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- All the World’s a Stage
- Goffman and the Sociology of Masks
- Life as Performance in the Digital Age
- Corporate Scripts and the Elevator Pitch
- Small Acts, Quiet Truths
- Games We Play: From Childhood to Boardrooms
- Theatre of the Oppressed: Unmasking Power
- Maslow, Self-Transcendence, and the Original Face
- Returning to Presence
All the World’s a Stage
“All the world’s a stage,” wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It. This remains one of his most quoted lines, rivaled only by “To be or not to be” and “Et tu, Brute?” From the moment we step onto this stage of life as tiny actors, we are handed scripts—often written by playwrights far less gifted than Shakespeare—scripts we never chose, yet are expected to perform.
We begin crafting masks: one for home, another for school, one for the workplace, another for the marketplace. Each mask becomes a story we learn so well that, over time, it hardens against our skin. We forget the face beneath it. In that crowded wardrobe of selves, our true self lingers like a silent guest, waiting in the corner until a slip unmasks us—revealing the wrong role in the wrong scene.
Goffman and the Sociology of Masks
Erving Goffman, in his seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), pioneered dramaturgical analysis and showed us that every interaction is a performance. On the front stage, we polish our gestures for the audience; backstage, we sigh, fumble, and remove the mask. His explorations of stigma peeled back the theatre of everyday life, exposing the hidden frames that shape our roles. In this sense, Goffman gave language to the enduring idea of life as performance.
Life as Performance in the Digital Age
Fast forward to the early 2000s: Second Life, the first great metaverse, invited millions to experiment with alternate selves. By 2013, I too had joined—choosing the avatar “Vishy Sankara,” a digital extension of a nickname born years earlier at Wipro Systems. Over time, that name became me. My given one receded into the “wardrobe of souls.”
Scroll through today’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or WhatsApp groups, and you’ll notice a second act of that digital stage unfolding: curated personas chasing applause, polished scripts of likes and shares. Emojis now act as our social currency—tiny tokens of belonging, exchanged to grease interactions without the risk of real words. Yet truth remains elusive, untouched by cascades of reactions.
Corporate Scripts and the Elevator Pitch
During the heyday of Six Sigma, when GE was the envy of boardrooms, I too was a Black Belt. At one brainstorming retreat, our Chairman’s unexpected question left a colleague speechless. Afterwards, we were lectured on the importance of having an “elevator pitch”—a 30-second act in the play of corporate life. The message was clear: in the ongoing drama of life as performance, you never know when you’ll be thrust on stage.
Small Acts, Quiet Truths
On my last day at Wipro, I went searching for Lakshmi, the janitor and ikebana artist whose floral arrangements graced our reception, and for Sachin, who brewed the finest ginger tea. When I left a note of thanks for Lakshmi, she told me I was the only one who had ever acknowledged her work. That moment, more than any corporate accolade, revealed to me a quiet truth: when the ego dissolves, masks fall, and presence awakens.
Games We Play: From Childhood to Boardrooms
Even as children, we rehearsed roles in Monopoly—where fear of loss often drove someone to seize the banker’s chair. Corporate facilitators of experiential learning know this well, recreating games like fishbowls, mirror exercises, and blindfolded labyrinths. These playful methods surface the old scripts we still perform, showing how deeply life as performance continues long after childhood.
Theatre of the Oppressed: Unmasking Power
Beyond corporate workshops lies Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, where the line between actor and audience dissolves. As “spect-actors,” participants freeze scenes of injustice and step in to rewrite them. Unlike scripted role-plays, Boal’s methods pry open systems of power and invite co-authorship of new realities. In that practice, I discovered how often I perpetuated oppression, even while believing I was resisting it.
Maslow, Self-Transcendence, and the Original Face
Beneath these performances lies Maslow’s pyramid. We cling to its base tiers, scrambling for security and approval. Yet Maslow himself, late in life, pointed beyond self-actualization toward self-transcendence—a truth he had glimpsed decades earlier among the Blackfoot Nation, where fulfilment flowed from reciprocity, not hierarchy. Corporate workshops still peddle the pyramid, blind to the fact that even Maslow outgrew it.
The Zen master Tozan, gazing into a pond, whispered: “Even now he is not what I am, and I am what he is.” Roles fell away. The mirror revealed the original face—not something given, but uncovered.
Returning to Presence
From Shakespeare’s stage to Goffman’s sociology, from avatars to Maslow, we circle back to the same truth: all the world’s a stage. But in the shedding of masks, we glimpse a flicker of the sacred within us all. That is when we become not just human, but truly humane.
We are never just one thing. And perhaps that awareness itself is the most honest mask of all. When I stopped climbing Maslow’s pyramid, I realized I had become the very ground on which it stood—at Kanzeon Zendo.
(Want more awesome content? Head over to the author’s blog, KokoroZendo.life, for fresh insights on mindfulness, motivation, and transforming your life. New posts drop all the time to help you on your journey!)
