Life Scripts

In nearly all self-help literature there is a concept I find useful that I like to call a life script. Think Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players". The idea boils down to trying to see yourself in a certain way so eventually you will act that way. There are different techniques such as changing your vocabulary or being grateful for your circumstances. Maybe the most famous technique of all comes from Jesus: "Love your neighbor as yourself"*.

I think the reason these techniques work, if indeed they do work, comes from injecting change in your life. If you are unhappy then just thinking new thoughts gives you something novel to work over in your mind. That's why I think the best of these (at least in my experience) come from sympathizing with other people. But other things can help as well. Lately when I've been at home I've been sitting on the floor instead of in a chair. This gives me a new way to use my muscles and offers a nice contrast to when I'm in public and have to use chairs. Cleaning my apartment and moving my furniture around had the same type of effect. It gave me a new environment to move around.

You need to be careful with this life script bullshit. At a certain point it becomes its own stupid addiction, and certain scripts can overwhelm the rest. There are so many techniques out there that if you are going to get anything out of them you have to stop thinking and start doing. Most teachers won't tell you this since they want to keep coming to their seminars and buying their books. Of course, the idea "stop thinking, start doing" is itself just another life script which has to be monitored to see if it is still useful for you. At least I think you need to monitor it since my Main Problem is actually doing the work. All this thinking about why you have certain thoughts and where they come from can also be described as a life script. To me, it has been an especially seductive one for a number of reasons. It allows you to have an excuse for not ever getting anything done. Let me quote that great sage Elaine Benes: "Well! I can't spend the rest of my life coming into this stinking apartment every ten minutes to pore over the, excruciating minutia, of every, single, daily event."

That quote comes from the Seinfeld episode "The Bizarro Jerry". What a great distillation of the concept of life scripts that episode is. Essentially, the three male leads have counterparts with similar personalities with slightly different assumptions that completely change to way they act. The whole show is also a great demonstration of the reason why thinking about why people do what we do is seductive. Most human rituals look ridiculous when analyzed enough. Here is a great one about lawns. Think about a wedding. Two people stand in front of their friends and pledge not to fuck anyone else for the rest of their lives. I'm loath to give examples I've used in real life since people get so defensive about it. Comedians get away with it because they are "just" telling jokes. The defensiveness can be fairly amusing when provoked in people, but I don't recommend doing it too often since it just makes people angry at you unless you are really careful with it. And just because something is stupid doesn't mean it can't be fun.

Here comes the therapy. I think I need a new life script. I question too many things. So here are my two axioms. 1) Life scripts exists. 2) They have consequences. So that means I need to pick the ones that the person I want to become would use. I don't think my personality allows me to buy into any one script too fully. Hopefully, as long as I realize what I'm doing I can use the scripts enough to get what I want out of life. First, I need to eliminate all the destructive scripts from my mind. I've been doing the same thing lately with my pastimes and possessions. It has been working in the sense that it has made me happier so maybe by doing the same thing with my life scripts I can get a similar improvement. Although I didn't use this language (I used the language of fears), I did do this a couple weeks ago with an extremely destructive script. I think if I hadn't done that I wouldn't even be able to write this. So its time for a spring cleaning of the mind. I need to look around the recesses of my mind and throw out anything I don't want. Time to get to work.

* Why is it that so many Christians seem to ignore this? Jesus proceeds this commandment by talking about loving God so maybe that's where it comes from. God gives a lot of crazy rules that no human being could possibly follow (which even He admits). Personally, I like the theory that hate is so much fun since it allows you to feel superior to someone else with absolutely no effort. We are all just monkeys flinging shit at each other.