During covid some SWEs had pretty sweet gigs due to lowered expectations and a rush on talent. And what do a small fraction of SWEs do? Make “life in the day of” videos that glamorize how cushy and easy-going it is, painting the whole group of SWEs as spoiled and entitled who make too much money. Point is they could’ve just realized they had it good and kept quiet.
But, no, they had to hustle for internet points, even risking their job inadvertently. It’s unbelievable to me how fast we flipped from the internet being an accessory to life to it being a surrogate for actual social interaction.
Pretending you're rich has been happening for a long time. Conversely, pretending you're poor though might make you a bit of a miser as you wouldn't use what you have to help anyone else. It seems wise to be discrete about your wealth if you have it, or you're just inviting trouble for little real gain.
Sure it'd take longer than pulling up directions on your phone does now but if you're planning a cross-country trip to kidnap someone and beat their passphrases out of them or demand a ransom from their family or whatever then you've probably got some other plans to make. If it's a total impulse then you just grab your duct tape, chainsaw, masks, and continental-scale road atlas and hit the road; when you get to your target's state you can pick up maps that'll get you to their place at the first gas station you hit. Don't make jokes about why you're on a road trip when you stop at the whimsical roadside attraction shaped like a dinosaur, someone will come forwards when your case makes the news.
If I needed a direction addresses for another city I'd just go there (had a full highway map of the country) and buy the local map - they were typically for sale near the front of basically every store (gas station, pharmacy, etc.).
And I think it all boils down to the fact that some humans need to make noise about their successes so they feel validated. Much like the cryptocurrency evangelists, they probably can’t help themselves because they want to ensure they defend “the mission” even if it comes at great personal cost in the long run.
It's worth worrying about in the general case, too. There are subtler and much more noxious failure modes here than merely getting beaned with a Swedish nut rounder.
The interesting thing to me about this is watching how we've changed over the past 40 years. As a kid, it was impressed up on kids to not talk to strangers. You don't tell people where you live. You don't tell people anything more than necessary. Now, people share the most intimate details of their daily lives. People share/invite random strangers to their accounts without any concerns about who they are or what they might do. People just do not think about how the most benign of posts can be used for nefarious purposes by someone else. So we've gone from share nothing to over sharing everything.