A strange thing happens when the lights dim, the first chord plays, and the story unfolds before us. We stop being ourselves. The boundary between our world and the world of the movie or song fades, and before we know it, we’re living through borrowed emotions. We cry for fictional heartbreaks, root for impossible romances, and quietly start rewriting our own expectations of life according to what was meant only as art.
I often ask people in coaching sessions: What does love mean to you? Most answers echo lines from songs, scenes from movies, or dialogues from some timeless romantic drama. Rarely does anyone describe love as something they have discovered through quiet reflection or raw experience. Instead, it’s often a hand-me-down narrative: the grand gesture, the eternal bond, the cinematic soulmate who somehow understands you without words.
We’ve been fed these scripts since childhood. A song tells us heartbreak must feel like drowning. A film teaches us that if it’s meant to be, the universe will conspire to make it happen. Somewhere between melody and montage, we stop noticing that real life has no background score.
The borrowed language of emotions
Movies and songs don’t just reflect society; they instruct it. They become the vocabulary through which we express emotions. How many times have you said, “It felt like a movie” when describing something beautiful or dramatic? The very language of our hearts is scripted by industries built on illusion.
When you fall in love, do you truly feel the person, or are you unconsciously matching them to a cinematic ideal? When you grieve, do you allow silence, or do you search for a song to give it meaning? We consume so much ready-made emotion that we forget how to craft our own.
In psychology, this phenomenon is called emotional contagion: the tendency to “catch” emotions we see or hear. But when media becomes the primary source of those emotions, our inner life becomes a projection screen for other people’s fantasies. We start living second-hand feelings.
A personal reckoning
I remember once watching a movie in my early twenties that portrayed love as suffering, the idea that if it didn’t hurt, it wasn’t real. For years after that, I unconsciously equated pain with passion. I stayed in relationships long after they had lost meaning because I thought endurance was proof of depth. It took time, reflection, and distance to realise that I had confused cinematic drama with emotional truth.
It was humbling to admit how deeply an image on a screen had shaped my choices. But it’s not just me. Many of us grow up believing that love must look like chemistry, career success must look like glamour, and happiness must look like a well-filtered vacation photo. We’ve been trained to feel through templates.
The danger of false intimacy
Songs, especially, have a sneaky way of making us believe we understand emotions we’ve never experienced. A heartbreak anthem convinces us we’re heartbroken, even when we’re just lonely. A love ballad makes us feel connected, even when the connection doesn’t exist. This false intimacy can be intoxicating; it fills the emptiness for a few minutes but leaves us emptier after.
Psychologically, the brain doesn’t clearly distinguish between what’s imagined and what’s real when emotions are intense. So when you watch a film or listen to a song on repeat, your body actually lives that story. Your pulse races, your hormones respond, your mind builds memory traces around it. You start associating those sensations with what you think life should be. The trouble begins when real life doesn’t match the script.
Culture of exaggeration
Modern entertainment doesn’t sell stories anymore; it sells intensity. Every song must be extreme, every scene explosive, every relationship all-consuming. The subtlety of everyday emotions has been replaced by theatrical highs and lows.
This conditioning has consequences. We’ve become uncomfortable with normal. We chase the rush of dramatic affection and mistake peace for boredom. We overthink messages, replay texts, compare gestures, and analyse tone because we’re searching for signs that match what we’ve seen on-screen.
The irony is, the more we consume stories meant to expand our imagination, the narrower our emotional spectrum becomes. We begin to measure our own experiences against fictional perfection. When love doesn’t feel like fireworks, we fear it’s not real. When sadness doesn’t look poetic, we suppress it.
The power of conscious consumption
None of this is an argument against movies or music. Art is meant to move us, to reflect the collective psyche. The problem arises when we forget to be the editor of what we absorb.
When I watch a film now, I remind myself: This is someone’s idea of love, not a universal truth. When I listen to a song, I ask: Does this feeling belong to me, or am I just echoing it?
As a life coach, I’ve seen how awareness changes everything. One client, after realising her belief in “destined love” came entirely from romantic comedies, began exploring what compatibility actually meant to her. Another admitted he chased intensity because slow affection didn’t feel cinematic enough. Once they saw the pattern, both started making choices that felt more authentic and less performative.
Choosing your inner playlist
Every story, every lyric, is a seed. Some will grow into empathy, others into illusions. The question is: which ones are you watering?
You can still enjoy art without surrendering to it. Watch the film, feel the song, but come back to yourself after. Notice how it colours your expectations. Ask whether that feeling is enhancing your life or distorting it.
Choosing wisely doesn’t mean becoming detached or cynical. It means staying awake. It means enjoying the movie while remembering that the director isn’t your therapist. It means humming along to the song without letting it rewrite your emotional truth.
The quiet truth
The most beautiful emotions rarely look cinematic. Love is not always fireworks; it’s often steady warmth. Healing is not a montage; it’s slow, uneven progress. Fulfilment isn’t found in a crescendo; it’s found in quiet alignment between your values and your reality.
When we stop expecting our lives to resemble songs or movies, we start experiencing them fully. We stop waiting for the grand moment and begin noticing the quiet ones.
So yes, watch, listen, feel. But remember to return home to your own script. Because the greatest story you’ll ever live isn’t playing in theatres. It’s unfolding right here, in the unedited honesty of your everyday life.
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