People Think They Are In A Movie Starring Themselves

I recently read an article about how Pandora is curating personalized playlists to soundtrack your life so that you can,

“Feel like you’re living in your own private Wes Anderson movie – or Quentin Tarantino flick or, if you’re really into Hans Zimmer, even Jurassic Park.”

The phenomena of feeling like you are in your own movie is a contributing part of why more people are becoming radicalized/insane. Mental health problems are more common than ever before, and people are increasingly divided/generally less religious. Why? Possibly because of influences like social media where people are constantly being reminded that they are special by posting pictures and stories to get dopamine hits. It’s all MEMEME.

1 in 10 on Wall Street is a psychopath and I wonder if bankers on Wall Street think they are the star of their own movie at a higher rate than others do.

I believe that you are the master of your own fate. Society would have more realistic expectations and people would be more hard-working if everyone realized that persistence and determination are omnipotent. But this is not the same as saying that you are in a movie and you are the star.

Am I reacting unjustly to the article, or is it not a problem that people think they are the star of their own movie?

Note: The article is on Fast Company. I do not have enough points to link it.

23 Comments
 
Funniest

I operate life under the assumption it's a giant VR and all the cool and interesting people are other players and all the boring normies are AI. I can't think up a better video game than life.

heister: Look at all these wannabe richies hating on an expensive salad. https://arthuxtable.com/
 
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Firstly, Fast Company is garbage. Second, your belief that you're the master of your own fate is a version of you believing you're in your own movie. Smoke some weed, the answers will come to you. Everyone is in their own movie, literally and figuratively, because we're stuck in one point of observation for our entire lives and have only one perspective from which to interact with what we experience. What we do is both meaningless and the only thing that matters. Our movies write themselves, again literally and figuratively.

Last, I'm going to kindly impart an idea unto you regarding what you said about "society would have more realistic expectations...". Your thinking that is a manifestation of failure to understand what society is: a system. Systems seek equilibrium, and what we call society has found its own balance, one that necessitates both idiots and enlightened alike. Whether you, I, or anyone else is an idiot or enlightened doesn't matter - we're all just necessary pieces of the puzzle. Don't listen to the talk about "radicalized" or any other current events nonsense - it's all just noise. Look for the signal.

in it 2 win it
 

But life isn't a movie and some people are delusional. I'm not talking about the system or anything like that. I was thinking about the guy who wrote about how his life is over because he didn't get into Harvard (I think it was Harvard) when I wrote this. It is cinematic to take one event like that and boil your life down to it or use it as the reason why you went off the rails. There are some people like this guy who years after some event that they had no way of knowing the outcome of (like getting denied from a school) will use the event as the rationale for why they went off the rails. The guy who made the post about not getting into Harvard isn't going crazy I'm just using him as an example of someone who thinks that their entire life was building up to some moment. Imagine the motivation behind some crazy shooter the reasoning might be something random that would only make sense in a movie.

 
"famesjranco" I was thinking about the guy who wrote about how his life is over because he didn't get into Harvard (I think it was Harvard) when I wrote this. It is cinematic to take one event like that and boil your life down to it or use it as the reason why you went off the rails.

It is irrational, but it happens.

I grew up playing tennis in circles with this Chinese dude. We were really good friends growing up. His parents pushed him really hard. To the point that he didn't even really like tennis anymore. He still played though, he had to go to practice. A few years later when we both went to college, he got into Cornell and was studying architecture. His parents moved back to Hong Kong around that time and he would fly back in the summer.

One year he failed a final exam that made him fail an important pre-req class. Failure was unacceptable in his family. He couldn't go home to face his parents. He had a flight back to HK and instead of going to the airport, hung himself in his room. RIP. Really sad. He was such a good kid.

The important thing with failures is that we keep striving, that we keep pushing, keep moving. You don't fail when you fail. You fail when you stop. The next rejection or failure is one step closer to success.

“A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life. And he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to accuse others as the cause of his condition, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts; ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.”

-James Allen, As a Man Thinketh

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

Nah man, what you just described in the cereal box example is schizophrenia (i.e. mental illness that manifests in abnormal behavior and a diminished grasp of reality; psychotic behavior). Psychopaths/sociopaths suffer from antisocial personality disorder and exhibit a similar set of traits. The terms are often used interchangeably though one difference often noted is that a psychopath has no conscience while a sociopath does have one, but it's very weak.

 

That's implying that being delusional doesn't lead to success. I don't think that's true. To be really successful in this world, and to do what 99% of people aren't willing to do, sometimes it takes a bit of delusion and ego. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, etc.

 

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