IS LIFE SCRIPTED?
Have you ever been travelling for a road trip or maybe a vacation? You see so many people along the way. You probably have wondered at some point:
“All these people all around, how is it possible that they all have their own life, thoughts, family, circle of friends, and people?”
Maybe they aren’t real, or maybe
someone is controlling all of them. It cannot possibly be true that all the problems and headaches and giant things we have in life go the same way for ALL the people out there, every single one out of the billions?
HOW CAN IT BE POSSIBLE?
This also has maybe happened to you: You are in class, and the teacher is asking questions randomly to any student. The teacher is busy with a student answering the question, and you suddenly feel like the next one is going to be you, so you maybe prepare the answer, and guess what?
She DID ask you the next question. It is like you are a certain ‘protagonist’ in the world, and THIS goes by us in OUR particular point of self. AS YOU…
‘The psychologist most associated with this idea is Dan McAdams, at Northwestern University, whose narrative identity theory holds that from adolescence onward, we don’t just accumulate memories — we organize them into a story. We pick a beginning. We decide which moments were turning points. We cast ourselves as the person things happened to, or the person who made things happen, or both. McAdams described this as building something like a personal myth: an internalized, evolving life story that stitches together a reconstructed past and an imagined future so that life has some kind of throughline instead of just being one thing after another.’ ( All sources used are listed at the end.)
“To me, life feels like a movie where you can decide what the main character does, which would be interesting, if there were actually something going on. But there’s no action or excitement, nothing interesting at all. Making choices for this character feel like, ‘Do you want blah or meh?’ I put a ton of energy into trying to be excited about things, but nothing really matters because it doesn’t really improve the experience of watching this movie. It’s the most boring movie I’ve ever seen and it just drags on. Anyone else?”
A user on Reddit said the above.
Now, why does it feel not possible for all the people we see sometimes randomly on the street from the window, or maybe in an aeroplane, or anywhere?
This feeling of realizing is termed actually as — ‘sonder’.
The strong feeling of realizing that every person you see has their own life story in which they are the most important person:
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Sonder can encourage compassion.
Sonder can have a profound impact on our wellbeing.
There’s a fascinating thing happening with narrative identity.
Psychologists study how people construct stories about themselves — stories involving their past, present, future, relationships, failures, goals, and changes. The APA describes narrative psychology as studying how stories help people give meaning to their experiences and understand their lives.
So our brain creates a certain narrative field in regular human life, making us feel like the most important and others as ‘side characters’, and this is for everyone individually. Our brains aren’t capable of acknowledging this general fact: that the complexity of our life, ourselves, goes the same 8.5 billion times all across Earth, just in different terms, and THAT is what makes life different.
Now, for the question: is life a pre-prepared script we are playing?
The philosophy literature calls the relevant idea causal determinism.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines determinism roughly as the idea that, given the state of the world at one point in time and the laws of nature, what happens afterward is fixed. But it also explicitly says there is no agreement over whether determinism is actually true.
Now, for this topic alone, there could be many answers, AND I am not going into the fields of conspiracy or religious beliefs because that would take a LOT to talk about, so I am only going to use what we as humans currently define the answer to this question to be, which is currently that —
Science doesn’t currently establish that the entire future is predetermined. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that quantum mechanics has made the old simple “clockwork universe” picture doubtful, and that there are competing interpretations of quantum mechanics. It concludes that current science does not decisively establish that everything we do is predetermined by the past or could have a possible link.
Now, of course, there comes a very cool fiction topic of the multiverse theory and God, but we still can only find these as ‘coincidences’. But who knows? Maybe every time something falls, or maybe even when you’re reading this, maybe it was already meant for you to be reading these lines at this current moment, whichever you are in right now.
Keep thinking!
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