Invisible Scripts of life and discussion making

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The stories we tell ourselves enough time and we start believing them. It’s really important and required to stay focused on it, though sometimes we should critically think about those or discuss it openly and calibrate the beliefs. It doesn't really happen if you don't take time to think about it. (some are not even focused, but we don't even take time to think about them.) Those are invisible scripts.

Few things which we are kind of given without much of choice

• Nationality

• Religion

• Name

We never get a chance to choose or we don’t have any say in it. That means we hardly think about it and accept and move on. - There are other invisible scripts which are given to us based on the environment we grow up in - (though I don’t subscribe to all, I am here taking liberty to list from my observation)

Some of the items below are specific to Indian culture. 

• you hardly question parents, teachers and elderly

• liquor is bad

• arrange marriage (asian tradition - again, its updated lot in recent years)

• what you study in engineering or medical for 4 or 5 years, dedicate your entire life to that type of work (mostly)

• Always taking blessings from elders, sometimes from whom we don’t even respect due to various reasons (asian)

• Don’t take much risk.

• Based on financial profile. (you know that it's just one life, but you don't really realize or accept it. If you would act on it, you would do a lot of things differently.)

• Loans/debt are bad

More general ones -

• Have milk, tea or coffee for breakfast

• You have to go to school and college for first 12 to 16 years of life

• mostly no questions asked.

• You have to get married

• You have to have kids

• Buy home

• Practice religion

• 9-5 work, and stay near work (in the last few years it has changed due to good or bad reasons)

• All fruits are good. Juice is better than other drinks

• Wear traditional clothes in religious places, weddings, fancy restaurant

• Keep everyone happy

• celebrating birthdays and anniversaries with cake

• Closing eyes while praying (majority people don't know why we do it, that way)

Few items are good to follow the crowd wisdom, but not all and not always. It's like making a decision, we don't want to critically think about all the decisions, as otherwise we will waste a lot of time and the outcome is not that different even if you pause and think and decide. If your decisions are average outcome will also going to be average, anytime you are looking for long shot, thats the outlier, for that you can’t go with average input or go with wisdom of crowd. (not suggesting to drive on wrong lane) Another way to look at it is, if you want to make a wrong decision, ask everyone.

We approximately make 35,000 decisions in a day. A lot of those are made without much of the effort, we subconsciously put the decisions in different categories without realizing -

Impulsive (first option available), Compliance (not much choice), Delegating, Reflecting - this is where we can make a difference. - (Topic for another write up).