“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. […] Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
✱
(The following is from a conversation with a friend, after an acquaintance told us about feeling suicidal)
it’s interesting to me how people fall into “roles”. have you heard of / read Eric Bernes’ Games People Play? Basically it’s a sort of framework for interpreting social interactions. Any social group seems to quickly develop a bunch of unspoken norms – someone is the instigator, someone is the mediator, someone organizes outings, someone is always late or getting in trouble. There’s a sort of equilibrium that emerges. We turn our social lives into sitcoms, basically.
Why? I think there’s a natural human impulse for predictability, stability, etc. I think nabokov had a quote about something like this. Are people are prone to playing a certain role? Yeah, I think most people tend to get pigeonholed into a very specific role and play that their whole lives – and that in turn determines the circles they’re in.
It’s interesting to observe children because you can see they do it very instinctively from a very young age – even like 3-4 year old kids. Someone becomes the ringleader, someone is the tattletale. Someone likes to show off for the audience. I’ve witnessed it at work – shy, quiet, taciturn colleagues tend to have everyone kinda naturally adapts to their style when they’re with them. Charismatic colleagues, you can see people open up around them more. Everyone is constantly sending and receiving signals about who they are and how they are to be treated.
✱
(the following is from a conversation in a group chat, when someone told us about something crazy one of our mentally ill acquaintances did)
There’s a bit in Horace and Pete, where Louis CK’s character Horace cheated on his wife with her sister. And many years later, his ex-wife is cheating on her new husband with her father-in-law (her new husband’s dad). And so she comes back to Louis to talk about it, because now oddly they have something in common. And now Horace makes this interesting point about how, in a way, the decision to cheat, to make the worst decision ever – that ruins your life and everybody else’s life – is sort of like a ragequit. It’s a dramatic way of saying that you don’t like your situation. Instead of sitting down and telling your wife that you’re not happy with your marriage, it’s easier to just fuck her sister. It’s easier to be angry than sad.
I also remember a psychotherapist saying that he was pretty confident that the biggest thing he did for his patients was to give them legitimacy. Which is, when you can tell your friends “I’m seeing a psychotherapist”, you get to signal to them “this is serious, you know. I’m not just playing”.
Also: The reason terms like “whiner”, “crybaby”, etc exist to begin with is because people realize that… if you stop something because somebody complains, then the rate of complaints increases, not decreases.
Beyond biological starting points, and things like childhood and upbringing, it seems like people like our friend Y fall in love with the narrative they have for themselves – and will continue spiralling destructively because in a way that’s what they want. Does that make sense? We learn to love our roles in our dramas. Change is almost always an option but it’s almost always painful and scary, it requires killing a part of yourself that’s so intimate and familiar to you.
Talking about how bad your life is, interestingly, is not all that different from talking about how good your life is. And at a meta level, when we keep talking about our friend Y, that’s a game we’re playing, too. And it might be interesting to think about why we talk about them, repeatedly, periodically. What are we trying to achieve here? What sort of meaning are we transmuting from this? What are we telling each other about who we are, in relation to Y and her struggles?