“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on somebody else’s path.” – Joseph Campbell
Whenever you go through a difficult life event–a loved one passing away, a divorce, getting fired or laid off–you quickly feel the inadequacy of the “script” that people follow in fraught social situations.
Someone finds out your loved one passed? You get a rote “I’m sorry” and people struggle for what to say beyond that.
You get laid off? People worry for you but say you’ll find something soon.
Get divorced? People often reach for the hideous catchall “everything happens for a reason,” which manages to feel both judge-y (“so you’re saying I deserved this?”) and an enormous reach for positivity.
We all fall back on these niceties and bromides. But these scripts aren’t just things people say. It goes way deeper than that. There are crucial cultural assumptions that underpin the sentiments in these scripts–that one should look on the bright side, that there is (or should be) order in life, that one should minimize others’ discomfort, that one must keep moving forward.
Few things expose society’s script more than trying to step off it entirely, which, I’d argue, you must do if you are hoping to pursue meaningful creativity in your life.
The life script
The “life script” varies somewhat depending on location and culture, but it broadly goes like this: you grow up, you go to the best college you can if you have the opportunity, you get the best job you can, you may be pressured to find a spouse with the best job you can, you put your nose down and work as hard as you can, you get married, you have kids, you retire, you oversee the next generation repeating the script, you die.
Chances are you will be pushed at every turn to stay on script and fulfill society’s twin directives: Be as economically productive as possible, and you better reproduce.
You’ll feel the presence of the script whenever you tell people you want to pursue a creative life. People will push you to make it a hobby that’s subservient to a more economically viable job.
And if you do engage in a creative pursuit, questions will quickly turn to whether you’re making money. If you tell them you’ve published a book, they’ll wonder if it’s a bestseller or being made into a movie. Anything short of that, they’ll faintly pity you as a dilettante.
The “solution” some people come up with is to do the meaningful personal things after they retire. And look, no judgment if you went that way and you’re happy. But if you’re hoping to do something meaningful for yourself before you’re 65, chances are you’re going to need to step off script.
In my opinion? It’s better to ditch the script as soon as you can.
The bumpers
Stepping off the script is extremely difficult for two main reasons:
- Our entire society is organized around paying for things and, well, you have to figure out how to pay for things.
- At every step of the way, people in your life and influential cultural winds will push you to stay on script.
For #1, the challenge can be enormously difficult, but the contours are straightforward: You have to find enough money to cover your expenses.
For #2, the challenge seems easier but is more opaque: You have to resist the influence people have over you and the pushes and pulls when you try to step onto a different course.
The farther you get down your path on “the script,” the more invested other people are in keeping you on it: parents, significant others, friends, children. Your variables become more constrained. Even when they’re supportive, they’ve often internalized a lifetime of “lessons” that have kept them on script. Their advice will reflect their desire for you to stay in your role in their lives, as well as their own lived experiences.
And don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting you ditch everyone you love in order to pursue a creative passion. Some variables get (rightly) locked in.
Then there are the broader forces at play: Status symbols we find ourselves coveting, a culture that valorizes the rich, our internalized beliefs about what others will find impressive and attractive.
There are a wide array of bumpers configured around you that will keep pushing you onto our culture’s prescribed course. If you want to pursue a passion project that’s truly your own, particularly one with dubious economic utility, you’ll have to resist the script.
Escaping the script
I’m going to keep returning to the topic of building a creative life over the course of the next month, but the first and most important step for stepping off the script in life is to first recognize the script’s existence.
When you start sharing your dreams and acting upon them, people around you will often react fearfully. If for instance, you pass up a lucrative job offer to preserve time for creativity like I did a few years back, you’ll need to see that when people are horrified on your behalf, they are only following the script. It’s crucial to see this lest you internalize their doubt.
It’s important to see the script within you when you find yourself coveting a bigger house, a nicer car, a more prestigious job title. Whose voice is telling you to want those things? Are those “nice” things really worth what you’d have to give up to get them?
And, importantly, you have to shed the false certainty the script provides. Nearly everyone I know who follows the life script reaches a crisis point where it fails them. A divorce, an unexpected illness, a job loss… We’re all implicitly told that if we just do X, Y, and Z–if we do things the “right” way–we’ll have a prosperous and safe life. At some point you find out the hard way that just isn’t true.
You have to learn to shut off the auto-pilot and fly the plane yourself, and in order to do that, you have to realize that’s the kind of plane you were flying in all along. It’s scary and confusing to always be at the wheel, but as the Joseph Campbell quote at the start of this post articulates, it’s the first step toward charting your own course.
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Art: Hans Gude – Norwegian Landscape in Rain
Dear God, what a lovely post. Thank you for this. I can’t begin to tell you how much this means to me in this moment. Sometimes you just think you’re the only one.
— a struggling writer
Awesome, glad you found it helpful!
Thank you for this! What an excellent read and reminder. I often worry about our culture’s obsession with wealth and I think the pursuit of it leads to a lot of pain and frustration (and larger cultural struggles). We need more ways to define success. And more acceptance of contentedness. But maybe that is a different essay.
Content is underappreciated. Being content is more satisfying than being happy and it is less fleeting.
I read this initially as content as in social media content, which is a funny alternate way to read it!
Absolutely, this is also on my mind as a certain very rich person acquires a certain social network. Ascribing so much currency (literally and figuratively) to people like him is a choice our society collectively makes!
