Where reality is shaped by what people say, people are mostly shaped by performance.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with that word. Especially having described GAINS as a performance-first brand. The word performance has two different meanings. One is efficient action. The other is playing a character for an audience. But sometimes playing a character seems like the most efficient action you can take, and sometimes you don’t have to play any character because your performance speaks for itself.
Which raises the question I keep coming back to. When is it real and when is it fake?
Most of what we learn is performance. Kids instinctively mimic their environment, the people around them, the culture they are born into. But when we’re younger we also have imagination. We play make-believe, we act, we try on different versions of reality just to see how they feel. We involve others in it, watch if they understand and how they react, and learn what feels real through that. That is not deception. It is actually one of the healthiest things a human being can do. There is a reason kids have so much imagination. If they already knew what was and wasn’t ‘real’, what was and wasn’t ‘possible’, they wouldn’t be able to make mistakes freely, learn as fast, or come up with anything new.
A lot of adults seem to have lost that imagination completely. They stopped playing and imagining things outside of the role they were assigned, calling that rigidity responsibility.
Then there are people who constantly imagine everyone else’s reality and can’t help but shift into whatever role the environment needs. This can look like adaptability. But if you are constantly changing into the most useful role for others, where do you even begin and where does the environment end? And are these people less real because they’re constantly changing? Because the survival instinct that makes them feel safe doing that might be one of the realest things out there.
Having a role is not wrong. But a role only becomes real when you understand it, when there is enough room to actually feel it as yours rather than just constantly perform it.
Some people cast others into roles purely to extract performance from them. This is more common than people realise.
Dealing with these people, we can sometimes end up in environments where we’re the only real one not putting on a performance, cast into a role where we’re destined to fail. They do not cast you because they don’t see what you’re capable of. But because they do. They keep you around because they fear you could succeed, and are more entertained watching you fail while you’re trapped in cycles they nudged you into. Sometimes they enjoy this only to boost their own confidence. There is no point in blaming them for having to outsource it. Staying in such environments too long is when people break. We like to imagine that light enters when we break, but sometimes panic kicks in and people do the most stupid things, and sometimes someone’s spark just dies. Not from failure or pain but from having to perform so much that you lose the clarity of what your own reality was like, because you’ve been pulled so far into someone else’s. Some people enjoy watching that happen. Seeing that they were secretly able to make that spark die in someone behind the scenes while keeping their own performance up makes them feel powerful. Like they were able to snatch someone’s soul. Probably because someone snatched theirs first.
I have a hard time supporting people who use others as tools for their own performance. It is one of the things I find hardest to respect.
But still. When is it real?
I like philosophy, art, photography, writing, poetry, travel, and being creative. But I also have my routine of putting on pure violence on my headphones in the gym and lifting something heavy or hitting a punching bag like I’m trying to kill someone. I have a curious brain and no formal education that cast me into a clear role, so to some people I’m doing nothing, because I’m actually trying to do everything. They think I would never be able to keep that up and wonder who I think I am for thinking I could do everything. But honestly I am whatever I want to be and I don’t need anyone to believe it. Honestly I kind of like it when they don’t. But if I want something badly enough, there will come a point where I simply lived it enough that it becomes too real to ignore.
The idea that doing more things makes you less of something is something I can’t seem to buy into. Remaining curious and trying new things is kind of the point. It’s how I find out what actually gives my life meaning. Studies actually show that kids who explored many different interests outperformed those who specialized early. Novelty is one of the best things for the brain. I don’t believe that doing one thing makes another thing off-limits for life. A lot of those limits are just social ideas someone decided were rules. You don’t have to believe in their reality. You can only divide your attention so much in the moment, but the future is wide open.
I also have this thing where I do not tell anyone about what I do before I’ve made something real. So I act modest, like nothing is real yet. But then I can’t blame people for taking that as proof that nothing I do is real. And when I just stop being modest, people find it too aggressive. Maybe I need to be more selective with my words and who I share them with. But I prefer feeling like a real human rather than a strategic operator. I’m still figuring that one out.
But after all that modesty, when I casually reveal something I made real that might be someone’s entire identity, they don’t find that fun either. They feel that it threatens them. If this ever happens to you, it can be very confusing. You did something real, you’d expect that to be respected, but the opposite happens and you’re actually met with disrespect.
When people see you go outside of the norms, some people turn into some kind of hall monitor. Overly eager to enforce rules nobody asked them to enforce, nitpicking every detail, desperate to be seen as the one who knows how things should work, because their entire identity is built on being that person. It is hard to not take personally, because it feels like the reason is because it’s you. But it is not about you at all. It is about threatening what feels real to them. So they strategically try to protect it by making sure things stay off-limits for you. Not because you did anything wrong and they hate wrongdoing, but because they want to stay in the role of a rightdoing person. They want to be the people who set the rules. So they try to make an example out of you, to further solidify that their identity is what gives them the power to make the rules, and that you’re not supposed to ever take on that identity. Often it’s just that these people lost their imagination and simply cannot picture that things can also exist outside of their reality.
