We are all bit-players in each other's life-movies

The viewpoint that we are all bit-players in each other's life-movies was briefly talked about several decades ago, but it has been a long time since I heard that concept again, so here it is again.

The associated quote from Shakespeare "All the world is a stage" implies the same concept, I think.

Now, the inherent artificiality of a movie, even moreso of the making of a movie with its scriptwriters, directors, actors, stage props and their setup crews, and the cut and paste and add musical soundtracks afterwards, all so that the finished product will flow well and tell a story that most viewers will agree on what the story was about, reeks of fakery; yet the audience is there to enjoy the story, artificial tale or effort to portray some actual event of the past, does not matter.

So to claim that each individual is living the making of his/her life movie in real-time and usually without a film record being made of it, may sound farfetched. Yet the concept that each of us is the star of our own ongoing life-movie, and all other people are bit-players in our life-movie, and all the stuff of the world is mere props for the movie, may be a worthwhile viewpoint. Along with its corollary, that we each are also a bit player in all those other people's life-movies being made, of course.

The less-than-physically-real aspect does fit well with the viewpoint that the world each of us lives in is an individual world made up of our myriad interpretations of the incoming sensory stimuli and fitted in bit by bit into our mental model of the world and its events. Our imagination is what we experience, not so much the raw physical stimuli of our sensory impressions, and even less so of direct connection with the physical world's stuff itself.

And so in social interactions, each of the participants is experiencing their own life movie's ongoing imaginary interpretation of it all; and each person may well be perceiving the social interaction as being quite different from the other participant's interpretation of the ongoings transpiring - and not realize they are different, perhaps very different.

Does the difference matter? Probably not so much. Especially if we are there only to enjoy the show.

Now, as the years go on, I have sometimes conjectured that an even different form of the life-movie might also be being made. Frequent peculiar happenings, such as apparent invasions of my residence, when I am easily stalked - even by security cameras - such as when out shopping in a big market chain store; the small things noticed subsequent to my return home - bottles of favorite nutritional supplements seem much emptier than before, fluid containers now having different volumes, and more strange, finding a bunch of my favorite clothing stuffed in the wrong place in my closet, clothing clearly commercially cleaned, unlike my own home laundry looks. Shoes vanish; sometimes return after months, or never return. All very peculiar.

Also the occasional contact with some stranger who appears to think they know me and also have a strong opinion of me that is quite incorrect - such as apparently thinking I were a homosexual, for example, or some knife-wielding maniac that might go gersprung at any moment, or a child-abuser or wife-stealer - and it is impossible to get rational communication going with these folks who think they are talking with some other person.

A psychologically-apt friend has assured me that I am not the dual-personality type; I recall seeing a silent movie long ago where the actor portrayed two sisters living in different bedrooms of the same house, and they disliked each other, leaving messages for each other too; when one of them finally poisons the other one, the final scene is that the one personality killed the other personality, same dead person, however; a very graphic demo of the concept.

Since I was not that kind of person, then the thought eventually seeped into my consciousness, that there might be some long-ongoing movie-making supposedly of my life going on, filmed by persons unknown, using my residence sometimes as the stage, and actors using my favorite clothing, but doing things that were not what I would do at all.

As to why such a movie would be made, is only guessable. Probably mostly just for the entertainment of other people, as well as of the participants in the sport of movie-making. I have vaguely heard of something called a "reality show" but have not actually seen one; it has been many years since I have had a TV, could be involved in my missing out on learning about that kind of thing. And such an obnoxious character as I described above, would surely be more entertaining to an audience, than is the real me in my rather dull life, living below poverty level and suffering from the lack of a good woman as my partner - women do not want a socially-inept Asperger man as a partner, especially one that has little money to spend on her. Yet if this is going on, the making of my life-movie to be something quite different than it really is, it probably has some fitting nasty end planned for it, that may well involve the real physical me at the end, with the audience declaring righteously that it served him right. Popcorn and soda consumed, they can then leave the theater and go be entertained by something else next.

Yet another possible interpretation is that it is actually a form of identity-theft going on, perhaps to reap rewards that were due me; a signature-maker thought to be legal. Thus the "real me" would be but a bit-player in my own supposed life-movie.

There is an expectation in movies, that the person seen on screen seems to be the real person being portrayed, but really is not the real person. It could be that the conditioning to this phenomenon from childhood on, that the distinction between the real person of apparent identity, and someone else who in some way is a satisfactory imitation of the "real" person, may tend to fade out at times.

