The City Told Her Who To Be: How Fiction Replaces Our Inner Compass

Let’s start this blog with a strikingly relevant video:
What this video conveys might feel one way right now, but by the end of this blog, your interpretation of it may shift entirely.

Because that’s the point of this entire essay: how our perceptions, desires, and even our sense of self are often filtered through stories that aren’t ours. Watch it now, let it sit with you.

I became fascinated with why people think and act the way they do recently, particularly after I got into a relationship in the summer of 2022 where I met a fascinating person. Unlike anyone I’d ever met - sharp, simple, emotionally mature, and deeply reflective. Being around her made me start questioning not just who she was, but who I was, and whoever I had dated before. I started questioning what makes people different, and particularly how they become who they are.

Not just in the clinical psychology sense, but in everyday life – how our identities and choices are shaped. I began to suspect that many of us are not truly living by our inner compass, but rather following scripts handed to us by culture, media, and others. An incident with a friend recently brought this into sharp focus for me.

I went out to dinner with a close friend who had moved to Toronto. She arrived impeccably put-together, dressed like a walking Pinterest board, every detail polished and curated. In conversation, she smiled and made a comment that stopped me cold: “You’re like 'random male superstar and I’m like random female superstar,” she said. It wasn’t a joke or playful banter. It was as if she needed to frame both of us as characters in someone else’s story – an attempt to validate herself by comparing our lives to famous fictional personas. In that moment, I realized she wasn’t really speaking to me, but to an idea of herself that she felt she was “supposed” to be. She had placed herself inside a pre-approved narrative – the “superstar” identity – as if her real self wasn’t enough until it was filtered through a fictional, larger-than-life lens.

This urge to model ourselves on fiction or external images is more common than we think. Over a century ago, Oscar Wilde observed that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” arguing that people find certain “beautiful forms” in art which they then try to realize in their own lives. Indeed, we often consciously or unconsciously imitate fictional portrayals or cultural ideals in shaping our behavior. But as playwright George Bernard Shaw later cautioned, when life tries to imitate art, it can become “reprehensible” – people copy the idealized, romanticized versions of life they see in fiction, often to foolish ends. Shaw dryly noted that “men and women are made by their own fancies in the image of the imaginary creatures” from stories – but “only much stupider”, since real life can never measure up to these scripted ideals.

My friend’s need to cast herself as a fictional character exemplified this. Rather than engage authentically, she was performing a role she’d absorbed from media and society. It was as though fiction had replaced her inner guide, telling her who to be. This introduction uses one personal anecdote, but the pattern is widespread: many of us end up living “second-hand lives” – following culturally scripted paths, imitating heroes, celebrities, or what parents want, and in the process, losing sight of our own values and desires.

In the sections that follow, we will explore in depth how and why this happens. We’ll analyze how careers and social expectations can overwrite our personalities, how media narratives provide ready-made “scripts” that people slip into, and how this creates a gap between our true needs and the roles we play. We’ll see why some people choose performance over genuine feeling, and examine the psychological factors – from mimetic desire (imitating what others want) to fear and trauma – that keep us repeating these scripts. We’ll also discuss the consequences of living such an inauthentic life, including the regrets people express later in life for not being true to themselves. Finally, we’ll outline how to recognize the signs that you may be living someone else’s story and not your own, and explore ways to reclaim your inner compass so that “being an adult” doesn’t have to mean “pretending better” – it can mean “remembering who you really are.”

When You Become the Job – The “Corporate” Persona and Adult Identity

As the dinner went on, I gently pointed out to my friend that she seemed overly self-conscious and “corporate.” In her demeanor and speech, there was a formality and guardedness that hadn’t been there before. She laughed, almost proudly, and admitted: “That’s just the result of my corporate job in Toronto.” Then she added a justification that struck me: “This is part of being an adult.” In her mind, the anxiety and hyper-self-awareness that had changed her personality were simply the price of growing up and having a professional career.

I couldn’t stop turning that over in my head: since when did adulthood mean becoming someone entirely different? Certainly, maturing involves change – we take on responsibilities and roles – but does it require surrendering our inner self to the point of being unrecognizable? My friend had always been creative, relaxed, and spontaneous. Now she carried herself like an impeccably polite executive, armed with talking points and a cautious smile. It was as if she wore a mask labeled “Successful Young Professional,” and she’d been wearing it so long that it fused with her face.

Psychologists and sociologists have long noted that we often present a sort of “public self” that can differ from our private self. Erving Goffman’s famous dramaturgical theory compares social interaction to a performance: people put on a “front stage” persona when they know they are being watched, conforming to expected norms for the role or setting. In a workplace, especially in a competitive corporate culture, the pressure to perform a certain role can be intense. You internalize the company values, the professional jargon, and the polished LinkedIn-ready image. Over time, this external script can start to overwrite your internal narrative. My friend had spent years in a high-powered corporate environment where being poised, articulate, and “on brand” was not just encouraged but required. It had conditioned her behavior and even her thinking patterns. She was “way too conscious” of herself, as I put it, constantly monitoring how she came across, as if an invisible audience was always evaluating her.

This kind of “identity shift” in professional settings is not just anecdotal. Organizational psychologists describe something similar as “surface acting” or emotional labor – when workers must suppress their real feelings and put on an approved demeanor (cheerful service with a smile, or unflappable corporate professionalism) as part of the job. Over time, heavy surface acting can lead to stress and burnout, because of the internal conflict between one’s authentic feelings and the performed role. In my friend’s case, constantly curating herself to fit a corporate ideal had made her anxious and, by her admission, “a little neurotic.” She had effectively become the job – even outside of work hours, the corporate persona clung to her.

What’s troubling is that she rationalized this loss of spontaneity and authenticity as “just part of being an adult.” Many people do feel that shedding their youthful quirks and conforming to professional norms is a necessary maturation process. To some extent, we all adapt when we enter the adult world of work. However, there’s a difference between developing professionalism and losing your core identity. True maturity might involve growth around your core self – gaining new skills, becoming more responsible, rather than a complete erasure or masking of that core.

Surrendering one’s inner self to a job or role can have serious psychological costs. Alienation from one’s deeper values and identity is a known contributor to burnout. A 2025 article on burnout in Psychology Today noted that working “without purpose and meaning” or in ways that clash with your core values can lead to emotional exhaustion.
(Core Value topic is deeply layered. Often, what we believe are our core values are actually inherited, passed down from our parents, or shaped by the culture we grew up in. We continue acting on them, mistaking them for authentic instincts, when in reality, they’re responses to external conditioning. It’s what happens when you trust an intuition that’s already been hacked by outside prompts.)
When people are out of touch with their authentic values and needs, they may feel empty or disconnected – “we become different people when we feel different,” as the article puts it, destabilizing the sense of self. My friend’s anxious corporate shell, which she equated with adulthood, might have been giving her professional success and a paycheck (with benefits – “burnout now comes with dental,” as the saying goes), but it came at the price of a constant uneasy feeling. She laughed off her own anxiety, but I could tell it was draining her.

Crucially, being an adult does not have to mean “being an automaton.” Social pressure might lead us to act like robots sometimes – answering emails in corporate jargon, networking with a forced grin – but we risk losing touch with our genuine emotions if we never take the mask off. Psychologist Erich Fromm once described a modern individual “who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be.” Such a person’s “meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain,” Fromm wrote. This vivid description rings alarmingly true. My friend’s conversation had felt hollow, as if a script was speaking through her (pleasant small-talk and canned lines), rather than the real her. Her smiles and words were polished, but lacked the warmth and spontaneity I remembered. If we start to equate this automaton-like state with normal adulthood, it suggests we’ve collectively bought into a very bleak script.

Adulthood shouldn’t mean permanent performance mode. Yet society often sends that message: Grow up. Be serious. Curb your eccentricities. Play the part. This might help us “fit in” professionally or socially, but if taken too far, it can become a form of disassociation – “disassociation in a pantsuit,” as one commentator quipped, describing how people numb themselves and play a role in corporate life. The danger is waking up one day, successful on paper, but internally asking, “Who am I, really, and what happened to the real me?”

