Our creative lives are more public now than maybe ever before (blogs, email, YouTube...).

But then again, maybe not. Before the written word, which is to say for probably 90% or more of human history, all we had for communication was spoken word. So we had to get good at listening, and at memorizing, and at improvising. Also, the bards of our tribes did not have the luxury--narcissism?---of going off by themselves to work and rework their schtick.

So, maybe we need to just lighten up and relax with the public nature of our discourse. It's not so different from what our ancestors experienced.