This phenomenon type perhaps could explain a fairly new phenomenon I have endured in the past half dozen years. A multiply puzzling phenomenon, with several seemingly impossible factors, yet very repeating and quite peculiar if not outright obnoxious at times. I hypothesize that a unifying factor could be that not only has someone else been apparently groomed to be considered me to others, that I have been groomed to be someone that I am not, as assumed by others.

At one time, this might have been called a "switcheroo." It could explain the repeating phenomena of having my movements be synchronized to that of others; for example, when I first moved here, when I would back out of my driveway onto the very quiet residential street on which I had not seen any traffic at all, the neighbors had a shrub growing in the corner of their lot which would briefly block my view of oncoming traffic from one direction. At that precise instant when I was backing out onto the street unable to clearly see the street where there had been no traffic for at least five minutes, there would be a vehicle traveling at high speed exactly where it would broadside my car; fortunately, I have learned in driving hundreds of thousands of miles to always double-check when the view is uncertain, and thus I would pause my movement at the point of view being blocked by the shrub, and cautiously get a look down the street, and there would be a vehicle zooming right there which would have hit me.

Happening once would be strange, but by the fourth or fifth time it happened in a row when I backed out of my driveway, I switched to backing into my driveway, so when leaving home I would be driving forward into the street and thus was able to see around the shrub at the moment of entering the street. And the phenomenon of precisely-timed vehicles ceased to happen after that. Another thing was that when I would be leaving my home, there would always be someone at a vehicle - on the essentially otherwise deserted street - who would look up to look where a passenger would be sitting if I had one. Or a car would just happen to be cruising past out of nowhere, the driver also turning at the exact instant to glance at my passenger seat side. My telephone was besieged by robot phone calls for several people who apparently had left a lot of bills unpaid; snail mail came for them too sometimes, including brown envelopes saying it was only for the addressee to open - and no such person lived here. This kind of thing has gone on for half a dozen years.

Then a few months back, a knock on the door, a young man handed me a sheaf of legal papers. I looked at them, they were for a couple who I had not heard of before, were not even any of the names claimed to be at my residence per phone calls and snail mail; the papers did not have an address on them either. I handed them back to the young man, and told them it was the wrong person and the wrong house. Two days later he came to my door again, again attempted to give me the papers, he saying that his employer demanded that these papers be left here at my residence. He left them on the front porch; they stayed there for a month or so, getting more weathered. No one came by to get them; I had thought that maybe the real people would have done that, possibly it was for some of the furtive folks I had glimpsed at times. I examined the papers more carefully for a return address; the only address was for sending monthly child support money to the state capital. My address was not on the papers, nor my name on them. I dimly recalled seen a news article saying that the State was cracking down of child-support fugitives; maybe that was involved too. But the continuing surveillance that was increasingly apparent when I was outside in my yard or out shopping, the phenomenon could be that a lot of people think I am someone else; and some folks have deliberately created that false identity. So this explanation of the stalking going on year after year, and in recent months a worsening of the beamed-energy assaults on me using the through-the-wall harassment & observation technologies originally developed for better purposes, it is likely that people have lost the need to actually identify people before they harass them, no doubt feeling righteous about their clever unprovable abuse. Likely it is the excitement of the team sport of stalking and hazing, is what pulls the operators into the activity.

But why me as a target? Well, I can only guess, but part of it could be like that in the game of football, something has to be the football and get kicked around, or the game could not be played for the enjoyment of the players and fans. In my case I can conjecture more specific reasons to target me, but that is beyond the theme of this post about the life movies that we all play in as bit players, except the life movie that is our own, in which we are the star actor.

But in my case lately, it seems that even that even my own life movie perhaps is not entirely my own; the surrounding various groups of organized-stalkers apparently have taken my identity and put it on some other actor the world thinks is me, while I have been enduring the hazing intended for some wrongdoer, at the same time. And in the hypothesized common psychological condition of people being raised watching TV where all the people seen are not who they pretend to be, it could be that people do not really care if the target is who it is said to be. All that matters is that the movie be played.

Where this will lead, seems to be at high risk for people in general to increasingly lose connection with the real world; and that will mean not being able to respond in effective ways to the challenges the world provides. Our minds are built to experience the mental model that is the movie set for our individual life movies; but, that mental model really needs frequent actual reality checks to be useful for getting correct answers to the problems we face and the opportunities we might have.