Living Out a Netflix Script – How Media Narratives Shape Our Reality

Later in our dinner, I asked my friend what had initially drawn her to get into this corporate job, but also why she moved to Toronto. Her answer took me by surprise in its simplicity: “You know I always wanted to be the girl who moves to a big city, wears nice clothes, finds love… You know, just like that movie.” That was it. She didn’t describe a personal dream or a concrete career opportunity. She described the plot of a romantic comedy.

I waited for more, but that was the answer. She had unknowingly lifted a life script straight from a film. What she was pursuing – the stylish urban lifestyle, the meet-cute romance, the high-rise condo – was essentially a copy of someone else’s storyline, “borrowed and taped over her own.” In her mind, moving to the big city was like the next episode in a show she had watched. She was living out a branded hallucination – a media-inspired daydream that had been sold to many of us: “big city, big dreams, trendy clothes, and serendipitous love.”

This is a powerful example of life imitating art. It’s not inherently bad to be inspired by fiction; stories can motivate and teach us. But problems arise when we can’t distinguish between our authentic aspirations and the narratives we’ve absorbed. Oscar Wilde’s notion that life imitates art suggests that people actively try to mold their lives to match art’s patterns. Sociologists might call these patterns “cultural scripts.” For instance, the trope of “young woman moves to the city to find herself and romance” is a common cultural script reinforced by countless books and movies. It offers a ready-made sequence of goals: move to hip city, land a cool job, meet charismatic partner, have quirky urban adventures. It’s packaged as a rite of passage for a fulfilling life, especially marketed toward young adults. My friend, consciously or not, had adopted this script as her own life plan.

Media portrayals can powerfully shape our expectations. Research in social psychology has shown that exposure to fictional narratives can influence what we find meaningful or desirable in life. We often internalize the journeys and outcomes seen on screen as templates. In my friend’s case, rather than asking “What truly makes me happy or fulfilled?”, it seems she asked “What would make my life feel like that chic movie I enjoyed?” The city life promised excitement and validation – a feeling of being, in her words, a “superstar.”

There’s even a pop-culture term for seeing oneself as the hero of a cinematic story: “main character syndrome.” It’s used to describe people who view their life as if they are the protagonist of a movie or show, sometimes to the extent of trivializing others as mere supporting characters. In its extreme form, main character syndrome can lead to narcissistic or solipsistic behavior – caring only about one’s own storyline and not others. In my friend’s case, I wouldn’t call her narcissistic, but she was definitely framing her decisions as scenes in a narrative. For example, she had even crafted a tragic subplot for herself: she admitted she had met a great guy who treated her well – someone she now regretted leaving. I asked why she didn’t reach out to him again, and she said, “It’s too late.” She delivered that line with the fatalistic tone of a rom-com heroine who realizes what she lost in the final act, but by convention, must live with the regret. In reality, there was nothing preventing her from calling him – no actual “too late” except the imaginary script in her head that said the chapter was closed. She was literally living in a scene where the woman concludes that the opportunity for love has passed and stoically moves on, rather than doing something unscripted like fighting for it or seeking closure.

It was a striking moment: the fictional narrative had more authority than real life opportunities. She was making life choices as if a screenwriter were dictating them. In fiction, we often see the trope that “you can’t go back” “it is what it is” or that someone walks away for dramatic effect. But real life is messier and offers second chances – if we choose to step outside the neat narrative structure. My friend, however, was not ready to deviate from the script she’d absorbed. The comfortable familiarity of that script – even though it led to an unhappy result – seemed to exert a stronger pull than the uncertainty of writing her own new story with that person.

This speaks to a phenomenon psychologists might call cognitive script rigidity, or more simply, being stuck in what you think your life is supposed to look like. When reality presented her with something genuine (a caring partner), it didn’t match her internalized “movie” expectations (perhaps she expected more drama or a different type of partner), so she rejected it. In her mind, the romance in the movie was the authentic one, and her real experience was an anomaly. We see here a dangerous inversion: fiction was perceived as more “real” or worthy than reality itself.

Social psychologist René Girard offers an explanation for why people often desire the things they see others (or characters) desiring. He coined the term “mimetic desire”, meaning that our desires are not entirely our own but are imitated from models in our social environment. Girard famously said, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. If a beloved film heroine yearns for the big-city life and finds it glamorous, viewers may begin to want that life because it was modeled as desirable. Girard noted that beyond our basic needs, almost all desires are influenced by seeing others want something. If I perceive a certain career or lifestyle as good, he wrote, it’s because someone else (whom I admire or consider a model) has shown it to be good. In my friend’s case, the “model” influencing her was a fictional character (and by extension, the writers and actors behind that character). The story had modeled a particular set of desires so compellingly that she adopted them as her own: the result was a kind of branded life trajectory – an attempt to copy a narrative that never actually belonged to her.

The risk of living out a Netflix script, or any fiction, is that it can lead to profound dissonance between expectation and reality. Movies often gloss over the mundane struggles and deep personal uncertainties that accompany major life changes like moving to a new city. They present a compressed, idealized narrative (even with a few setbacks for plot). When a person chases that narrative, they may feel confused or disappointed when real life doesn’t montages itself into a perfect success story. The “glitches in the script” – those moments when reality diverges from the expected plot – can make someone anxious or disheartened. Instead of re-evaluating the script, they may mistakenly conclude that they themselves are failing or that something’s wrong, when in fact it was the script that was unrealistic.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with moving to a city, dressing nicely, or seeking romance – those can be wonderful experiences. The issue is why one pursues these things. Is it out of genuine self-directed desire, or because you feel your life should look like a certain narrative? My friend’s story shows how thin the line can be between inspiration and imposition. A movie inspired her to dream big, which is fine, but that dream became an imposition when she felt obliged to follow the exact plot points, even at the cost of her own happiness (leaving a good relationship, enduring loneliness and anxiety to keep up a glam urban life). Her inner compass had effectively been replaced by the compass of a fictional character.

History and literature are full of examples of people shaped by the stories around them. Wilde’s idea of life imitating art suggests we often look to artifice to find forms of self-expression. In the 19th century, some romantics literally modeled themselves on Goethe’s hero Werther or Byron’s poetry personas, sometimes with tragic results. Today, our “art” is frequently mass media and social media. The characters might be Carrie Bradshaw moving to New York, or an Instagram influencer living a #goalworthy life. We have to ask: are we choosing our life paths freely, or are we cast in them by the cultural scripts we happen to fancy?

The Dissonance of the Dream – Performing Happiness vs. Actually Feeling It

My friend’s situation revealed a painful gap between what she said she wanted and what she actually did. She often claimed she wanted things like emotional security, genuine love, and a sense of “authentic” life. In quieter moments, she confessed to me that she was tired of superficial dating and yearned for someone who truly cared about her. She talked about wanting a slower pace sometimes, time to explore hobbies, maybe even moving to a less frantic environment one day. Yet, when those very opportunities presented themselves, she rejected them. The fun, caring boyfriend – she left him. The chance to step off the career treadmill – she clung to the prestigious corporate job instead. There was a massive dissonance between her professed desires and her chosen actions. Why?

The answer, it seemed, was that she wasn’t ready to feel those things she claimed to want. She was only ready to perform the version of herself that fit a successful narrative. Accepting the comfort of a loving relationship, or the calm of a life not centered on status, would require a kind of vulnerability and self-honesty that the “scripted” version of her wasn’t prepared for. It’s as though on some deep level, authentic contentment felt unfamiliar and “wrong” to her, whereas striving and performing felt normal.

This paradox is more common than it sounds. Many of us have, at one point, sabotaged something good in our lives or passed up an opportunity that aligned with our stated goals. Often, this is due to an internal psychological conflict. In my friend’s case, I suspect a few factors at play:

• Identity Investment in the Script: She had invested so much in the identity of the ambitious city girl that accepting a different happiness (like moving back home for love, or taking a less “cool” job for sanity) felt like failing the character she was playing. Psychologically, she likely derived self-worth from being seen as successful and cosmopolitan, according to that script. Changing course would mean admitting that the narrative wasn’t truly fulfilling, perhaps feeling she “wasted” years on it, which is hard to do. So, she doubled down.

