Our Life is a Big Scene and We Have a lot of Roles
People take on many roles throughout their lives. Actually, we have to do this because we have changing responsibilities and a role assigned to us in different places at different times. For example, while at school we are expected to behave in accordance with our student role, while at home our parents expect us to behave in the role of children. If it were the other way around, it could have negative consequences: Imagine that we were playing the role of son against the teacher when we were at school! Therefore, our roles diversify in accordance with changing times and places, and our most important survival feature makes it easy to adapt. In this essay, I will talk about our roles in life and our inner world.
Our roles in life vary according to our location and time. Our roles change at home, at school, with our friends and in many other places. For example, consider yourself a businessman: You can’t behave like that when you’re at home. You wake up in the morning, you take on the role of father to your child and husband to your spouse. When you go to your workplace, you take on the role of a businessman. When you are with your friends, you become their friend, you have a chat. When you come home again, your roles change again as husband and father. All of this happens within a day. Likewise, our roles also change over time. You can only be a son right now, but the role of the father can be added to your role in the future, and the role of the grandfather can be added later. Our roles also change over time, along with the people in our lives. That’s why we are all actors, the world is a stage. Every day we play a different curtain. In addition to these, there are also roles in our inner world.
The roles in our inner world are acting on ourselves. This is what we act upon that we can achieve something. They say believing is half the success, and we act to believe. I will give an example to this from myself: While I was trying to lose weight (and I had illnesses that triggered my hunger) I was pretending to be not hungry. That’s how I succeeded by believing and acting myself. Apart from that, we also play a role for empathy. Putting ourselves in the other’s shoes. This is likewise a role we do in our inner world and helps in our relationships.
To sum up, we are actually all actors. The people, places, times involved in our lives change these roles and we play these diverse roles every day. Even in our heads, we take on roles and adapt, which help us sustain our lives.
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