‘Feign disorder, and crush him.’ –Sun Tzu
Sophocles is sometimes credited with having introduced the idea that, in the theatre, spectators should be able to identify with the characters. Two thousand years later, Shakespeare went further and suggested how we might also identify with the actors. “All the world’s a stage,” says Jaques in As You Like It, “And all the men and women merely players.” But it was not until 1959 that the dramaturgical metaphor for human life was theorised fully in sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. […]
Whenever we are with others we are always “performing”, trying to control how we appear to them, consciously or otherwise. […]
Most things change according to their situation and each variant reveals another aspect of their entireties. To say we are only ourselves in one kind of situation is as nonsensical as saying water is only itself when liquid, and that steam and ice are just performances. […]
If you resort to humour when you’re hurt, for instance, someone could comment that you are “wearing a mask”. But it might be a coping strategy. […] Rather than worry about whether you’re being “real”, it might be more helpful to ask more specific questions, such as whether a coping strategy is working or not.
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