The Human Drama

Chagee Cafe at Nu Empire is my chosen place for my routine Saturday blogging session. All week, I was thinking about the topic of my article, juggling a few ideas. I wanted to write about our human propensity for creating drama. A quick search of my blog indicates that I've covered different aspects of this topic before: read The Arc of Karma, The Story of Our Lives, The Epic of Existence and The Story of Within. 

My thesis is that the human brain, operating at the everyday level of abstraction, takes stories as its natural unit of processing. Everything has to be dramatised -- meaning that it needs a narrative arc for the brain to find satisfying. While this can be used to motivate the masses or as a useful mnemonic device, the propensity for drama also has its drawbacks.

Sometimes we tend to create unnecessary drama when letting things pass is the wiser move. These situations often arise in social relationships, for example, between couples, family members and co-workers. "He didn't call today because he doesn't love me anymore"; "I'm always the one who has to take care of the kids";  "The boss is always giving him the high-profile projects". 

So much of the difficulty we find in human relationships originates from individuals creating unnecessary stories. We are the victim, and someone else is the bad guy. In reality, it was a natural unfolding of processes which played out the way it did, nothing more, nothing less. Why do we read so much into things?

Maybe drama is our way to overcome social ambiguity fast, perhaps for better cognitive efficiency. Beneath our story-creating and drama-creating is the need for certainty. We want to identify who is for or against us so that we know how to navigate going forward.  When people are neatly classified and stereotyped, we can focus our energy on who to help, avoid or fight.  Often, we would rather choose a dramatically wrong story than sit in quiet uncertainty. 

Fuelling the creation of drama in human relationships is the ego's need for attention. The ego has a gravitational force which seeks to attract recognition and attention. This can be achieved by either making itself relatively bigger, exaggerating its accomplishments, or putting others down. The ego provides the emotional energy, and the brain provides the dramatic rationale. 

We should expect lots of drama when we put different personalities together. We are all storytellers by nature. But let's remember, not every moment needs to be a stage. When our minds start spinning stories, notice it and step back. When we let go of the script, we discover that true happiness lies not in the drama but in the peace and simplicity of being.