“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” — William Shakespeare, 1599.
Carl Jung described the Persona in 1921 as “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” Alongside the Persona, he identified the Shadow—the personality traits we are ashamed of, buried deep in our unconscious and silently controlling us without our awareness.
But more than two thousand years before Jung presented these ideas, someone in Athens was already asking questions about these masks—a man who declared that true wisdom was accepting you know nothing rather than pretending you do. His questions dismantled their masks one after another. And they sentenced him to death for it—Socrates of Athens.
We are all players here, playing different roles in our lives and committed to performing well in order to survive and make everyone around us happy. Whether you are a parent, sibling, child, friend, worker, owner, or something else—the people around you are doing exactly the same. Right now, you are a reader, a space where you don’t need to play any role and you can just relax.
Before you read further, I would like you to remember which role you want to play that makes you feel truly happy—and the people around you as well. Don’t forget to mention that role in the comments.
While playing all these roles, we tend to lose our original personality—living for others rather than for ourselves. We play by our knowledge and experiences, using different masks to cover our Shadow, the unconscious personality we are ashamed of. But inevitably, at times, we fail to hide it. That is why accepting that we know nothing is referred to as true wisdom.
The most brutal part of our Shadow is our ego—because unlike the rest of our Shadow, it often operates with our quiet awareness. We know the decision comes from the ego. We wear the mask anyway. And we call it wisdom.
So how do we play along? This is where I take you back to 440 BC. When Socrates declared that true wisdom is accepting you know nothing, he was not admitting defeat. He was suggesting that if we stop pretending and start building honestly, we can at least begin asking the right questions.
As human beings, we are emotionally driven, and we expect a great deal from the world around us. But in reality, these expectations are the very thing stressing us out. While everyone is playing different roles and slowly losing their original personality, we inevitably collide with each other when those expectations are shattered.
If I expect that being genuinely nice to someone or being completely loyal to my employer will be rewarded in kind, I am setting myself up for disappointment. Because I have no idea what mask they are wearing. And expecting something in return from behind our own mask is perhaps the greatest illusion of all.
If I were to ask you to remember a moment of disappointment, you would recall hundreds of them in a single second. This is how life is—full of disappointments, yet fascinating and promising. What do we do when we are disappointed? Either we move on, or we give our faith another chance with a new expectation, and the cycle continues.
But is this the right way to go about it? In my opinion, it is not. Why should I choose to be disappointed again? I would not give my faith another chance in that manner, because I am aware that everyone is living with their masks. Once the mask is dismantled, that specific faith is gone.
Here, I am strictly not referring to trust, but to expectations. For example, the other day I asked my friend to drop me off at work because my car was broken, and it was agreed that he would pick me up at seven in the morning. It was around 11 o’clock at night when we spoke, and he was not expecting me to ask such a favor at that hour. But because he is my friend and didn’t want me to get upset, he agreed.
However, at around 6:30 AM, I received a text from his wife explaining that because he was binge-watching his favorite series, he had been up until 5:00 AM and was now unable to accommodate me, so I should take an Uber.
This is one of my moments of disappointment. Here, a certain faith for the future is lost, but the trust stays because I have known him for the last 12 years. We all carry these same feelings over time, but we rarely accept that this is how life plays its role—wearing its own mask. The same happens in a broader perspective; we pretend to predict others’ behavior, but in reality, we don’t know, and this is the exact ignorance we need to address in our lives.
When mentioning Socrates, he used to question the elites of his time, which made them so uncomfortable that it led to his death. Here, I am not asking you to go out and confront the next person you see after reading this. All I am advising is to be aware of the fact that we don’t know as much as we think we do.
If we look around at everyone we interact with, we both use our masks and get comfortable with the fact that our shadow is hiding our real personalities. On the other hand, our unconscious mind is constantly sending signals about the truth through our body language, the words we choose, our tone of voice, our eyes, and so on. Anyone who knows how to read these signals will see exactly what lies beneath our Shadow.
In my opinion, Socrates had this exact ability, which is what allowed him to identify the liars of his time and question them. Carl Jung, in his ideology of the Shadow, described how each shadow we carry requires a certain amount of energy to suppress our true personality—energy that is required to play our role perfectly while keeping our mask intact on the stage Shakespeare defined as the world.
Now the question arises: what actually should we do? How do we play along?
The answer is simple: keep your shadow pure, so that any mask you wear doesn’t need to carry any fake energy, and any role you play reflects your true personality. Like the incident with my friend that I quoted before, the one thing I learned from that experience is that rather than relying on my expectations, I should find my own ways while keeping my trust intact. That way, the next time we interact, I can make sure he feels comfortable and never bring it up.
Now it’s your turn — which role makes you feel truly alive when you’re playing it? Drop it in the comments. I read every single one.
