatt tries to do praxis. i'm exaggerating in both directions, but the fragmentation demonstrates a real tension of values in my life. it's a disservice to myself to avoid this tension by splitting my identity and trying unsuccessfully to have the best of both worlds.

the possibility of publicly combining my identities felt possible to me when i was hired for a new job and found out the person who hired me had somehow found out i was not just matt van ommeren but also quasimatt. they hired me anyway. while this might have to do with a better attitude toward labor and labor rights in germany than in america, i realized i might be fabricating the need to keep the identities separate. maybe the current job market doesn't require us to limit and dehumanize ourselves in the ways we're sometimes taught it does. i can be a person with opinions who posts nonprofessional things online—that shouldn't make me a job market pariah. quasimatt arose primarily as a reaction to what i perceived to be a repressive professional world—a forceful and intentional deviation from expectation. the truth of quasimatt—and of matt van ommeren—is that they are both departures from my true self.

so here's what i'm actually going to do for now: in pursuit of a more genuine existence, i'm going to put an end to the quasimatt/matt van ommeren fragmentation. i'm sharing this post with both quasimatt and matt van ommeren circles. so to those of you who know me as matt van ommeren: hi, i'm quasimatt. to those who know me as quasimatt: you might already know this, but i'm matt van ommeren. we're one and the same, and i'm going to figure out a way to make that work.