5/22/2024–Can you act your way to happiness? Or to any mood?
Is all the world a stage, as Bill Shakespeare posited, and we are just playing make believe?
I am beginning to believe this to be true, and have some unscientific basis for it. Let’s start with actors.
How many leading men and women fall in love with each other while doing a film or play? We’ve seen it on the big screen, with stars of old and young actors with couple names like Bennifer and Drakedashian. Heck, we’ve seen it in local community theater productions.
It’s logical. We are wired to respond to physical cues when choosing mates, friends, and enemies. If you are doing a romantic show day after day, your subconscious brain will begin to believe that that person really loves you. All the signals will work, even if they are faked. The ramifications are powerful. If you want to be happy, smile. If you want to fall in love, pretend you are in love.
Marriages: pretend you love your spouse, and you will fall in love again.
Work: pretend to enjoy your job, and you will love it.
Sports: pretend you are a great baseball slugger, and you will be.
Social: pretend you are interested in what people say, and you will become interested. Likewise, pretend you are interesting, and you will be.
The opposite is also true. Following social media accounts, you notice patterns in what people post about. I’ve come to the conclusion, hardly original, that some people are only happy when they are unhappy. I suspect every day they wake up and start looking for things to offend them. They enjoy acting as if they have been slighted, ignored, or wronged. They actively look for examples of this, and then go to the next step of convincing everyone else that they are justified in their dudgeon. In some convoluted way, this brings them great satisfaction.
How we act, is how we are. This should be obvious. Yet why don’t we recognize it?
Maybe because there are great forces aligned against you experiencing joy and fulfillment without their assistance. We’ve become convinced we cannot achieve fulfillment without buying a service or product. It’s the foundation of all marketing.
Start with therapies, pharmaceuticals, homeopathy, vitamins. Today, essential oils and scents are the trend, but once it was chlorophyl, castor oil, and lobotomies. Even tobacco and cocaine were marketed for their therapeutic powers. How did those work out?
Giant Disclaimer: If your brain is invaded by a live worm, acting like it’s not there won’t make it slither out your ear. You’re going to need drugs, maybe surgery, and probably lots and lots of therapy. My life was saved thanks to medical intervention, including copious amounts of drugs. If I had been born 100 years earlier, I would not have survived strep throat.
As always, Abe Lincoln makes the same point in fewer, simpler words: “Folks,” he said, “are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”