Drama is present everywhere in society today. The air seems saturated with it. Personally I have always been one of those people who go around saying, “I hate drama.” The irony is that I always seem wrapped up in the biggest dramas around! Drama seems drawn to me like a moth to light, and at the end of the day I feel exhausted. So now for the big question, why do we have drama and how do we avoid it? Obviously something I have very personal reasons for looking into.

Drama is typically created when people react irrationally to a situation. Any situation can turn into a drama when a person involves reacts out of instinct instead of in a rationally calculated way. When we are faced with adversity or a difference of opinion, our instinctive brain goes into defensive mode and we seek to revalidate our core beliefs by arguing our point of view. This is a kind of “social filter” that our mind uses to prevent being influenced by outside ideas, thoughts, and perspectives. Instead of being open to rationally sound argument and new ideas, by nature we wish to convert the people around us to our perception of reality, rather than be open to adopting someone else’s.

This system greatly hinders our ability to evolve as a race, slows down scientific progress, and is the single greatest cause of war in world history. Drama is the result of 2 or more mindsets competing against each other for superiority in their own minds. The fact of the matter is that the drama could be avoided by the mindset staying inside its own mind, safe and secure, but due to our evolutionary heritage we tend to want to defend our mindset verbally. This in turn will place the other mindset on the defensive and thus, we have two competing mindsets, both closed off to outside input, both emotionally charged with the need to validate themselves.

There is a startling implication in all of this. If drama is created most often by two mindsets struggling to validate themselves, could most drama not be avoided by being quiet? Would consciously deciding to no longer attempt to convert other people to our mindset, but instead be a receptor of information, create less grief in one’s life? I would argue that we could build a much more rational, complete, and accurate framework in our mind by being receptive to the mindsets of those around us. Accept the mindset of another human, analyze it rationally, discard that which is not verifiable, and keep that which makes a more accurate model.

I’ve gone into a lot more deep thought in this post than I usually do, but I would like to summarize the whole thing with a phrase my very wise grandfather used to tell me:

“You have one mouth, and two ears. That’s because you are meant to listen to others twice as much as you talk.”

 

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