Hey Nathan! I’ve been a fan/blog lurker for over a decade and just wanted to thank you for posting this—it was the perfect reminder at the perfect time for me today. I’ve been dealing with the “script” issue a lot over the past few years since leaving my full-time tech job in SF so I could pursue my novel writing/screenwriting career. It has been exhausting and fraught with uncertainty, but every time I wonder if I made a mistake, life gives me a little nudge toward continuing to pursue my dreams. Today, that nudge was your post!
What really got me was your point about learning to deal with other people’s fear-based reactions (and how easy it is to internalize them). It’s so spot on, and reading that really helped me feel less isolated as I navigate that in my own life.
I also want to share a quote I recently heard and can’t stop thinking about. It more or less said, “When you’re pursuing a passion, you’ll always find support, even if you don’t know where it will come from next.” So far, this has been true for me despite my non-traditional career path. While I’ve done a decent job self-publishing novels only to realize nobody cares, the storytelling skills I’ve gained as a result have now started to open doors in the film/TV business. I’m still waiting for the big “yes,” but I often have to ask myself: How would I feel had I been too afraid to pursue this path at all? Would I really have been better off in that soul-sucking tech job, knowing I never had the courage to fight for a chance to live my dream?
I’m pretty sure I know the answer to both questions, but it never hurts to have somebody else validate it. So, thank you! And welcome back to California! I hope you’re enjoying it so far. 🙂
That’s amazing, congrats on taking the leap! No matter where you end up, I suspect you’ll never regret doing the hard thing and following your own path.
This is a brilliant post, one I’m sure I will come back to again.
Thank you!
Thank you for this post, Nathan. I needed it!
Thanks, Roque!
Excellent. This is an essay dreaming of becoming a book.
Thank you! And we shall see!
I won’t go into all the reasons I love this, Nathan, but sure am looking forward to the next month, especially at this holiday season when memories of loss and failure become more intense. When everybody feels the pressure to stay on script.
Absolutely, it’s always difficult when the “script” tells you you should feel a different way than what you really feel. Hang in there.
Hi Nathan,
I’ve been following you for a lot of years. I wanted to express that when you wrote “opportunity, you get the best job you can (or, depending on one’s location and gender, find the man with the best job),” come across as sexist. I read it and was like “Whoa!”
I am sure a lot of people read what you wrote and got a lot out of your post “stepping off the script in life” and I can imagine you’re going through stuff most of us are soul searching right now but heads up about that line.
I appreciate your posts, your taking the time to write, and what you do write but women go through such different journeys than men, especially the privileged white male journey.
You misunderstood. Nathan wasn’t being sexist, he was stating a fact. In some places, a woman IS expected to marry a man that can provide for her. But it’s not just some places. It’s most places. It’s a common trope in movies and tv shows to have a mother ask her daughter when she is going to get married. It’s common in media, because it’s common in life. Because the world affords more opportunities to men, and pays men better, parents want their daughters to marry someone who can provide for her. Even if their daughter is well-educated and has a good career, they STILL want her to marry similarly. Parents want their children to have better than what they had, to have stability in an unstable world. Maybe it is a script, but parents generally love their children, and want what’s best for them. They want their daughter to marry a man with a good job, so even if she loses her good job, they won’t have to wait for pay day to buy groceries.
Yes, this reflects my intent with that line. Thank you!
Apologies if it came across that way, I was trying to acknowledge the pressures and “scripts” people face that *aren’t* white male scripts. I’ll take another look and see if I can phrase it so it comes across more in line with what I intended?
Thanks for this Nathan! My own Thanksgiving blog post was about gratitude for my work-life balance—which is actually IN balance—but your metaphor is much better; in future, I’ll credit that balance to my many steps off the path. I’m lucky my family has always supported my crazy life choices, but others have definitely tried to keep me on a more traditional life path. So glad I didn’t fall for it.
That’s great that you’re striking a balance that’s working for you! So tricky to do.
Thank you for this wisdom! And for acknowledging a struggle that so many writers face. Living way off the Script has been essential to my writing life, but it is not easy. I see my poetry coaching clients (who often find me shortly after they retire) haunted by the Script too. No one should feel guilty about choosing to explore and pursue creative work.
Absolutely, the guilt is hard to shake. It’s important to give yourself permission.
I misread “content” the same way. Great minds misthink alike!
As for that Very Rich Person, he’s added insult to injury by adopting the same name as the wonderful ecological hero who is saving the planet by building all those electric cars!
Oh wait…They’re one and the same person! Yikes! The answer is obvious. We must BAN all electric cars! They’re heavy, expensive, explosive, and take forever to charge! I love the smell of gasoline in the morning!
“The Script” can also be described as Conformism. Yet Nonconformism can have a script of its own, and not just in regard to religion. The Internet, for example, provides alternatives to “The Script” that can be liberating and envigorating, but can also have their own rigidity and chilling effects. The classic three part system of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis can be useful here. One may go partly or wholly through that process, once or more often, and a Script that was useful in the past may outlive its purpose.
Thanks to Nathan and all commenters!
Wow, thank you for this! What a beautiful illustrative look at the deep pool in which we find ourselves swimming, treading water, and often thrashing and gasping. I, like others here, will come back to this and read it again. It brings a sense of peace.
Thanks for the reminder about scripts. My children are finding their own path in their mid-life, and I am happy that they are doing it, but my fears for their future sometimes creep in. Your post is something I will keep in mind so I can focus on their growth, their decisions, their goals.