What script have other people written for you?

A different kind of year-end reset, part three

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts.

-William Shakespeare

Lilian Gish, one of the biggest stars of the silent film era.

Have you ever watched films from the dawn of cinema?

They’re fascinating—not just as movies, but as windows into how life looked a hundred years ago. But what strikes me most is something else: they had the technology to capture video, but seemingly not sound. These are of course, termed ‘silent films’.

So the characters speak, but you can’t hear them. Instead, a caption fills the entire screen:

“Let’s go home!” or “Silent movies are great!” or whatever it might be.

As a kid, in the rare occasions I saw a silent film, I always wondered: Did the character really say that? Or did someone else write those words later?

I remembered this again later in life, especially traveling, when I’d see people strongly react to certain situations due to cultural or familial programming.

Once I was in Japan getting a coffee at a Starbucks. Since it was a tourist area, the baristas spoke some English. I asked the woman who took my order “How’s your day?”

The thing was, I didn’t actually want to know how her day was. I just wanted to be polite. It felt natural for me as an American, but I didn’t understand that the question could be interpreted in different ways.

But she took it entirely the opposite way, as if I was prying into her inner life.

I later asked a Japanese friend, who told me that asking such a question to a stranger was highly unusual.

What was saddest but most revealing is that I didn’t actually want her to tell me personal things, I just did it as a reflex—it’s a question you’d ask in the United States without even thinking about it. I expected a “Good thanks, how are you?” To which I would reply “Good” or “ok” even if I was not doing well. Writing that now, it feels pretty stupid, as if Americans ask questions we don’t want real answers to.

At the same time, I can see how appearing friendly, and not taking things so seriously, can serve to lighten the atmosphere.

I think about this when I notice how much of my own life, and my own reactions to things, runs on scripts I didn’t write. You could take my silent movie analogy and call it a silent script. You could call it an inherited or implicit belief, or something else entirely. The point is that many of the ways we go through the world are the result of how we are raised, and what our culture says is acceptable.

In Hong Kong, at restaurants they’ll sometimes bring you tea without asking, then charge you for it at the end of the meal. It cost maybe 50 US cents or something, but when I lived there, there was a European classmate of mine who was livid that he was charged for something that he technically never ordered. He assumed it was free, and got into an enormous fight with the staff over it.

(I personally think he overreacted, especially as a guest in a foreign country, but that is another story).

But what was so revealing was that this kid was 18. That sense of extreme indignation over something so small must have been learned from his parents or home culture.

Another example: A Russian once asked me, about Americans “If everyone smiles, how do you know who’s honest and who is trying to trick you?” “In Russia” she continued “you only smile to people you truly like.”

These are small things—tea, smiles, “how’s your day?” But they made me wonder: what else am I doing on autopilot? What deeper scripts am I running without knowing it?

Likewise, as we are now into the new year, we can think about the ways we automatically react to situations, any silent scripts we follow, and the narratives we create about ourselves and others.

Today’s Questions:

• What do you do automatically that someone from another culture might find strange?

• What phrase do you say without meaning it?

• What did your family treat as “normal” that you later realized wasn’t universal?

• What opinion do you hold that you inherited, rather than chose?

In those old silent films, you never hear the actor’s real voice. Someone else wrote the caption. Someone else decided what they said.

But here’s the thing: you’re not in a silent film. You can speak. The question is whether you’re saying your own words—or still reading someone else’s script.

More on that in part four.

Endings are beginnings. Beginnings are endings. This post is part of our year end reset series, straddling the new year, and prompting us to examine our lives as the calendar changes and so do we.

Part one: What would you want if nobody could know you had it? (partial paywall)

Part two: What would you do anyway, even if you knew you’d fail? (partial paywall)

Part four, coming soon. Please sign up to support us to receive all parts of this reset, and our other posts and products.