Why do you suppose more people on the Internet choose to exercise this right then in real-life?
I had never considered that the level of pseudonymity available on the Internet is available in real-life as well. Really the only thing that the real-life has which you can't change would be your DNA.
In real life you can maintain pseudymity by just never exposing your identity. This happens all the time, much more often than the Internet (e.g. As I type this under a tree by the road of my uni, no one knows who I am and yet my nick here absolutely identifies me).
Because you are being so open about it why do you feel you need to use a nick in real-life?
A lot conversations for this story seem to have focused on the concept of permanence with a nickname. If you use the same nickname across a multitude of services then you've created a "real" identity.
I'm trying to understand peoples reasoning for this. To me there seems to be two prevalent reasons:
1) You want your single identity to be under a name you choose, not have it be forced upon you like you real name was.
2) You want to maintain a multitude of identities each with a specific purpose.
I had never considered that the level of pseudonymity available on the Internet is available in real-life as well. Really the only thing that the real-life has which you can't change would be your DNA.