You behave like you’ve seen in films

Everything you know about how to act in life, what will happen in life, and what the possibilities are in life, you got from stories. Books, comics, films, pop videos, television, adverts. All the interactions, all the characterisations, all the ways of speaking looking and posturing — all written and imagined by writers. True, they’re often observed from life, and often not, but such scenes to play, actions to perform and attitudes to strike are also abstracted and distorted for dramatic effect. All the behavioural transactions we exhibit are inherited from those we’ve seen other people perform, otherwise it’s not a valid currency. The most memorable and vivid examples of such transactions are often those transmitted through mass media.

The boring sections of life, any interstitial inconsequential ‘glue’ in-between the notable parts, is edited out while dramatic situations are exaggerated. This is then passed on via contemporary culture through generations until the original direction or observation is lost. These snippets and expressions and communications become normalised as “the” way to do things. But we can’t actually invent any of these things ourselves in isolation without being heavily influenced by what we see and experience around us and most of what we experience in volume is stories. In todays terms, this means stories transmitted in mass media. Everything we know about how to act in life we learned from films and television, comics, books, etc.

You might be doubting me right now, ready to deny this and ready to argue back but consider the way in which you are picturing yourself retorting in your mind. You got that catalogue of moves and facial expressions and ways of speaking from somewhere. Maybe some children’s cartoon series, maybe a graphic novel, maybe a film you once saw. Maybe not. Maybe someone down the pub or at a party or club, who in turn got it from a cartoon or film or an advert on telly. Your lexicon of expressions and attitudes and actions are a validated mashup of the most vivid transactional moments in your media consumption.

Looking for the magic that’ll rescue you from work

There’s no magic that’ll save you from having to do the work in life. There isn’t some significant alternative state to your life in which, once you enter it, you’re relieved of all the hard work and judgement of success. There’s no lottery win that’ll change everything. Even if you did win the lottery, you’d have learned nothing — it‘s not repeatable, and you can’t just do it again when you need to. What you need is the learning of repeatable or reproducible actions or processes. Otherwise it’s not you doing it — any success gained is not your success. Therefore, in order to achieve success, be prepared for a proportional amount of actual effort to put in. It’s not going to happen with no effort or work, but our response to the word “work” can vary according to what we mean by work.

In our minds, are we equating “work” to someone digging a ditch, laying railway tracks, banging metal in a workshop? Does a graphic designer do any work — you don’t hear any banging sounds, so is there any work happening? Does a photographer work — I’m remembering of course the days when there was such a thing as a professional photographer and their phone used to ring — people wondered, where’s the work in just pressing the shutter? Does a salesperson do any work — at least some days in a month, yes they probably do — their work is persuasion. Does marketing count as work? Some of it certainly does — a lot of their work is even a mystery to themselves, as you’ll discover in the world of social media marketing, but a lot of it is promotion, and if that work isn’t done, the product isn’t promoted.

There’s also no magic idea that is likely to occur to you that will change the world and make your fortune just by itself. There’s plenty of good ideas, but absolutely none that are self-propelled so that just simply having the idea is all that is required to happen. No good idea is so good that you can then sit back and reap the rewards without any further effort. All ideas require development and implementation, but further, they require promotion and persuasion, and those last two are usually much more work than the first two.

Unfortunately, a mediocre idea that has been thoroughly promoted to a critical mass of people, persuading them  that it is perhaps a better idea than it really is — stands every chance of succeeding. Whereas, an excellent idea that has not been promoted very much — only a few people around you even know it exists and most of them don’t understand the benefits properly — stands every chance of staying exactly where it is. This indicates the potency of promotion and persuasion and that they are stronger forces than a good idea alone. It might even be the case that with skilful and industrious promoting and persuading, you don’t even need an idea at all, just a process of work that can be exercised.

Varied providence of nations adjusts effects of agency upon success

Before I go further with this article, seeing as you’ve got past the title, I’d better define what I mean by “agency”. There are among other definitions, philosophical definitions of agency and sociological definitions of agency, but they both converge in the way that I would find useful for this conversation. They both imply the ability to take action, whereby the decision to take action and the direction or form in which this action is to take, is decided within the person we are referring to. The competing force is that of “structure”, and the structure within which the person operates acts among other things as a set of constraints or limitations, or even affords opportunities, most usually both.

For example, a school might have a certain level of formality or strictness, compared with another school, and this places limitations on the exercising of free will on the students (and teachers). If there are innate needs to rebel or act demonstratively the more constrained students might yet still exercise those needs, but they may be less practiced at them and therefore do it too well and too much. At a workplace, there might also be a certain level of formality or strictness, compared with other places to work. This, of course, places limitations on the happiness and sanity of the workers, who should not stand for this watered-down form of slavery, and should instead leave and find nicer jobs, leaving behind those out-of-date slave drivers to struggle by themselves. Or you might be employed in a nice place with a nice management, although hardly anyone actually is.

But what about whole countries or nations? They too have quite different structures, and it is interesting to see how the differences in nation state structures manifest in real differences in agency within the populace. Different countries have a different amount of “supplied” assistance or governance or rules that guide or constrain a person’s actions and behaviour. This could be seen to give rise to differences in agency as perceived by the nationals of various countries. Some nations try and place quite defined and delineated restrictions on behaviour and expression, and also on the level of detail of support, help or security. Variously, this could have an influence upon the collectiveness or individuality of the people of that nation.

In some countries, if you don’t have a job or income, you’re broke. In other countries, you might not be, you might have a layer of assistance. To give a tangible example, in some countries, there’s very clear definitions of where the road stops and the pavement begins, in other countries, there isn’t — the road just sort of “becomes” the pavement in a rough and ragged unfinished fashion. Does this mean that road safety is less? Perhaps not really, perhaps the responsibility of provision of safely acting shifts from the country or county into the individual. Some countries have a structure that is provident, which might substitute for action within the individual. Other countries simply don’t, which causes the individual to have to take action. However, the heroic success stories there that we would hear about can tend to mask the hidden failures that, if provided with help or support, could have demonstrated a difference. Is the structure that we find ourselves in more of an inadvertent ingredient in success than we usually consider?

Conversations come in different flavours

People start and engage in conversation on the Internet, just as they also  do in real life. Different conversations have different reasons, of course, but they also have different styles. These flavours or methods of going in the desired direction can affect the content of the conversation by biasing it. The conversation will progress using positive or negative, constructive or destructive expression. If the reason for the conversation is predominantly an exercise in purely the style of the conversation, it would be fair to say that it will feature   no actual productive outcome at the destination. There’s no end product — because in those cases that simply isn’t the reason to have the conversation.

I would suggest developing an alertness for ‘where this conversation is going’ both online and in real life, in terms of not only the outcome or reason for the communication, but also for the style. It might be helpful to remove yourself from the situations in which a certain kind of communication is evidently of a destructive and negative style, as you’re sure to have more productive things to be doing at that particular time.

If you have to be present, you don’t have to participate. If you have to participate, try and steer or shift the focus around to make the purpose of the time spent more positive and generative if you can. Perhaps you could draw to the attention of the other participants that what’s going on is unconstructive and unhelpful — you’ll have to play that by ear. Online, it is easy to get swept into posts on forums that degenerate into absurd displays of ego protection in the guise of expertise, or even plain immature negativity. In real life, you’ll also notice the differences in styles of meetings, gatherings, in business and in more relaxed scenarios. Spot those unconstructive style differences early, and if you can, abandon the endeavour — there’s no requirement to be part of such a waste of time and energy.