• Fear of Authentic Emotion: Truly embracing love and contentment can be scary, especially if one has been in performance mode. Genuine intimacy requires letting your guard down. For someone anxious and self-conscious, it can feel safer to stick with what’s familiar – even if that’s loneliness or stress – than to venture into the uncertain territory of real emotional fulfillment. There’s a saying: “We reject the love we think we don’t deserve.” In her case, she might have felt deep down that the peaceful love offered by that guy was too easy, too un-dramatic, or maybe that she herself wasn’t ready to be loved without the pretenses. Healthy love, when you’re not used to it, can oddly feel uncomfortable. Psychologists note that people who have lived with chaotic or conditional relationships often find stable, healthy relationships “unfamiliar” and thus anxiety-provoking – their nervous system almost doesn’t know how to react, except to distrust it. They may even unconsciously gravitate back to familiar patterns of stress or drama because comfort can come from familiarity, not positivity. As one therapist put it, “Trauma can make what’s healthy feel unsafe – your gut might tell you something’s off simply because it’s calm, not because it truly is wrong.” In other words, what my friend thought was her intuition (“this isn’t right”) might have been a trauma-induced preference disguised as taste – a craving for the familiar stress of chasing a fantasy, rather than the unfamiliar calm of an attainable reality.

• The Allure of Performance and External Validation: She was, in a sense, addicted to the performance of her lifestyle. Wearing the right clothes, going to the right venues, projecting success – these gave her hits of external validation. People likely praised her exciting life, her Instagram posts from rooftop bars, and her high-profile job. That validation can be intoxicating, whereas the internal rewards of genuine happiness (which are quieter and invisible to others) might not have been enough to entice her yet. It’s hard to step off a stage when applause is all you’ve been trained to value. She kept acting out the role of the go-getter urbanite because that role won her social approval, whereas her inner self was by now a stranger whom she didn’t know how to value.

All of this led to a kind of cognitive dissonance – the psychological tension that arises from holding conflicting beliefs or desires. She said one set of values (authenticity, love, balance) but lived another (appearance, status, hustle). When confronted, a common rationalization is exactly what she said: “It’s just part of being an adult.” This phrase allowed her to reconcile the conflict by essentially saying, “My behavior is fine; it’s my idealistic desires that were childish.” In other words, she downgraded the importance of what her heart truly wanted and upgraded the narrative of hard-nosed adulthood. Psychologically, this is a coping mechanism – if we tell ourselves that sacrificing our deeper needs is normal and inevitable, we feel less tension about doing so.

However, calling something “just part of life” can also be a form of denial or fear. As I quietly thought that evening, “No – that’s not adulthood, that’s just being afraid.” It’s being afraid to break the script, to confront the possibility that you’ve been living by the wrong compass. It’s scary to admit, “Maybe I don’t want what I’ve been chasing. Maybe I’ve been numb or misled.” Instead, people often double down on the existing path, because changing direction would cause an identity crisis or require facing regret.

Speaking of regret, this brings a crucial perspective. What happens if someone lives their whole life this way? One day, the performance ends, the audience is gone (or you get too tired to continue the act), and you’re left with your choices. Here’s where the wisdom of those who have lived longer becomes invaluable. Palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware famously recorded the top regrets of people on their deathbeds, and the number one regret was this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”. This regret was more common than any other, suggesting that at the end of life, many realize they were performing roles or meeting expectations at the expense of their own true desires. Crucially, the biggest regrets were not about things people did and failed, but things they never tried or did on someone else’s terms. As my friend and I talked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was already making peace with future regret – she was in her 20s, but saying “It’s too late” about love, or “that’s just how life is” about losing herself. It was as if she were prematurely accepting a life of “what-ifs”.

Research supports that regrets of inaction (things not done) tend to haunt people more in the long run than regrets of action. Psychologists Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich have found that people’s most enduring regrets often involve not following their ideal selves or dreams – failing to live up to their “ideal self” – rather than mistakes made in following duties or avoiding mistakes. In other words, the dreams left unpursued, the authentic self left undiscovered, are the regrets that linger hardest. My friend’s statement that “it’s too late” to reach out to a good man she lost was precisely the kind of needless, premature resignation that might become an enduring regret. It wasn’t actually too late at all; it was only too late in the script she was emulating.

So why do so many people, like my friend, keep repeating these same scripts even when they lead to unhappiness? The comfortable answer is that we’re “just doing what we’re supposed to”. The uncomfortable answer is that many of us are deeply afraid – afraid of the unknown, afraid of our feelings, and even afraid of our own freedom to choose differently. We mimic and we roleplay because it feels safer than facing the open terrain of our unique path. We confuse mimicry with maturity, as I realized that night. True maturity might actually be the opposite: having the courage to stop mimicking when it no longer serves you, and to carve out a life that might not follow a familiar script at all.

Why We Keep Repeating the Same Scripts – External Influence, Contaminated “Gut Instincts,” and Fear

By now, it’s clear that external scripts – whether from society, media, or peer expectations – can heavily influence an individual’s life choices. But one might ask: why don’t people just follow their heart or intuition? Wouldn’t that correct the course? The trouble is, after years of being conditioned and primed by outside influences, even what we think is our “heart” or “gut instinct” may not be truly our own voice. Our very intuition can become contaminated by social conditioning and past psychological wounds. This makes breaking free of repetitive scripts especially challenging.

First, let’s consider the role of social and cultural conditioning on our desires. From childhood onward, we are bombarded with messages about what we should strive for – from parents (“be a doctor, that’s the secure choice”), from schools (“get good grades, get into a top college”), from peer groups (“everyone is getting married by 30”), and of course from media (“this is what success looks like,” “this is what love looks like”). Over time, these messages can crystallize into powerful inner voices that we might mistake for our own aspirations. The phenomenon of introjection is relevant here – it’s a concept in psychology where we internalize other people’s ideas or expectations as if they were our own.

When my friend moved to the city chasing the rom-com life, she probably felt it was her dream. In reality, that dream was an amalgam of introjected cultural ideals. But to her, it felt like following her heart. How many of us are certain that what we want is truly what we want, rather than what we’ve been conditioned to want? It’s a tough question. René Girard’s mimetic theory, as mentioned, suggests that much of what we desire is copied from others. Luke Burgis, a writer who expanded on Girard, advises people to identify their “models of desire” – those individuals or characters who inform what they want. He points out that some models are external (celebrities, fictional characters, influencers we don’t personally know) and some are internal (people in our actual lives like friends, colleagues, family). External models broadcast desires one-way – we might idolize a celebrity’s lifestyle without any interaction – whereas internal models involve mutual influence (we and our peers shape each other). Social media blurs this by making everyone feel equally accessible and thus influential. The key is that if we don’t realize this process is happening, we will blindly chase desires that were planted in us, not born from us.

Modern society often reinforces the same few scripts for success or happiness, which is why people’s lives end up looking strangely similar in pattern. For example, as Girard noted, a diverse group of college students might start with varied interests, but by graduation many all covet the same limited set of jobs (say, high-paying finance or tech roles) because they imitated each other’s definitions of success, leading to a “convergence of desire” and rivalry. Likewise, in lifestyle, we see trends where everyone suddenly wants the same type of wedding, the same travel destinations, the same “bucket list” experiences – fueled by seeing each other and media models want those things. We create feedback loops of desire. Breaking out of that requires conscious reflection to identify, “Is this something I genuinely want, or something I’ve been told I should want?” Burgis suggests literally mapping out these influences in your life. For instance, if my friend had done that, she might have written “The Devil Wears Prada movie” or “Sex and the City” as external models of the glamorous city life she pursued, and perhaps certain high-achieving friends as internal models pushing her toward a corporate path. Seeing it on paper can be eye-opening: you realize your so-called goals might trace back to a screenplay or someone else’s Instagram, not your soul.

