Plot Armor

I just heard Dave Chappelle telling a tale that made the difference between dreamer and dream

Perfectly clear, for he invited his listeners to recognize that, simultaneously, each of us is the author, narrator and protagonist of one story

And a trivial, or even entirely unwelcome, character in everyone else’s

There are billions of people who could not imagine me being so much as an AI generated extra

In the story of their lives, and of course that goes for billions of people I would never cast myself

Not because there is something wrong with any of us

Except insofar as many never think about who they are or what they think or do or say

With both of the aforementioned truths in mind

Some of us focus with shocking precision and intensity on the first-person perspective

Others are merely means to their ends, because that will make the story they tell to themselves about themselves beautiful. They really can’t imagine being a bit player in someone else’s story--which is a recipe for becoming such a character, ironically enough. They tell themselves this story about themselves, sometimes shifting from the first person to the third person during the narration—this was probably plagiarized from something they saw or pretended to read

You know, Phil generally narrates from the first person perspective: “I realized that the outcome of this hockey game meant more to me than my first marriage,” but shifts to the third person to writhe in ecstasy at how good it sounds as a mark of his “growth”: “Sure, Phil looked ordinary. But what the others present for this workshop would soon recognize, after one look at his spreadsheet, was someone extraordinary.”

Seldom, if ever, do they recognize that they might have a lilliputian role in every other story

What they want is fame, really

They think their story fit for universal consumption and acclamation

Their story is the world’s, or perhaps, the world is their story

But what they don’t see is that each of us is a Rosencrantz or a Guildenstern, not sure what we’re doing in Denmark

In some stories, even the kind of character each of us is has no part to play; in other stories

Too formulaic; two dimensional; an ambulatory cliché; those people are invisible to me; I can’t stand dentists, whatever

When you see, as Chappelle so clearly explained, that you are the author/narrator/protagonist of your story, and a mere ornament in some others, and a non-entity in most

You will shrink in trivial ways and expand in the only way that matters