Another term for this pattern of behavior is “the script”; this terminology, and the related narrative-oriented way of framing the behavior, seems particularly common as arising from LSD usage, dating back something like sixty years at this point to an individual whose name I can’t quite recall.
In this framing, people see themselves as characters living out a story; the grayed-out options are simply those things that are out of character for them. Insofar as your character is “agent of chaos”, as another commenter alludes to, you still have grayed-out options. They’re the things that you wouldn’t ever do; say, go to college, get a degree as an accountant, marry an average woman, get a steady 9-5 job, get an affordable car, have three kids, live in a boring neighborhood, and keep your lawn average and tidy while hosting semiannual barbecues for the next forty years until you retire into a life of obscurity.
Granted that’s a bit of a long-term plan; the grayed out options might just be the boring sequence of events that lead to enacting and maintaining that plan. But note that this should be on the table, at all, if you are truly acting chaotically; deliberate chaos is surprisingly orderly.
But even that isn’t really addressing “the script”, the “grayed out options”—they’re not just the things you wouldn’t ever choose to do, but much more importantly, the things you’d never even consider doing in the first place. For example, you could sew a blue dress and burn it to symbolize the death of your youth. But you see the thing—now you consider doing it. It’s not just the things that are in or out of character at a surface level, but the things that are in or out of character at a habitual level, the kinds of thoughts you think, the kinds of ideas you come up with.
Charlie, playing the Wildcard in It’s Always Sunny, had approximately one idea; everything else was grayed out. Even though he was the wildcard in the show, and came up with random ideas constantly—as soon as he was actually playing the wildcard, his vision narrowed.
Similarly for us. For most of us, indeed, the older we get, the more “character development” and “personal history” we have, the narrower the range of behavior we consider engaging in; even breaking the monotony of the routine becomes its own kind of predictable routine, the sort of thing “we” would do, so the sort of thing we find ourselves doing.
What’s remarkable is that it isn’t any kind of constraint on our actual ability to write a character outside our own script; pretty much everybody can think of an acquaintance who does things we ourselves would not, and imagine the kind of thing that person would do.
Another term for this pattern of behavior is “the script”; this terminology, and the related narrative-oriented way of framing the behavior, seems particularly common as arising from LSD usage, dating back something like sixty years at this point to an individual whose name I can’t quite recall.
In this framing, people see themselves as characters living out a story; the grayed-out options are simply those things that are out of character for them. Insofar as your character is “agent of chaos”, as another commenter alludes to, you still have grayed-out options. They’re the things that you wouldn’t ever do; say, go to college, get a degree as an accountant, marry an average woman, get a steady 9-5 job, get an affordable car, have three kids, live in a boring neighborhood, and keep your lawn average and tidy while hosting semiannual barbecues for the next forty years until you retire into a life of obscurity.
Granted that’s a bit of a long-term plan; the grayed out options might just be the boring sequence of events that lead to enacting and maintaining that plan. But note that this should be on the table, at all, if you are truly acting chaotically; deliberate chaos is surprisingly orderly.
But even that isn’t really addressing “the script”, the “grayed out options”—they’re not just the things you wouldn’t ever choose to do, but much more importantly, the things you’d never even consider doing in the first place. For example, you could sew a blue dress and burn it to symbolize the death of your youth. But you see the thing—now you consider doing it. It’s not just the things that are in or out of character at a surface level, but the things that are in or out of character at a habitual level, the kinds of thoughts you think, the kinds of ideas you come up with.
Charlie, playing the Wildcard in It’s Always Sunny, had approximately one idea; everything else was grayed out. Even though he was the wildcard in the show, and came up with random ideas constantly—as soon as he was actually playing the wildcard, his vision narrowed.
Similarly for us. For most of us, indeed, the older we get, the more “character development” and “personal history” we have, the narrower the range of behavior we consider engaging in; even breaking the monotony of the routine becomes its own kind of predictable routine, the sort of thing “we” would do, so the sort of thing we find ourselves doing.
What’s remarkable is that it isn’t any kind of constraint on our actual ability to write a character outside our own script; pretty much everybody can think of an acquaintance who does things we ourselves would not, and imagine the kind of thing that person would do.