Now, what about intuition? We often hear advice like “trust your gut” or “follow your heart.” But if your gut has been fed a steady diet of other people’s values and unresolved fears, it can lead you astray. In the case of my friend, her “gut” told her that rekindling things with her good ex was “impractical” or “too late.” Was that really intuition? Or was it fear speaking – fear shaped by every tragic love story she absorbed, by pride, and perhaps by the narrative that “the one that got away” is just a part of life? Her real inner voice – had it not been distorted – might have said, “I’m lonely and I miss someone who was kind to me; reach out.” But the louder internalized voice said, “No, that’s not how the story goes. Don’t be weak. Keep up the image.”

Fear often masquerades as rational intuition. We convince ourselves that not taking a risk is “for the best” when really, we’re just scared of a possible plot twist we can’t control. Moreover, as mentioned, if someone has grown accustomed to a certain level of chaos or stress, a calm opportunity can register as suspicious. Their gut may literally send danger signals in a healthy situation because it’s outside their comfort zone. “You call it intuition, but it’s actually a trauma response,” as one therapist insightfully put it – “Trauma can feel like instinct when your nervous system has only known chaos. So even healthy love feels unfamiliar, unsafe.”. In other words, a person can feel an internal aversion or alarm toward exactly the things that would be good for them, simply because those things don’t fit the pattern they’re used to.

Therefore, telling someone in my friend’s shoes to “just follow your heart” isn’t sufficient – first, they must disentangle which inner voice is truly theirs and which is an echo of conditioning or fear. This is hard work. It might require therapy, honest self-reflection, even temporary withdrawal from the noise of one’s social environment to hear oneself think.

Another force at play is simply habit and inertia. Humans are creatures of habit. Once we start down a script, invest years in it – it becomes hard to let go. There’s sunk cost fallacy: “I’ve already come this far being this person, I can’t change now.” There’s also external reinforcement: friends, family, and followers come to know you as the persona you’ve projected. If you suddenly break the script, you risk disappointing people or causing confusion. The fear of social fallout or of “who am I if I’m not this?” keeps people stuck.

And then there’s pride. Admitting that the path you’re on is not actually fulfilling can feel like admitting failure, especially if you’ve outwardly championed that path. My friend had proudly shown off her cool life for a while; to say “I’m not actually happy” would be humbling. Many keep the facade, hoping at some point it will pay off with actual happiness. It’s like doubling down on a bad bet because you don’t want to admit you lost.

In summary, we keep repeating scripts not because we are incapable of change, but because multiple psychological locks keep the script in place: External programming (society/media) sets the stage, fear and trauma skew our internal compasses, habit and sunk costs cement the routine, and pride/identity makes it painful to acknowledge the need for change. All of these can make a contrived life feel inescapably “normal.”

Yet, escaping the script is possible. The first key is awareness – recognizing these forces. My friend started to have glimmers of awareness (she could articulate that she wanted authenticity). But awareness without action leads to cynicism or despair. The next sections will look at how to spot when you are living a “second-hand life” and then how to begin reclaiming your real one.

Before that, let’s delve a bit more into how pervasive and insidious these “manufactured identities” can be – so much so that our entire life can become, as I phrased it, “a cover band version of who we could’ve been.”

The Parasite of Manufactured Identity – How Society Embeds in Our Psychological Code

Think of your identity – your beliefs, preferences, ambitions – as software code running in your mind. Now consider how much of that code was written by you versus by outside influences. It’s a disconcerting thought. Social media, films, peer groups, family expectations, cultural norms: these don’t just superficially influence us; they can embed themselves deep in our psyche, like parasites hitching a ride in our source code. Unless we periodically debug and examine our core programming, we could live our whole lives executing on subroutines that were implanted by others.

One dramatic way to illustrate this is the experience of fumbling or rejecting something good in life because it “doesn’t fit the algorithm we were trained on.” My friend’s story of rejecting a good partner is a perfect example. If her internal algorithm (shaped by years of media and maybe past tumultuous relationships) says “love must look like X and come at Y time and feel like Z drama,” then a real person offering love outside those parameters won’t register correctly. She literally could not recognize healthy love for what it was because her internal model was calibrated to a different pattern. Many of us do this: we dismiss or overlook excellent potential friends, partners, or opportunities because they don’t match the “search image” in our head – an image often placed there by cultural archetypes or old traumas.

Consider how someone might reject a great job offer in a field they secretly love because society deems it less prestigious than the corporate job, causing them to burn out. Or someone might push away a friend who genuinely cares because they’re used to chasing approval from a colder, popular crowd. We often “keep fumbling good people because they don’t fit the algorithm we were trained on.” We pursue things that do fit the algorithm (the high-stress job with status, the aloof partner who seems cool) even if those things harm us, because they feel right in that they are familiar. It’s the mimetic cycle Girard described: we desire what we are taught to desire, even if it hurts us.

Social media has amplified this effect dramatically. It provides an endless stream of “models” for what our lives should look like. It’s not just that we compare ourselves to others (though we do, incessantly); it’s that we start to curate ourselves to match what is rewarded online. There is a term “the curated self”, where one’s identity presentation is carefully controlled to project an ideal image on social platforms. People essentially become brand managers of themselves, turning their lives into content. They may start making life choices with an eye to how it will appear or “fit the brand.” For example, choosing vacation spots, hobbies, even opinions, because those align with a certain persona they’ve built. Research confirms that self-expression on social media is often idealized and unrealistic, and users act like “virtual curators” of their identity, staging and editing their posts to present an enhanced life.

While this doesn’t automatically rewrite one’s inner identity, over time, the performative aspect can boomerang inward. If you spend years posting only happy, photogenic moments and receiving likes, you might start to prioritize those moments in real life over others (because they align with your online persona’s “script”). Similarly, if you become known as the fashionable career person, you may invest ever more in that identity, at the expense of neglected parts of yourself that don’t make it to the public stage.

What we end up with is a person who is living a life that is a copy of a copy. They are imitating societal ideals (which themselves are sometimes imitations of fiction or marketing), essentially becoming a cover band performing well-known hits of “success” or “coolness” rather than composing an original life song. They might look successful and happy externally, but it’s a simulation. My friend’s sleek condo felt to her more like a “simulation than a home.” That line of mine wasn’t just metaphor – modern environments can indeed feel unreal when one’s life script is driven by external images. It’s the sense of déjà vu in your own life: “Is this really me living this, or am I just going through motions I’ve seen before?”

At a societal level, this phenomenon is widespread. Erich Fromm’s automaton quote earlier hints that whole societies can produce individuals who all act according to the same shallow script. People become almost interchangeable if they’re all following the same template of success or happiness marketed to them. In such a scenario, authenticity becomes a rare commodity. Individuality gets swallowed by the collective narrative.

Let’s talk about the “parasite” metaphor more concretely. Social conditioning can be thought of as a parasite in that it needs a host (your mind) to replicate certain memes or behaviors. For example, consumer culture implants the idea that buying certain products equals success. That idea “lives” in people’s heads and drives them to work jobs they hate just to afford the luxury goods, thus propagating the consumerist cycle. Similarly, a narrative like “you must have a picture-perfect wedding and marriage by age 30” can parasitically drive people into relationships or huge expenditures that don’t actually make them happy, but satisfy the narrative. The narrative gets “fulfilled”, but the person inside it might feel strangely empty once they check the box, because it wasn’t truly theirs.