Even if it is as real as it gets, some people’s nervous systems simply cannot accept things as true. To them, if someone does something real, they must just be faking something else that makes everything fake. It’s apparently only real when enough people have seen it enough times to feel safe calling it real. But when the truth is very uneasy people often rather accept a lie as truth, because that feels safer, and sometimes it is.
People just love to put each other in predictable categories because it literally makes their nervous system feel safe. It’s actually not that different from how I feel about spiders. I see one and think I’m brave enough to overcome the fear this time and put a bowl over it and take it outside. But it moves in a way I didn’t expect and my body just reacts. I feel safer around animals that just move forward or backward. But spiders need to navigate complex environments, build webs, hunt and escape, so therefore God designed them in a way where they can go in any direction. Honestly I kind of relate to the spider more than the person afraid of it. I don’t feel limited in the directions I can move in. And when people notice that, it makes them feel unsafe, so they try to limit those directions to feel safer around me. But putting a spider in a small cage forever is cruel. And it’s not fair to just kill it because it’s scary, when it can’t help being born like that. There is actually something super interesting and beautiful about how such a harmless thing can fill up an entire room with a spooky darkness, just by being there, without causing any actual harm. We know it can’t do harm, so is it not real then? But we still feel like it might, and that is literally coded inside our body to feel inescapably real.
Just like a spider doesn’t think about you, because you’re not food and it only wants to escape if it sees you, people are also just thinking about themselves. But we can still have this irrational fear that they might literally come to harm us. Being able to impose that kind of fear on others comes with a pretty evil kind of power. The kind that is purely based on fear. Where people treat you carefully and only appease you because they’re scared to give you a reason to do something unpredictable. It performs really well though, so people do it. Or maybe they just perform that they are scary and unpredictable. Either way, the fear is probably more rational with humans than with spiders.
Dealing with all of that, the limits, the irrational fear, feeling like people do not believe it’s real simply because it’s you, being cast in roles that can never feel real because of your nature, all of it imposed by the outside world, can lead to so much rage. Some of the highest-performing people in the world are running on exactly that. It becomes fuel. A dragonfire that can burn through everything. But if you’re not careful it can also burn away pieces of yourself that you loved the most.
What I do know is real is that there is a point where the two meanings of the word performance come together. Where what looked like a performance was simply the human will to grow.
Someone says “I am a bodybuilder” before they have any muscle to show for it. But with the right imagination being a bodybuilder is real to them, so they take on the performance. They train like one, eat like one, think like one, live like one, and simply be one. To the outside world it only looks like a performance in the play sense. But they are also performing in the efficient action sense to make it real. It’s just that nobody can tell them it’s real yet because it always looks like a performance first. An embarrassing one if it’s public. But embarrassment isn’t the end of the world. It’s actually quite freeing.
And at some point, there is no more gap between the two meanings. The performance simply became so real that it became who they are, that eventually even the outside world has to acknowledge that.
The outside world doesn’t always like to acknowledge it though. Because if roles become who you are, it means anyone could just try to become anything. Actors and intelligence agents are proof of this, but they are also proof that it definitely doesn’t come without risk and that you must be careful what you wish for. They have to get pulled out of long assignments because the character does not just end when the job does. Part of who they were went into the role and does not come back in the same form. Adapting into the most useful role for your environment is a fragile thing. The question is not when is the performance real. Who is even the judge of that. The question is whether it allows you to just be real.
The art is to Just Be Real between all of that performance. Real enough with yourself that you don’t need others to believe something before you’ve performed it into existence. And real enough with others that you don’t put on a performance just for them. Just Be Real with your community.
When you Just Be Real it doesn’t matter much when others believe it or not. There is so much peace in not having to keep up with all the roles you’re playing. Even through a performance, you can just be real, by making it real enough that it becomes you. There will come a point where it’s so real that it’s hard to believe it’s not. And some people still won’t believe it, but that’s fine. They are not the judge you have to prove anything to. You’ll just be real.
Maybe me overexplaining my complicated relationship with a single English word is just me being real as a messy human being. English isn’t even my first language, so none of this might make sense and that’s fine.
But after thinking about this and looking at what performs best I came up with the slogan Just Be Real for GAINS. Because that’s what seems to make it all come together. I hesitated about it for a second but then I decided to just do it to remind people that they don’t need to do anything to prove themselves but to Just Be Real.
Just Be Real.