Live Your Life As If It Were A Movie

Who doesn’t enjoy watching movies? No one. Everyone enjoys a good movie. While our parents grew up with books and…radio shows? We grew up on TV shows, Internet pornography and movies.

What could be a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than waking-n-baking and heading over to your closest cinema and getting lost in the lives of fictional characters? Well, you could get lost in your own life — bong hit optional.

Ever consider what makes a movie interesting? You basically have a plot and characters. The characters move along the storyline, doing interesting things, meeting interesting people and, well, just simply doing stuff. You may argue that many movies aren’t very realistic and tend to stretch reality to some extent or another.

But you have to consider that life brings us many things that are unexpected and while we may not be able to experience an adventure each and every day of our lives, if such adventures weren’t possible, then no one would make a movie about them.

If you find your life boring or mundane, there is something that you can do about it — make it more interesting. If you’re tired of going through the same routine day to day, week to week, then do something about it. Haven’t had a day worth mentioning to anyone in recent memory?

Haven’t had a night crazy enough to share with your friends in a while? If you find movies entertaining, if you find the lives that the characters live fascinating — which is the entire point of a movie — then why not live your life as if it were a movie? If your stories aren’t worth sharing then you aren’t living properly.

If you don’t know what you are doing wrong, then all you need to do is to compare your life to that of any movie character. Overlooking the actual setup of the plot, you may notice that each and every movie has one thing in common: the main character experiences something — whether it be a thing, a person or situation — he or she experiences something novel, something different from the ordinary, different from the routine.

The reason that movies are interesting is because the character or characters find themselves in an unknown situation and have no choice but to deal with it. The characters are thrown outside their comfort zone and — assuming it’s a happy-go-lucky film — find a way to overcome whatever issues come their way and find a way to make the best out of a difficult situation.

This throwing oneself or being thrown into uncharted territory is what makes for an interesting movie. No movie consists of people doing exactly the same shit they do every other day — routine never makes it to the big screen. For this same reason, when you decide to do the same thing every weekend, you end up yielding the same boring results.

I have a couple of friends that have this exact problem — they hang out at the same bars every week, running into the same people every week, and then go home wishing that something exciting would have happened.

What exactly can you expect to happen if you keep returning to the same scene all the time? You already know how it plays out: you go in for a beer, meet up with Bob, have the same conversation you had last week, flirt with the same bartender who continues to refuse to give you her number, down a few more drinks to keep yourself entertained, get drunk, stumble home, jerk off and pass out — The End.

If you continue to repeat your actions, then it should come as no surprise that you are also repeating your results; if you’re not happy with your results then change your actions. Lights, camera and action — just not the same action that you are used to.

If your life isn’t interesting enough then it isn’t the director’s fault. You have all the resources to turn the mundane into the surreal — but you have to do something different, something unexpected. If your life is one short scene on repeat, then hit the fast-forward button and skip ahead to something more titillating.

Leave your comfort zone and experience something novel for a change. Even if an adventure doesn’t present itself your first time around, it will at least be a new experience that you can share. Sooner or later your story will unfold; whether it’s an action/romantic-comedy or a documentary on pencils is up to you. If your life were a movie, would anyone care to watch it?

Paul Hudson | Elite. 

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