One striking example of escaping a scripted system of desire comes from the world of haute cuisine. Chef Sébastien Bras, who had held three Michelin stars for 18 years, made headlines in 2018 by asking to relinquish his stars. Why? He realized that “striving to maintain [the] three Michelin stars year in and year out had kept him from experimenting” and from remembering his original passion for cooking. Chasing the Michelin script – the expectation of perfection according to an external rating – became a “system of desire” he was trapped in. Bras reflected that he became a chef to share the authentic cuisine of his region with the world, “not to become a slave to a ratings system.”. So he made the radical decision to extract himself from that system, to break the script (one that many chefs would kill to be in, by the way) in order to regain his freedom and creativity. This real story shows how powerful external scripts can be – even one of the most lauded chefs felt enslaved by the narrative of maintaining stars. And it shows that reclaiming your path often requires bold moves and re-focusing on your personal values (in his case, creativity and local authenticity over international prestige).

Now, not everyone is in a position to make such dramatic breaks. But the principle stands: you have to identify what “system” you’re caught in. Are you climbing a career ladder because you actually enjoy the climb, or just because someone told you it’s the ladder to climb? Are you sticking with a lifestyle or social scene because it truly nourishes you, or because long ago you internalized that it’s what “cool” or successful people do?

One more layer to examine is how reward systems in society reinforce manufactured identities. Modern environments – workplaces, social platforms, etc. – often reward performance over genuineness. If your workplace only praises you when you conform and never when you dissent or bring your full self, you’ll likely perform. If your social media followers engage more when you post glamorous shots than when you share a vulnerable thought, you’ll lean into the glamour. We respond to incentives. Over time, living in an environment that rewards a false self will gradually silence the real self. It’s a survival strategy – you give them what gets applause. But the real you “doesn’t survive well in environments that reward performance.” When an environment consistently values only a certain side of you, the rest of you atrophies from disuse or hides in protection.

We see this tragically in many personal lives: the person who was the life of the party and always agreeable, who never let others see their sadness, until one day they have a breakdown, because the environment rewarded the happy-go-lucky persona and they felt they had to disown their depression or depth. Or the opposite: someone who plays the role of stoic provider, never admitting they need help or tenderness, because society rewards their tough, self-sufficient act, until it crushes them internally.

We’ve built a culture that in many ways feeds the parasite and starves the host. By that, I mean it feeds the manufactured persona (with likes, promotions, clout) and neglects the person underneath. This is why so many people who seem to “have it all” end up feeling empty or going into therapy to “find themselves” after years of playing roles. They had optimized their life for the story but not for the soul.

So, how do we reclaim our soul from these invasive scripts? The first step is to see it, to name it. One must realize, “My life has been heavily scripted by X, Y, Z influences. That’s not necessarily my fault – programming happens to everyone – but now it’s my responsibility to rewrite the code.” This is painful – it involves confronting the fact that some portion of your life might feel inauthentic. But it’s also liberating, because once you identify the foreign lines of code, you can start debugging.

Let’s proceed to some concrete signs that indicate a life might be “second-hand” or scripted, and not truly self-driven. Recognizing these signs is crucial for anyone who wonders if they have been drifting off their genuine course.

How to Spot If You’re Living a Second-Hand Life

It can be remarkably difficult to diagnose in oneself that you’re living according to a script rather than your own compass. However, there are red flags – telltale patterns of thought and behavior – that signal you might be living a life influenced more by fiction, social scripts, or others’ expectations than by your authentic self. Here are some major signs to watch for, along with why they matter:

• You reference fictional stories or characters more than your own values or experiences. If, when making decisions or giving advice (even just to yourself), you find that you frequently think “What would [favorite TV character] do?” or “It’s just like in [movie] when this happened…”, take note. While stories can provide insight, over-reliance on them might mean you haven’t developed your own guiding principles. Your personal values should ideally come from your real-life beliefs and reflections. If instead, you’re mentally consulting the writers of Friends or The Office or Marvel movies for how to live, you might be outsourcing your moral and practical compass to pop culture. For example, someone might avoid a genuine heartfelt gesture because “nobody does that in the shows, it would be cringey.” But real life isn’t a show, and our values shouldn’t be limited to a scriptwriter’s range. Fictional references can also create a filter: you start measuring your life events against whether they’re “movie-worthy” or “picture-perfect,” rather than whether they align with your personal growth or relationships. If you notice this tendency in yourself, try to deliberately articulate what your value is in a situation (“I value honesty” or “I value kindness even if it’s awkward”), without quoting a fictional example. It can feel strange at first, but it’s a way to ensure you’re speaking in your own voice.

• You idolize or admire fictional characters or celebrity personas, yet you dismiss or push away real people who genuinely care about you. This is a major sign of a second-hand orientation. Psychologically, it’s often easier to love a fictional or distant ideal than to deal with the messy, sometimes challenging love from real humans. Fictional characters (or carefully curated celebrities) are designed to be appealing – they have scripted virtues, and even their flaws are often endearing or dramatically resolved. Real people, on the other hand, can annoy us, bore us, or require compromise. If you find that you yearn for the kind of friends, partners, or family dynamics you see on screen, yet you overlook or undervalue the companionship offered by actual people in your life, it’s time to recalibrate. For instance, someone might think, “Why can’t my partner be more like [fictional heartthrob] who always knows the right thing to say?” – meanwhile ignoring that their real partner shows love in quieter, less cinematic ways (like doing small helpful tasks or being loyal). Or one might devote hours to online fandom for a celebrity while ignoring texts from a longtime friend. The allure of the fictional/celebrity figure is that they can’t truly make demands on us – the relationship is one-sided (what psychologists call parasocial relationships). They give us emotional reward without requiring vulnerability in return. A clinical sexologist, Chloe Scotney, pointed out that fictional characters often embody only the most charismatic, romanticized traits of humans, “things we just don’t tend to encounter” so perfectly in real life. They are heroes or charming rogues whose flaws are usually presented in a lovable way. Real caregivers or friends might not seem as exciting, but their care is real. If you catch yourself preferring fantasy over reality repeatedly, it may indicate a fear of the vulnerability and imperfections of real relationships. Importantly, fiction won’t be there to hold your hand when you’re in trouble – only real people can. So nurturing those real bonds, even if they feel less glossy than fiction, is crucial for a fulfilling life.

• Your focus is on looking good or being successful more than on feeling good or being emotionally healthy. In other words, aesthetics and optics take precedence over inner well-being. Do you spend far more time and energy crafting your appearance, your social media feed, your résumé – essentially your image – than you do on introspection, mental health, or nurturing your inner life? Modern culture, with its Instagram filters and constant status updates, pushes us to live aesthetically. There’s even a common saying, “When you look good, you feel good,” reflecting the belief that outward appearance creates inner positivity. And yes, dressing well and taking care of yourself physically can boost confidence to a degree. But it’s far from the whole truth. A person can look like they have it all together while privately falling apart. We’ve all heard of the glamorous celebrity who was deeply depressed behind the scenes. If you catch yourself neglecting your “emotional hygiene” – things like reflecting on your feelings, addressing stress or trauma, maintaining healthy relationships – while ensuring your outfits or Instagram posts are perfect, that’s a red flag. One therapist cleverly noted that checking your emotional state should be as routine as checking that you put on deodorant. In other words, tending to your mental and emotional health is as basic (and important) as physical hygiene. Yet, in a script-led life, people often treat inner well-being as secondary, something to be “handled” quietly (or ignored), while outward achievements and looks get front stage. Remind yourself that appearances can be deceiving – looking good is not the same as being good or feeling at peace. If you realize you’ve been using makeup, fashion, a car, a job title, or other status symbols to paper over internal issues, that’s a sign the script (which values those symbols) has overridden your self-care. Consider rebalancing: maybe schedule “inner work” the way you schedule salon visits or workouts. Journaling, therapy, meditation, and honest chats with friends – these are equivalent to showers for the soul. Don’t skip them in favor of just polishing the surface.

