all the world's a stage

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

…

Jaques had a point, we all have our entrances and exits, we all have our role to play. And God do we do it well. We know our lines, we know our queues. Sometimes our voices overlap, cause conflict; sometimes we don’t project them loudly enough and they’re lost in the current. But no matter who hears, who watches, the show must go on.

Who are you when nobody is watching?

The answer should be complex, should be difficult to explain. How can we describe something that by definition is indescribable, is unseen. Instead, it is simple. If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? The answer is, it did. Even when nobody is watching, we are performing. And the reason for that is: there is always somebody watching.

You are alone, completely alone. Isolated in your room, with curtains drawn and no neighbours to be seen or heard. But still, you are connected to others. Not only through the little machine in your back pocket. Let’s discard that one, throw it across the room, switch it off.

Even then, you are not truly alone. There will always be the voice in your head. The voice that sounds like your own, but isn’t really. It is the voice of all those other voices combined, all those other people you have heard in your lifetime, all the words you’ve seen on paper or on the screen. There’s no avoiding it.

And all those voices merge into one. One Voice that will tell you what to do without you knowing that it’s there. And because all those original voices were simply repeating their lines, were simply playing their part, even the Voice, the one Truth that you have no choice but to accept is a lie.

It will tell you to perform, you are but a puppet on strings. The puppeteer is not a single figure hidden by a curtain, but is made up out of all the other puppets that surround you.

We feed the system and the system feeds us. And we keep performing.

The circle is vicious.

What’s wrong with performing?

There is nothing wrong with it, until someone calls you out for it. For being fake, for being performative. But - you think - what else was I supposed to do? Even if I tried to be genuine, I wouldn’t be being genuine genuinely. I’m stuck.

True, nothing is genuine. Because anyone who’s genuine is simply trying to be genuine. That is their performance.

So maybe we need to accept it. Maybe we need to try to understand that anything we do will be perceived as a performance, because everybody perceiving it is performing themselves.

After all, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.