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Key points
- It's rare we choose and inhabit our roles in life consciously.
- Eventually we grow tired of playing a role that doesn't authentically reflect us.
- It takes work, but shaping a role to who we are is what leads to greater happiness.
We inhabit multiple roles in our lives. We are offspring, sibling, student, mentor, friend, partner, and parent. We are employee, boss, artist, and dreamer. We are the fun one, the nag, the serious one, the organizer, the planner, the spontaneous one, and the partier. We cut our losses and we remain loyal until the end.
Some of these roles we choose—because they are an expression of our values, or because they seem exciting or pleasurable. But many of the roles are roles that were chosen for us or are ones we fall into unconsciously—because we think it’s “what we’re supposed to do” or because we don’t know anything different.
Either way, it’s rare that we choose a role or fall into it and consciously decide how we want to inhabit that role. In other words, we may get married because we think that’s what people do when they’ve been together for a long time. Or we may get married because we deeply love the person we are with and we value the institution of marriage and we want to live within that institution with this person we love. But how often does someone choose to get married and then actually sit down with their partner and think about how they want to shape that marriage? How they want to define their roles as partners, how they want to resolve conflict, what role they want extended family to play, and all of the many aspects of their relationship and married life that make up a marriage.
Most of the time people step into roles unconsciously, simply mimicking the way they’ve seen it done (no matter if it’s the best way or not), or fulfilling them in a way they fantasize it should be done, or doing it in survival-mode—doing whatever it takes day-to-day to make it to the next day. It’s rare that people think about how to do it best, take the time to educate themselves about it, and think about how to fulfill the role in a way that fits with who they are and how they want to live their life.
Eventually, we grow tired of playing a role that doesn't authentically reflect us
This means that frequently people find themselves deeply unhappy in the roles they inhabit. They are in a marriage and don’t feel seen and loved for who they truly are. They feel resentful of their children. They feel stuck in a career they weren’t sure they ever really wanted to begin with or drinking heavily at family events to make it through. In the words of the Talking Heads song "Once In A Lifetime," they may wake up one day and ask themselves, "Well, how did I get here?"
The impulse in that moment is to want to shed the role completely—to have an affair/leave the marriage, quit the job, move to a new city, or drop out of school. Or try to leave in less dramatic ways, such as through drinking, drugs, spending, gambling, or “zoning out” in front of the TV. But there is another option, it just takes self-awareness and some courage: figuring out if it’s possible to re-inhabit our roles in a way that is more congruent with who we truly are. In other words, figuring out how to do those things our way.
It takes work, but shaping a role to who we are is what leads to greater happiness
It isn’t easy to inhabit a role uniquely. There is often a great deal of pressure to do things “the way they’ve always been done.” It can be even more challenging to shift a role once you’ve been doing it in a particular way for some time, and ultimately, it may be that it’s not possible to remain in a role and be who you were meant to be in the world. Inhabiting a role often means choosing not to inhabit a different role (it’s difficult to be a parent and not be a parent at the same time without causing psychological harm to the child) and sometimes a role necessitates making sacrifices you aren’t willing, ultimately, to make (it would be tough to remain a trial lawyer and decide you don’t want to go to court anymore).
But often people are surprised by how much more space there is for them to be themselves within the roles they already inhabit. The employer is actually willing to be that flexible, your spouse is willing to wait for you at home when you go off to travel, or your family is actually willing to accept your limits and boundaries or shift in identity. It can be scary to try—you risk loss, to be sure, when you ask an established system to change. But there’s only one way to find out.