• You routinely ignore or rationalize away your gut feelings and personal intuitions as “impractical” or “silly.” One thing about scripts – whether cultural or narrative – is that they often come with rationales. “This is the right thing to do because that’s what successful people do,” etc. Meanwhile, your own gut may sometimes protest, “I’m unhappy” or “This doesn’t feel right.” If you’ve been trained to trust the script over your internal barometer, you’ll dismiss those feelings. For example, you might stay in a prestigious job that gives you anxiety attacks because you tell yourself it’s impractical to quit – everyone says it’s the dream job, so you ignore your misery. Or you might remain in a social circle that stresses you out because, logically, they are the “cool crowd,” and you don’t listen to your loneliness among them. Ignoring your gut repeatedly is dangerous. Research has shown that when people go against their own better judgment due to someone else’s advice or pressure, they often end up with more regret and self-blame if things go wrong, compared to if they had trusted themselves. In a Cornell study, participants who followed bad advice against their initial instinct felt worse and more responsible afterward – they kept thinking “I knew the better choice and I didn’t do it”. The takeaway is: your intuition is part of you for a reason. While it can be skewed by trauma as discussed, a persistent gut feeling of distress or longing is worth listening to and examining, not dismissing out of hand. If you notice that you label your heartfelt desires or discomforts as “impractical,” pause and ask: Impractical according to whom? Often, it’s by the metrics of the script, not your true well-being. Of course, we must balance intuition with reason, but habitually silencing your inner voice means you’re likely following someone else’s script at your own expense. As one of the researchers, Sunita Sah, said, “Our research highlights the importance of rejecting suggestions that go against our better judgment…. You end up feeling worse when you ignore what you knew was the better choice.”. Your life is ultimately yours to live with the consequences, so if your gut is waving a red flag, don’t just say, “Well, the plan says I should ignore that.” Investigate it.

• You have started making peace with long-term regrets or unfulfilled dreams, even though you still have time to address them. This is a quieter but poignant sign. If you catch yourself thinking things like, “I guess I’ll never pursue X passion – that’s just life,” or “Maybe some people find love, but I won’t – and that’s okay,” and you’re only 25, or 35, or even 55, ask why you’re resigning yourself so early. It’s one thing to accept what you genuinely don’t want; it’s another to settle in for regret while change is still possible. Often, the script can create a sense that life must unfold a certain way, and if it hasn’t by a set script-point (say, by age 30, or after having kids, etc.), then that chapter is closed. This is false. Real life is full of late bloomers and second acts. The scripted mind, however, is inflexible and fatalistic: “Nope, can’t change now, roll credits.” For instance, my friend saying, “It’s too late” to message a man she regretted leaving, even though in real terms it wasn’t too late at all. Or someone might think, “I always wanted to study art, but who am I kidding, I’m stuck in this career” – when in fact they could start taking classes at night. If you find yourself comforting your present discontent with a narrative like “Well, that’s just the regret I have to live with,” pause. You might be in the middle of your story, not the end. That narrative of “life goes on, nothing to be done now” can be a convenient way to avoid risk or effort. It’s easier, psychologically, to say “I have no choice” than to say “I choose not to try, because trying is scary.” Many older people, as mentioned, deeply regret not trying for their dreams or loves. If you’re young enough to still do something, almost any regret is worth at least an attempt at repair or pursuit. Don’t let a fictional trope of “missed chance” or a social timeline dictate what’s possible. Until you’re literally on your deathbed, most “too late” is just a mental barrier.

• When someone asks you, “Why are you doing this?” – whether “this” is your job, your relationship, your lifestyle – you struggle to find an answer that comes from you. Instead, you might cite a parent’s advice, society’s norm, a trend, a quote from a movie, or even say, “I don’t know, it’s what everyone does.” If your reasons for major life choices sound like they could apply to anyone or come out of a generic self-help article, you might not be fully in touch with your personal motivations. A “you-based answer” would involve your specific passions, joys, values, or even acceptable trade-offs. For example, “I’m in this career because I genuinely love solving technical problems and it provides for my family, which matters to me.” That’s a you-based reason. A script-based reason might be, “Well, it’s a respectable field and it’s what I studied so I just kind of stayed.” The latter doesn’t reveal any personal endorsement of the choice, just an absence of objection and an appeal to external logic. If you don’t have a compelling internal why for something as significant as your livelihood or your partnership, that’s a sign you may be on autopilot. Similarly, if your answer is, “Because that’s what one is supposed to do at my age/stage/etc.,” that’s clearly an external script speaking. Nobody wrote a law that “thou shalt do X by age Y,” yet these unwritten cultural expectations often drive us. Try this thought exercise: whatever your situation, imagine you were born in a different country or a different era – would you make the same choices? If you struggle to justify why you’re doing what you do outside of context (“because it’s what people in my environment do”), then how much of you is really in it?

If several of these points resonate uncomfortably, don’t panic – most of us will identify with at least a couple. We live in a highly interconnected world that primes us to live second-hand to some extent. Recognizing these signs is a victory in itself because it means you can start questioning and reclaiming those parts of your life. It’s like realizing you’ve been sleepwalking – once you know, you can try to wake up.

In the next section, we’ll discuss the flipside: what the “real you” is like, why it’s hard to keep in focus, and why it’s absolutely worth rediscovering and protecting.

The Real You Can’t Be Branded – Rediscovering Authentic Self in a Performative World

Amid all this talk of scripts and performances, it’s worth emphasizing a fundamental truth: each of us does have a real, core self – one that exists independent of the roles we play or the masks we wear. This authentic self is often quieter and less flashy than the “branded” personas we show to the world. It doesn’t package well into an Instagram bio or a LinkedIn headline. It may not fit neatly into any single narrative genre. Sometimes, it may even strike us as “boring” because it’s not curated for constant stimulation – it’s just us, in our raw form, complete with oddities and ordinary aspects. But it is always honest.

The tragedy, as we’ve explored, is that the real self “doesn’t survive well in environments that reward performance.” When every signal around you – from school to work to media – tells you that you must act a certain way to be liked or successful, the real you tends to get suppressed. Over time, you might almost forget what it feels like to be genuine. Many people eventually end up in therapy or soul-searching retreats, essentially trying to “find themselves” after years (or decades) of being who they thought others wanted to see. It’s like taking off a costume only to realize you’re not sure what your own skin looks like anymore.

So, who is the “real you”? It’s you that perhaps existed in childhood before you became self-conscious. It’s the part of you that has spontaneous likes, dislikes, dreams, and feelings that aren’t calculated for approval. It’s the voice that might pipe up in a quiet moment to say, “I love this,” or “I miss that,” or “I feel hurt,” even if saying so doesn’t win you any immediate benefit. The real you might be “boring” in that it enjoys simple pleasures that don’t make a splash on social media – maybe you love eating cereal while reading comic books on a Saturday, or you feel more deeply moved chatting with an old friend on a walk than attending a high-profile party. The real you might be “raw” in that it carries pain or vulnerability – perhaps you’re deeply anxious about being alone, or you have a long-held sadness about something, things that the polished persona would never admit. The real you is “always honest” in the sense that your feelings are genuine, not performative: when you laugh alone at a silly meme, that’s real; when you laugh at a client’s unfunny joke, that’s manufactured.

Reconnecting with the real self often requires safe, non-judgmental environments, because years of performance can make us guarded. This is why people often say they feel most “themselves” around certain friends, or family, or even pets – those who accept them without pretense. Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist, emphasized the importance of “unconditional positive regard” (being accepted without conditions) in allowing the true self to emerge and thrive. In a judgmental environment, we tend to show only the acceptable parts of ourselves; in a warm, safe space, we can risk showing the rest. Rogers also talked about congruence – the alignment between your real self and your outer self – and saw it as key to well-being. When there’s a big gap (incongruence) because you’re living out some ideal self imposed by conditions of worth, it leads to distress and “strangling demands” on the psyche. This is essentially what we’ve been describing: the stress and anxiety of having to always meet an external standard at the expense of your authentic needs.

