Drama kills the Dog (and your Dreams)
Note: Like the previous posts in the Revenge or Grow Sequence, this is mainly for hard-case people. If you are a normally functioning person, tune in back tomorrow and we’ll continue with the Will Power sequence.
The function of Drama
In “Why take the high road”, we saw some reasons for pressing Grow instead of .
Let’s talk about one kind of situation where you feel compelled to press the Revenge button: Social Drama. For example, you say something innocent and straightforward to someone, but he just turns it into something else and makes fun of you. And then other people laugh at the senseless joke. Drama. Fun.
Why is it “drama”? Cos it is just pointless, illogical stuff. I’m not talking here about overt power games where you someone withholds information from you so that you do worse or where they sabotage your plans in some other way. That is understandable in some way. Maybe not morally acceptable, but you can understand why it exists. I’m also not talking about legitimate arguments between friends where they feel they’ve been mistreating each other or not being supportive or immoral or whatever. That’s fine.
Drama is where people play all these little social games that seem to have little or no purpose. If you asked them about why they did, they would just say that were just fooling around, they didn’t actually intend to really hurt you in any way. And it could even be true. Maybe they didn’t even really know what they were doing.
So, that’s it, right? Case closed. They didn’t mean it. It just happened. Stuff. Move on.
Hmmm…. well… What Impact is it having? What happens when you get caught down in some drama? What is the net effect?
What you cannot do
Drama tends to magnify the importance of that part of your life relative to the other parts. It makes that part of your life more important to you, whether you like it or not.
What does that even mean?
Here’s what happens. Someone presses your buttons. You either feel like responding back in kind and making them f*cking pay (aka Revenge). Or you feel like sitting in a corner and weeping at the injustice of it all. You either get right back and engage them in a social joust or you retreat into your pussy cave pitying and cursing yourself for being such a huge loser who gets hurt by anything any little f*cker says.
What doesn’t happen is you ignore it and keep walking on the awesome path you were going on.
That is what drama does. It engages you. You can dish it back or you can retreat.
What you cannot do is ignore it.
Why? Cos man is a social animal. Your mind lives for these moments.
Drama is like a f*cking itch under your armpits. You will either scratch the living f*ck out of it and make it worse or you will grit your teeth and use every ounce of Will Power you have to keep your fingernails from getting to the spot.
What you won’t do is go on with life just as usual. Ain’t happening.
Important matters
Ok. You can’t ignore drama. So what?
What happens when some guy throws some shit at you? You are forced to engage with it.
That means you’re spending time and energy and thought on it. Time and energy and thought that you aren’t spending elsewhere. You can’t ignore it, which means you’re forced to invest time here.
You could be doing anything else in the world… anything else… and yet, you’re doing this. Hence, it becomes important to you.
“Hey! That’s not important to me. X, Y, and Z are important to me. Not this crap.”
Well, if you say something isn’t important to you and you still end up spending a lot of time and energy on it, does it matter whether you think it is important or not?
What will you think of a man who says that becoming fit and thinking “rationally” is most important to him, but who actually spends just a couple of hours a week total (if even that) on these things and all the rest of the time on other crap? Will you respect him? No Impact, No Right to Talk. Conversely, if a man says he doesn’t think IPL something is important, but actually spends hours doing that, will you pay any heed to his words?
The Best Judge
How do we judge the importance of something to a person? By the amount of time they spend talking about its virtues? By the number of essays they write about it? Or by the actual time and energy they devote to it? Yup. You got it.
Do you want to let stupid little random drama soak away the precious time you have? Do you want to make that idiot important to your life?
Look at it this way - in a hundred years from now, will it motherf*cking matter whether he said something to you or whether some other people laughed at it or not? Will you f*cking give a damn then?
You might argue saying you would have forgotten about it by then and that just because you forgot it doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. I routinely forget how much my parents have done for me. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. Just means I’m a dumb-ass. Cool. We won’t go by vague things like memories and feelings and stuff (that too, hundred years from now).
What is the best judge of importance? Our trusted friend - Impact.
Yo! What the f*ck do you think the Impact of this motherf*cking little bitch-drama incidents will be in a hundred years’ time?
And no, the answer is not that there is gonna be no Impact. Nope. That would be the wrong conclusion to draw. The sinister and correct conclusion is that there will be a huge Impact. How? It’s like a student who’s flunking all his courses and who is going out for a movie a few days before an exam. It’s nothing huge in itself, but it’s one more nail in the coffin. It won’t be long now.
Yo! I am the flunking student here. I am failing all my tests all the time. (So is everyone else, but that’s beside the point).
What do you think that flunking student (who is sadly like a couple of my old friends) will say if you tell him not to go to the movie, and instead use the time to study well?
Hey, I get what you’re saying. But I studied last night (for five minutes). And I just want to relax for a while. I’ll do the work later. Really. It’s just one movie.
Yup. And that’s how it goes with social drama as well. It’s just as exhilarating as a movie.
Falling off the Path
Reacting to drama makes you invest in some relationship. You don’t have any choice in the matter. Whether you like it or not, whether it is good for you or not, it doesn’t matter. It will become more important in your life - i.e., it will suck up more and more of your precious limited resources. It will drag you away from the things that are really important to you.
When you fight with a pig, you both end up covered with mud. The difference is, the pig actually enjoys it.
If you want to give maximum attention to the important things in your life, you must prevent crap from getting into your head.
Only now am I getting a better understanding of what people meant when they said “Be on your path, don’t be swayed”. I’d initially thought of it as “don’t be swayed by distractions and temptations”. And, cool, that is a valid concern. There’s a lot of shiny, empty stuff out there that will draw your attention like a magnet. You do need to stay away from that.
Wasting your time and energy and thought on addictive meaningless stuff (random video games, random FB posts, random Youtube videos) is one thing. You will know when this is happening because you will be away from your real projects. You can become aware of it by looking at how little time you’ve spent doing the stuff you really want to do (which I still haven’t talked about :P).
Drama, on the other hand, is like a crawly little insect that has been injected into your mind. It won’t prevent you from sitting at your computer or reading or practicing music or whatever. But it will eat your mind from the inside. You’ll do all those things, all right, but your mind won’t be in it. And that’s where the battle is lost. Forget the insights, forget the action, forget all of it. All you will be left with at the end of it is a half-eaten mind and a bunch of insect poop.
“Stay on your Path” means both “be wary of temptations” and “be wary of insidious drama”.
Make sure what’s important is really what you’re spending your limited resources on.
Stay on your Path, SPK. Take the High Road. Life will throw a lot of shit along the way. Tread lightly and don’t let any of the shit stick to you. Let it slide.
PS
Initial ideas
Function of drama is to make things seem more important to you.
You could be doing anything else, why do this crap?
Drama makes you invest.
Final ideas
What I mean by drama (pointless, illogical crap).
What you can’t do is ignore drama.
Importance is measured by the actual resources you invest.
Staying on your path also involves rising above drama.
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