Searching for scripts

Approaching quarter life makes you question some of the assumptions you’ve carried so far in life. Conversations with my friends lately have shifted from youthful exuberance to more sober discussions of what’s next for us. A lot of this has to do with fully inhabiting the adult world outside the familiar confines of the formal education system for the first time. We are now living Life^TM: the larger, less prescriptive swath outside the school theme park. For the first time, there are no obvious ways to win. There’s no universal way to measure your success either. How do you know you’re doing well? The closest thing we have to a number that needs to go up is money. And even if things are seemingly going well, one wonders if they could be doing more.

Our concerns betray a thinking rooted in the linear, finite game of school. Navigating this terrain, however, requires a new kind of awareness baked into decision making that starts with the question of who you are. This is of course a question one has to constantly ask and explore the answer to throughout life and there is no definitive stopping point. None of us exist in isolation either and our self conception is always evolving in response to the environments we find ourselves in, some of our choosing and others random. I think uncovering the self is a combination of reflection and contrast. We look back on who we have been, how we’ve chosen to spend our time, and by seeing what figures and role models we’re drawn to. It’s also often easier to figure out who we are not rather than who we are. It is here where the compare and contrast method works really well. From early high school, when I stumbled upon the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test to a few weeks ago when I was reading about Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehog and the Fox dichotomy, archetypes and their illustrative abilities have always fascinated me. When I first took the MBTI, I was amazed by how understood I felt by it.

I now look at typology more as a useful starting point for approaching these questions. They center my self awareness and give me a compass to navigate others. They create a language to engage with others better and to reach for more context about someone else. MBTI, Big Five, even horoscopes can be useful frames from which to develop our stories. And stories are powerful. We’ve collectively been telling ourselves stories since our beginning and they continue to enjoy such enduring popularity that I can only conclude that they’re somehow intertwined with our own psychology. While I’ve always loved a good story like anyone else, it’s only more recently that I’ve seen the narrative form as maybe the best mechanism we have for investigating reality and interpreting the world. This epiphany inspired my piece on impressionistic ways of seeing the world and has made me want to watch even more films and actually read novels again.

I wonder if returning to these foundational questions and thinking through one’s own archetype could give us clarity on future pursuits. So it was naturally exciting when I came across a classic Ribbonfarm idea, explored in Venkatesh Rao’s 2011 book “Tempo”, about narrative driven decision making. This resonated with me partly because I was already waking up to how fundamental narrativization is to our experience. The idea of developing personal stories to understand yourself better is probably a familiar idea. But to be useful, I think this needs to be paired with an understanding of narratives in the world.

“What do you want to do when you grow up?” is a question we’ve all fielded at some point in our lives. Typically this is asked when we’re so young that a ledger of our strengths and weaknesses has yet to develop so adults ask it to elicit entertaining responses. Then life happens, we get older, and we often temper our more outlandish childhood aspirations. But looking back, there’s something to the answers kids give. Where do they draw their inspiration from? It’s probably through role models: people around them who they vaguely identify as belonging to certain roles. There are certain types of people they see a lot at that age like doctors and teachers. There’s also media and the rich world of TV. They may relate to these in the particular: like how “Dexter is cool” or how “Ash is a great Pokemon trainer” but once they’ve seen enough of them, they notice patterns. Particular types of people one sees: the advisor, the hero, the rebel, the companion and others are each a major archetype forming the core of narratives.

But it strikes me that the question adults ask kids is not the one they’re answering. In order to understand what we want to do, we would need to actually understand what that persona does. I’m not sure I still understand what a Mechanical Engineer actually does but I’ve known what a mechanical engineer looks like and how she is seen by others since I was about four years old. What I’m more likely expressing is who I want to be. At some age, this kind of fanciful thinking ends. One becomes old enough to switch to the “what am I good at?” question. At this point in life, you’ve accumulated some minor scar tissue and a sense of what people admire about you and what they simply find unremarkable. You’ve dabbled in some things, mostly at school, and have likes and dislikes. If you’re lucky, you see people that resemble you! So you look at what they’re doing and emulate them. At my high school, there were several scripts, each centered around core activities: which included STEM problem solving, debate team, and sports just to name a few. Each scene attracted particular personalities, had milestones, and was eventually in service of some goal: university admission in this case. This is how one moves from archetype-based aspiration to scripts based execution. I generally think we end up operating in this mode for the rest of our adult lives.

Scripts are always particular to a context but often more long-term endeavors. Our sense of life progression is closely locked up in the scripts we are playing out and in the transitions between them. The traditional family script is one such kind. The young working professional (yuppie) script is another. You’ll notice that both the family script and yuppie script imply living environments: in America at least, one is associated with the suburbs and the other with major cities. Entire geographic locations become proxies in our mind for playing out certain scripts. “I’m not about that New York life” you might say with the implicit belief that New York is where you go to seek out a high powered career, ruthlessly compete, and maybe live out serendipitous adventures surrounded by friends. They also typically have an expiration date and many people transition from the yuppie script to the family script and make all the necessary lifestyle changes that implies. Scripts are also products of their time. A passion for STEM in 1923 would have led you to study theoretical physics at a university whereas today it often leads to joining an AI startup. Archetypes on the other hand can often be timeless. There were builders in the Renaissance and there are builders now. What they build is of course dictated by the dominant scripts available to them. The analyst archetype can be manifested in many ways: through academia, finance, or blogging. Likewise, the real estate mogul and the startup founder are similar in their core motivation to build grand things and leave a dent in the world. The scripts differ but the underlying ethos is the same.

But we can only choose from scripts we know of. Every place in the world has skewed perspectives on what amounts to good life scripts and it takes a certain savviness to investigate popular scripts, find unpopular ones, and choose wisely. Only with a sense of the zeitgeist can you understand which ones are on the rise. To understand the implications of one’s script, one needs to discover how it’s positioned in the wider world of the day and what lifestyle affordances come with that package. Even seemingly unrelated things like your immigration status, proximity to friends, and how close the nearest Whole Foods is depend on it. I also see these two awarenesses as independent. People aware of the world know of a wide range of scripts and their attributes so they are well positioned to find success but will find it hollow if it’s not in line with their archetype. People who only understand themselves well are likely to choose naively which can be either great or terrible.

But, at least in advanced economies, I think it’s easier to find a script for your archetype than it is to mould your archetype to a particular script. What we culturally understand as “self actualization” is about finding archetype-script fit. This isn’t easy to find. Especially because major life decisions have to be made with partial information on other people’s schedules. Most people will not find themselves with enough surplus time, money, and status to focus on self-actualization but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to it.

By finding a happy marriage between the self and the world, we can each have an impact on the world while propelling our own narrative forward. If you’re confused, I’d invite you to consider whether it’s out there or within that you’re confused about. Are you a hedgehog or a fox? And does your answer align with what your work persona demands of you? If you understand who you are, maybe it’s only a matter of better discovering what lesser known scripts exist. We’re often happy shading in someone else’s box but occasionally we’ll need to draw our own boxes too. In our era of great change, established scripts are breaking down all around us and we may be forced to go scriptless. When the dust settles, the next era’s scripts will make their way to us. In the meanwhile, keep searching.