Let’s consider concrete consequences when the real self is sidelined by the performative self:

• In relationships, You might end up in partnerships that look good on paper or impress others, but don’t actually fulfill you emotionally. Or you might never truly let your partner know you, so there’s always a distance. People leave good partners often not because the partner was lacking, but because they themselves weren’t present authentically to connect. If you’re performing the role of “perfect spouse” or “independent no-needs partner” or whatever script, your partner never gets to truly love you – they only love the act, and you feel unseen (whose fault is it if you never showed yourself?). Over the years, this is lonely and unsustainable. The relationship either ends or becomes a cold arrangement. Healthy love requires vulnerability and being known, which can only happen if you drop the act. It’s telling that my friend and many others sometimes pine for a lost love after it’s over; perhaps only then do they realize the person actually saw glimpses of their real self or offered a chance at genuine intimacy, which they pushed away. Real connection is a risk, but a necessary one for not ending up emotionally isolated.

• In career and achievements: You might achieve impressive things, only to find them hollow. A classic example: someone slaves away to become a doctor or lawyer because that was the prestige script, and they do it – success! Except they hate the daily work and feel empty. They followed the formula and got the reward, but it doesn’t mean much to their inner self. Or consider the many stories of corporate professionals who burn out and then realize they’d rather be teachers, or open a small bakery, or travel modestly – something more aligned with their heart. If you ignore your passions (say you love art but never pursue it because it’s not “practical”), you could end up with what society calls success, but a persistent sense of “is this all there is?” Burnout is another risk: it often happens not just from hard work, but from working against the grain of your values or identity for too long. Psychologists have noted that operating out of sync with your core self (having to fake emotions or motivation) is exhausting and a recipe for burnout. Conversely, people who find authenticity in their work tend to have greater resilience and satisfaction. A 2020 study in Nature Communications found that social media users who expressed themselves more authentically (closer to their true personality) reported greater life satisfaction and positive mood. This suggests that authenticity is deeply tied to well-being – when you can be yourself, you simply feel better, across contexts.

• In mental health: Living a lie (even a socially rewarded one) can lead to anxiety, depression, or a sense of meaninglessness. There’s a term in psychology – incongruence – for when there’s a disconnect between one’s self-concept and one’s real experiences. It often results in internal tension. If every day you go out and behave like someone you aren’t, you send signals to your brain that “who I am isn’t acceptable.” That’s a devastating message to live with, even subconsciously. Over the years, it can manifest as chronic anxiety (always fearing your real self will slip out and be judged) or depression (feeling hopeless about being understood or valued for who you truly are). On the flip side, environments or relationships where you can be authentic often feel therapeutic. Many have experienced that relief of being around a person who “gets you” and thinking, “Ah, I can breathe and just be me.” Imagine cultivating a life where you don’t have to constantly brace yourself like that – it’s a huge relief and foundation for good mental health.

• In personal growth, If you’re always playing a defined role, you might actually stunt your growth. Roles come with expected behaviors and boundaries. For example, if you see yourself as the “overachiever,” you might not allow yourself to explore activities you aren’t good at, or if you’re the “party girl,” you might feel you can’t show studious or serious interests. The real you is multifaceted and can evolve. But a persona can become a straitjacket. People often feel in midlife, after fulfilling all the duties, a crisis of “Who am I? What do I want now?” because their genuine interests were put on hold. Rediscovering things like hobbies, curiosity, creativity – these are parts of the real self coming up for air after being submerged by years of single-minded performing (for work or for social acceptance). The earlier you let those facets have room, the richer and more resilient your sense of self becomes.

To nurture the real you, start valuing things that can’t be branded or quantified easily. As a society, we’ve gotten used to treating ourselves like a brand or a character – something to market. But your real self isn’t a brand; it’s a being. It doesn’t exist to be marketable or impressive. It exists to experience life genuinely. Think about moments when you’ve felt a profound sense of “this is me.” It could be doing a quiet activity you love, or talking candidly with someone, or standing up for something you truly believe in, despite it being unpopular. Those moments might not have brought you fame or money; in fact, maybe no one else even knows about them. But they are golden because they’re when you are aligned internally and externally.

One interesting finding is that authentic self-expression can directly enhance well-being – it’s not just a lofty ideal. In the study of Facebook users mentioned, people whose online expressions were closer to their true personality actually had more life satisfaction. Moreover, an experiment in that study showed that encouraging people to post more authentically caused improvements in mood. In another sense, psychologist Steven Stosny wrote about burnout prevention and noted that acting consistently with one’s deeper values (which is part of authenticity) yields “a stronger sense of self [and] stable well-being,”. Authenticity essentially means you’re living in integrity with yourself, which reduces inner conflict.

Of course, the challenge is that being real often doesn’t yield immediate external rewards – in fact, it can bring external resistance because you’re no longer perfectly fulfilling others’ expectations. Your social media might become less curated (maybe fewer likes, but more genuine connections). Your career might shift (perhaps less prestige, but more passion). Some people in your life might not understand the changes. It can be a bumpy transition as you reorient from outside-in living to inside-out living. That’s why having supportive people (or even one person) who values the real you is invaluable. If you don’t have that person, a good therapist can play that role as a start, providing a safe space to let your guard down and hear your own voice again.

One heartening thing is that authenticity tends to attract the right people and opportunities in the long run. When you’re being genuine, you’re like a radio frequency sending out a clear signal – others on that wavelength will find you. It might be fewer people than the crowd that responds to a flashy persona, but they’ll be your people. Likewise, doing what you truly love might not make you rich, but it could lead to a career or creative outlet that you wake up excited for, and that gives energy rather than solely draining it.

I recall a quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” It’s a witty reminder that trying to live as a copy of someone else not only betrays your uniqueness but is ultimately futile – you can never outdo the original at being them. You can, however, be the best version of you, and that’s something nobody else can replicate or compete with. It’s also worth noting that even if you could fulfill every script perfectly, time would show the emptiness of it. The top regrets of the dying we discussed – not living true to oneself – underscore that in the final account, what matters most is that you lived your life. Not your parents’ life, not your peers’ life, not the life trending on TikTok, but your singular journey.

So, the real you might not make sense as a “brand”. It might not be neatly definable in a tagline. It may be complex and evolving. Good. That means you’re a living human, not a logo or a product. Embrace that. The discomfort you might feel as you let go of image management is just the shell cracking so you can grow.

Now, having recognized the problem and the importance of authenticity, the final question is: How do we change course? How do we, in practical terms, not let the script decide our ending? That’s where awareness turns into action.

Don’t Let the Script Decide Your Ending – Reclaiming Your Inner Compass

By this point, we’ve journeyed through the problem landscape: how easy it is to live by fiction and expectation, and the toll it takes. The good news is that it’s never too late to reclaim authorship of your own life story. You do not have to stick to the script handed to you. If you’ve recognized parts of yourself in the scenarios above, you’ve already done one of the hardest parts – acknowledging the issue. Now comes the empowering part: taking steps to course-correct so that when you reach the final chapters of life, you can feel, “I was true to myself, I wrote my own story.”

Here are some strategies and mindsets to help you not let the script dictate your fate:

1. Pause and Audit Your Influences: Take a close look at who or what has been acting as your compass. Make a list of the biggest influences on your major life decisions. This could include specific people (parents, mentors, friend circles), cultural narratives (religious expectations, ethnic traditions, generational norms), and media (TV shows, movies, social media trends, books). Write down what each of these influences seemed to want for you. For instance: “Dad wanted me to be financially secure and respected, which in his mind meant this career. My college friend group valued prestige – everyone was aiming for high-flying jobs. I also always admired the free-spirited artist characters in movies – a part of me wanted that life.” By externalizing these, you can see clearly which desires were internal models (from people whose opinions directly intertwined with your life) and which were external models (distant ideals you couldn’t interact with, like celebrities or fictional characters). Luke Burgis suggests drawing a Venn diagram of internal vs external models of desire affecting you, with social media sometimes overlapping both since it feels personal yet often features strangers. The point is to become conscious of the “training data” that shaped your algorithm. Once you see, for example, that you’ve been chasing something mainly because a celebrity or fictional archetype made it look desirable, you can deliberately question, “Do I actually enjoy this? Do I get fulfillment from it? Or is it just the idea of it that I fell in love with?” External models, like the Count of Monte Cristo in Burgis’s case, can powerfully sway us even though they aren’t real. Recognizing them strips some of their power; you realize you’re free to let that model go if it doesn’t serve you. Likewise, identify if you’re stuck in a “system of desire” – like the chef trapped by the Michelin star system. What systems are you in? Perhaps the corporate promotion system, or the academic accolade system, or the social media clout system. Consider whether those systems align with what you, outside of their context, actually care about. The chef Bras realized he valued creative freedom over the acclaim. What do you value more than the system you’re in?

