I went to throw away some prescription bottles and found myself intensely irritated that I could not peel the stickers off the bottle. “Why not just throw them away without removing the labels?” I asked myself.

“Because it has my personal information, my doctor’s name and more importantly, the drug the bottle contained.”

“So what,” my inner voice lamented. “Nobody cares and nobody is going to go through your trash.”

And then it came to me as clear as crystal. I care intensely about my privacy because I know with absolute certainty that out of the 6.7 Billion people alive on the planet that I am unique. I am important. I matter.

Me.

Being forced to give up that privacy forces me to admit that I am just one out of many interchangeable human beings. That is something I am not going to just willingly throw in the garbage.

You?