human behavior is reinforced, reflexive performance art. you’re born with a set of genetic/epigenetic starting parameters and loaded into an environment curated by your parents. then you start off on a stochastic path where certain personality traits and behaviors are rewarded or culled. this becomes a self-reinforcing reflexive loop as you present yourself into society. what are you but just a set of default patterns and loops? however complex your inner world may be, others can only see and judge you through your actions. are you playing a role, or do you become the role? no one can see what’s inside the actor, if any such notion exists at all.

how you carry yourself to others is reflexively projected onto you. and this is how personality and behavior are anchored. it can feel like a pre-determined self-reinforcing loop that was set off by arbitrary genetic and environmental parameters.

most people never think about their loops nor their initial parameters. even fewer think about re-programming their performance. they say that a man dies twice: the first time is when they die, second time is when no one left remembers their name. they also say that a man lives twice: first time is when they live, and second time is the realization that they live only once.

i suggest a new idea: a man is born twice: the first time is when they come out the womb; the second time is when he realizes life is performance art and he starts playing.

but we don’t live in a solipsistic single player game. there are other humans with agency that are molding their own realities. that’s where conflict occurs and whoever has the stronger reality wins. leaders have natural charisma that allows them to dominate frame. but given equal charisma, whoever has physics and resources will win out. belief hits physical objectivity, and we are housed in physical bodies. this is why certain great leaders are credited with reality distortion fields; they have the charisma and vision, but they also have the product and resources to back up their talk. their frame of reality is stronger than others, so their reality takes precedence.

but ultimately, their performance dominates, and others fall into their frame.

life as performance art is a liberating notion. you don’t get to choose your genetic or environmental starting position, but you do get to decide if you want to update your environment and create new reflexive loops. you can decide to wake up tomorrow with completely different loops and different response patterns. you either choose to keep your current template, or re-write it. but your local environment will resist and bash you into your previous presentation. so while it might be easy to decide to change your performance, you’ll need to exert tremendous effort to overpower their pre-loaded projection and force them to update their model of you. perhaps, just freeing yourself from other people’s projections is enough, or you might feed deep meaning and satisfaction in forcing them to update their model of you.

your reality is meaningless without you providing meaning to it. the meaning you inherit is arbitrary upon birth. create your own reality. be born again.