Don’t be the Star of Your Own Truman Show

The poet William Shakespeare said: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances…” This maxim is invaluable in relation to developing situational awareness. If a person doesn’t, can’t, or won’t see something for what it is, that person is at the mercy of that thing, and this vulnerability is dangerous because it deprives that person of their human agency— their capacity as an individual to act independently and make their own decisions. If the spectators watching the play on the stage around them aren’t consciously aware that it’s a play on a stage and the members are actors with roles and the purpose of the play itself is to influence the spectators, the spectators will easily be hypnotized by the drama of the storyline and seduced by its plot. Similarly, unawareness of the world around you can result in you becoming a star of your own Truman Show. This is a tactical disadvantage to maintaining your health and safety.

Consider the following hypothetical. You’re living in a simulation. Everything you know is merely an artificial production of “reality.” Your understanding of the world around you is completely fabricated by some unidentifiable but very real proverbial wizard behind the curtain. But you don’t realize this because you’re a voluntary prisoner of your own mind. Because of default psychological defenses in your own mind that influence and restrict you or because you’re simply unaware of your surroundings, you have no active agency in your own life and this makes you vulnerable to this invisible influence which may or may not have nefarious intentions (e.g., exploitation, manipulation, fraud, abuse, etc.). Thus, the first step to developing situational awareness is becoming more aware of how your mind might be inhibiting you here.

Default Psychological Defenses Blind People to Reality

In a way, we are all living in an artificial creation of our own minds. On a fundamental level, our brain is a fascinating organ that has several defense mechanisms which it employs by default to protect us against the harshness of our environments. Our bioevolutionary development has equipped us with the unique ability to activate these defensive strategies when we are confronted by frightening and overwhelming traumatic stimuli—and this often happens outside our conscious awareness. In other words, our brains have a built-in “need to know” mechanism that determines what we are allowed to access and what we are denied access to in relation to our experiences.

For example, a person can often dissociate when they are experiencing a traumatic event. When this happens, disturbing emotions related to this event are essentially pushed outside of the person’s conscious awareness and separated from the active stream of consciousness of that person or distorted to make them more tolerable. Dissociation thus protects the person’s mind from emotional overload that would otherwise overwhelm them without this defense. The downside to this upside is mental disfunction from maladaptive dissociation (e.g., dissociative identity disorder, dissociative amnesia, uncontrolled derealization, counterproductive depersonalization, etc.).

Another more common defense people employ to protect against the harshness of reality is denial. With this defensive strategy, a person simply refuses to accept what is happening in order to get through an unpleasant experience. The cliché “if I don’t acknowledge it, it isn’t happening” is a default way of dealing with stressful events or realities that our mind determines are too difficult or emotionally threatening to process. In other words, we simply ignore something or refuse to process an emotion that is too threatening. Although denial may help us get through an otherwise difficult situation (e.g., firefighter disregarding danger by entering blazing building to save residents from fire), the dangers of denial are legion (e.g., rationalizing abuse from partner as love, addicts who deny their addiction, etc.).

These are just a few of the many ways our mind protects us from threatening events and experiences that we will inevitably encounter in life. Many psychological defenses are the product of a person’s past way of coping, and these defenses are deeply engrained in that individual’s personality organization making change extremely difficult if not impossible. It should be said that defensive mechanisms are beneficial for obvious reasons. They promote adaptation because they help us get through the harshness of reality and cope with the challenges in our daily lives. But they can be maladaptive too, especially when they become a default way of responding to everyday situations that aren’t necessarily traumatic and inhibit our ability to be situationally aware. Failing to process reality for what it is—unmoderated and in its raw form—can be counterproductive if we want to learn from it and adapt to it. Thus, you should identify ways in which you cope with things that may be impeding or inhibiting your ability to be more aware of your surroundings.

Developing Situational Awareness

Situational awareness starts with self-awareness. Becoming aware of your coping mechanisms, and whether these coping mechanisms are distorting your perception of reality, is an important part of becoming situationally aware. But you must also work on becoming aware of your environment as well as the actors and events in that environment. By situational awareness, I mean using your perceptive abilities to process your environment with the purpose of identifying present threats to your health and safety and to predict how those threats may act against your health and safety in the future. You don’t have to be a Jason Bourne here but you should at least be aware of your surroundings. If you aren’t situationally aware, you can’t defend against potential threats to your health and safety.

Scan your surroundings. Assuming you’re able to develop situational awareness free of or in spite of psychological constraints, a good start is to actively begin scanning your surroundings in new situations. Make note of various people, objects, and events and actively observe any interactions between these people, objects, and events. You can mentally identify and note what you observe. If you have attentional problems or trouble focusing it can help to verbally repeat what you see as if you’re recording an oral journal (albeit quietly or others may assume you’re randomly talking to yourself). By verbally identifying your observations as you make these observations, you are more effectively locking these observations into your memory. The more you actively scan your surroundings, you will eventually internalize this habit and it will become an automatic process (which is what you want here).

Critically challenge things. Practice critically challenging your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. For this you will need to be more critical, and this is something that may be foreign or uncomfortable to you (social conditioning and popular messaging has, for years now, discouraged discriminating things, judging things, and critically examining things despite the fact that this is how a healthy brain develops and matures). But it is nevertheless necessary if you want to become more aware of your surroundings. Also, critically challenge things you observe, things you are told, and things that are shared with you, given to you, or sold to you before simply accepting these things as valid, true, credible, or useful at face value. Once you accept something as true or right, it’s very difficult to go back in your mind and edit that thing to make corrections to it. There are neurological and psychological reasons why first impressions are lasting impressions. So, make an active effort to critically examine everything before you believe anything.

Actively avoid passive learning. The transition from the industrial era to the information age involved a reconditioning of people from active learning to passive learning. Situational awareness requires active learning. Passive learning is antithetical to being situationally aware. Thus, you should actively avoid passive learning despite the fact that this is a conventional way of learning in our time now. For this, see “Scan your surroundings” and “Critically challenge things” sections above. Evaluate what you learn as you are learning it. Analyze seemingly simple things. Doing so will help you develop and tune up your critical thinking skills and, most importantly, it will further develop your situational awareness.

Conclusion

Developing situational awareness is a great countermeasure to becoming a victim of your own Truman Show. Living in an artificial realty where your entire life is scripted and choreographed by other people and invisible entities that you’re unaware of makes you vulnerable to unseen forces outside your control and deprives you of your active agency. More importantly, this unawareness and automaton-like way of living endangers your health and safety. To counteract this, actively work on becoming more aware—self-aware and situationally aware. By doing so, you gain active agency over your own life and avoid being a unsuspecting victim of the world around you. In the words of Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. Although living an examined life requires great effort and is challenging to say the least, it is also meaningful and provides a sense of satisfaction and authenticity that cannot be otherwise achieved.