Life scripts are the scripts we expect life to take based upon someone’s life track or upbringing. But where do we learn life scripts? And what are their origins?

•    Fairy Tales

Some life scripts can trace their origin to fairy tales. The expectation of how one can fall in love, how a hero should act with a lady and what can cause someone to fall in love often originate in fairy tales.

Some feminists have complained about the lingering effects of fairy tales leading young women to expect a man to arrive and fix their lives or provide a better life instead of deliberately taking action to improve their own lives.

Fairy tales may originate in retellings of historical examples that parents wish to pass one as examples of how one should live one’s life. Fairy tales are also written in the style of Aesop as specific examples of how one should live, without any historical backing but containing relatable characters with the intent to train children of how their lives should be led.

Young Greek children were told the tales of the Trojan Warn to tell them how to become great warriors. Odysseus’ tale provided girls the life script of how to be a dutiful wife while their husband was at war. This concept has carried forward to “The Karate Kid” and “Star Wars”, teaching how a warrior does not fight except to defend the weak or innocent but ends the threat when he does fight.

•    Literature

Literature provides a glimpse into life scripts for other times, distance places and different social classes. Literature such as that by Jane Eyre created a life script by describing how young women found possible mates, selected them, appropriate avenues for social promotion and proper behavior. Literature provided a unique method of standardizing life scripts by allowing thousands and even millions of people from around the world to read the same life script and then emulate it.

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