2. Give yourself permission to change course: This sounds simple but it’s profoundly important. Often, we don’t change our script because we subconsciously feel we can’t. Maybe you’ve always been “the reliable one” or “the funny one” or “the high achiever,” and it feels almost morally wrong or at least unsettling to break that pattern. You might fear disappointing others or even losing your sense of identity. But remember, your friend group isn’t your compass; your job is not your soul. You have to internalize that you are allowed to evolve. Adulthood is not a contract that you’ll stick to one persona or path forever. In fact, personal growth almost always involves change. It may help to read or listen to stories of people who made late or bold changes – they switched careers in midlife, left marriages that stifled them, pursued art after retirement, etc. You’ll find a common theme: they often feared it was “too late” or people would judge, but in the end, they say things like, “I wish I’d done it sooner; I finally feel alive.” Life is not like a Netflix show with a fixed script – it’s more like an open-world game where you can always roam a new path or quest if you choose. Cognitive-behavioral techniques can assist here: whenever you catch yourself thinking in foreclosed terms (“I have to continue like this” or “It’s too late to change”), challenge that thought. Ask, “Is this true, or is it just an assumption?” More often than not, it’s an assumption rooted in fear.

3. Reconnect with your core values and passions – and write your own narrative from them: One exercise is to write a short personal mission statement or a description of an ideal day in your life, based solely on what deeply matters to you. Not what would impress others, but what fills you with joy or meaning. Be as specific as possible – mention environments, people, and activities. For instance: “I wake up and feel excited to work on designing sustainable gardens (because I value nature and creativity). I have breakfast with my family (because I value love and connection). I live in a small town where I can walk to the library (because I value community and learning).” There’s no right or wrong – only what’s authentic to you. Then compare this narrative to your current life. Where are the biggest divergences? Those are the areas the external script took over. Now, importantly, consider small steps to move in the direction of your own narrative. If your ideal involves creativity, you’ve sidelined, schedule a class or creative time each week. If it involves different people, start seeking out like-minded communities (online forums, hobby groups, etc., can be a start if physical relocation is impossible now). Treat it like gently steering a ship – a few degrees change in course, maintained over time, leads to a vastly different destination.

4. Practice listening to your “inner compass” in low-stakes situations: If your intuition has been compromised by noise, it might need retraining. Start with small choices. For example, on a free day, instead of defaulting to what you think you should do (clean the house, catch up on emails, etc.), ask yourself, “What do I feel like doing?” Maybe you feel like taking a nap in the park, or baking, or calling an old friend. Do it (as long as it’s not harmful, of course). Notice how it feels to follow an impulse that isn’t about productivity or pleasing someone, but just enjoyment or curiosity. Over time, this inner listening muscle strengthens. Similarly, in interactions, pay attention to your feelings: do you really want to go to that party, or do you just feel you’d be judged if you don’t? If you’re tired and don’t want to, experiment with politely declining and see what happens. Often, the feared social repercussions are minor or nonexistent – good friends won’t abandon you because you skipped a hangout. You start learning that it’s safe to be real about little things, which builds courage to be real about big things.

5. Set boundaries with people who only like you for your performance: This can be hard, but it’s crucial. As you show more of your true self, some people in your life might resist. They were comfortable with you fulfilling a certain role. A true friend or loving family member, even if surprised, will ultimately want you to be happy. They might need time to adjust, but they won’t want you to suffer for a false image. On the other hand, if someone in your life outright rejects or belittles the real you emerging, you may need to create distance from that person’s influence. For example, if a friend only likes you when you’re the party clown and reacts negatively when you have a serious conversation or decline a night out, that’s a one-dimensional relationship. You can communicate your changes – sometimes people come around once they understand you’re seeking something more authentic. But if they don’t, recognize that keeping people who force you to wear a mask will hold you back. It’s better to have a smaller circle of authenticity than a large circle of pretense. This might also mean stepping back from certain social media if it’s pigeonholing you; maybe you take a break from platforms where you feel compelled to perform.

6. Embrace the discomfort and uncertainty as signs of growth: When you start deviating from the script, it will feel uncomfortable, like walking off a paved road into the woods without a map. This is where many turn back. But realize that discomfort is the feeling of writing your own script. It’s normal because you don’t have decades of predefined examples telling you exactly what to do. Take it as a good sign – you’re in uncharted territory, which means it’s uniquely yours. Mindfulness techniques can help manage anxiety: focus on the present moment rather than projecting too far ahead. If you left a job, for instance, don’t catastrophize that “I’ll never be successful now”; focus on the present steps of your new path. If you express a vulnerable part of yourself to someone and it feels weird, breathe and observe that feeling – remind yourself it’s just unfamiliar, not fatal. Over time, today’s unknown becomes tomorrow’s normal.

7. Continuously check in with yourself – make self-awareness a habit: Earlier, we likened emotional check-ins to daily hygiene. One practical approach is to keep a journal where you regularly ask, “How do I feel about X aspect of my life? Is this truly what I want right now?” Another approach is at the end of each day, note when you felt most “alive” or content, and when you felt off or drained. Over weeks, patterns emerge that highlight what aligns with your real self and what doesn’t. Use that feedback to adjust. This is essentially using your awareness as your intact tool – as I wrote, “Your intuition might be compromised. But your awareness is intact. Use it.” Awareness means noticing without immediately judging or dismissing. It’s your best weapon to ensure you don’t slip back into autopilot. With awareness, even if you slip into an old script momentarily, you catch it (“Oops, I was about to agree to something I don’t actually want – why? Let me pause.”).

Finally, let’s circle back to the idea of “the script” one more time. It’s helpful to consciously refute the specific script you were following and affirm an alternative. For my friend, the script might be summarized as: “A successful woman moves to a big city, gets a high-status career, lives a glamorous life, and only realizes what she lost when it’s too late.” To reclaim her story, she could literally say, “No, that’s not going to be my ending. My ending is going to be one where I realize what matters in time and build a life around it.” If I were speaking to her now, I would encourage: message that guy if you still care about him, or if not him, don’t shut yourself off from love out of pride. If Toronto and corporate life are making you miserable, it’s okay to pivot – cities and jobs are not one-way doors. Some chapters might end (maybe she leaves the big city rat race), but then new ones can begin (perhaps a fulfilling career in a smaller town, or a different field, or simply a different approach to work).

Don’t be another person at dinner comparing themselves to fictional characters just to feel temporarily valid. That behavior comes from a place of insecurity, trying to borrow significance from the larger-than-life figures. But you don’t need to. Your life might not be a blockbuster movie, and that’s okay because films aren’t real life. Being an adult – fulfilled adult–isn’t about how convincingly you can pretend everything’s perfect or cool. It’s about remembering deeper: remembering what you truly love, what values you truly stand for, what experiences genuinely shaped you, and living in accordance with that. It's reconnecting to the depth that a frenetic, image-obsessed world often makes us forget.

In closing, consider this: When the final credits of your life roll, what do you want to see listed as the “writer” and “director”? If you don’t take charge, those slots might be filled by “society,” “peer pressure,” “fear,” or “media influences.” But if you step up, it’ll be your name. The narrative may not please everyone; it may have twists that make some uncomfortable, but it will be authentic. And as all great stories are, it will be uniquely compelling because it’s true.

After all, you are not a copy of someone else’s protagonist, and your life is not a second-hand story. The pen, the camera, the wheel – pick your metaphor – belongs in your hands now. Go create something real with it, something that when you look back on, you recognize wholeheartedly as “Yes – that was me.”