Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth. – Kevin Kelly, 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

There are only two emotions: love and fear. – Elisabeth Kübler Ros

When I was studying improv comedy, we were taught the concept of ’emotional stakes’. The teacher noted that a scene would usually begin with some physical action mimed by one of the performers, alone. Then another performer would enter the scene and in some way mimic or join or react to this action, and the two would then do it together and talk about it very briefly. But, the teacher stressed, you should only exchange a few lines about the physical environment and action. These are just a pretext for engaging. The scene is never really about what is actually happening: it’s about the emotional stakes. A good scene is about some tension in the values, emotions, ideas, and, most importantly, the relationship of the characters that gets brought to the surface and then resolved. Spend too much time on the superficial happenings, and the scene will ossify into a dull discussion of the mundane that no one cares about.

In some ways, life itself is like one, long improv scene: made up as you go, filled with different characters, some recurring, others just isolated encounters. Moreover, as in improv, the scenes, whether they are solo scenes with just you or interactive scenes with others, begin with a surface-level activity. Rarely, however, is what at first blush seems to be happening what is actually happening. The real action is under the surface, and is only hinted at. But a lot of the time in life, we never move past the pretence; we engage with the pretence as if it were what actually mattered.

Of all places, I had an epiphany at the grocery store. I was walking down an aisle, systemically working my way through my grocery list. I was in the condiments aisle looking for the things that I usually get. As my eyes scanned the merchandise, I lingered on all the other things in the aisle that I routinely passed over: the others varieties of pickles and olives, the various sorts of less common oils. They were all there but never really existed as real options for me. My standard reason for not buying these things had been that they were expensive. In that moment though, I could tell that, whatever cogency that rationale had had, it was just a sham. It was just a pretext I used to ignore this whole range of possibilities. This wasn’t just true of my grocery shopping habits either. In various domains and walks of life, I realized that my frugality was a mere pretext for circumscribing my permissible sphere of action. It was comfortable not to consider all the possibilities seriously and to be able to fall back on a reasonable-sounding justification. Underlying all these niceties was something far more real and troubling: a fear of living. I had been using economy to rationalize my fear, discomfort, and even annoyance, at having to confront the world in its full scope.

In interpersonal interactions, people will state a position and explicate arguments. While it’s natural to begin by addressing what the other person stated, I think it’s a mistake to stay there. Doing so is like spending the whole improv scenes talking about the mechanics of playing volleyball. You never get to the real emotional stakes. In many instances, a person’s initially stated position is actually of little importance to that person. So much of human thought and action is not about what it is ostensibly about. The reason given is just a pretext, a presentable layer of clothing overlying the much simpler, cruder reality that the person is afraid of this or attached to that.