Plot Armor: The Thing We Need for an Uncertain 2024

Over a holiday dinner, my family and friends talked about how we wanted to live our lives in 2024. We weren't making resolutions as much as expressing what choices we wanted to make about our mindsets. My daughter's friend Maddie said she hoped to live with a sense of plot armor in the New Year.

I didn't know the term plot armor, but as a writer I felt I should. She explained that plot armor is when a protagonist who is indispensable to the plot of a movie, book or game avoids harm against all odds because they are needed for the story. They survive even when their skills and ability suggest they should not. While it's often a derogatory term for narrative laziness or heavy-handed deus ex machina, she was considering its symbolic worth as a positive philosophy. I seized on this idea, which reminds me of my favorite inspirational cliche: What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

I think we all need a bit of plot armor in 2024. We're embarking into a year of wild uncertainty, war, political toxicity, and technological revolution. I worry for the world. I'm tempted to hole up under a blanket and do nothing more than doomscroll. Yet that won't make things better and most certainly will make them worse for my own mental health.

If I knew I had plot armor, how might I live? Certainly not running into traffic or dodging bullets. Rather, what would it mean to move through the world with a kind of confidence that challenges are an invitation and even if things go wrong, it will be mostly okay? I will still err and struggle - after all, the armor protects not me but my larger story - but I want to believe I can persevere and even grow.

Our lives are not plots, but they do have beginnings, middles and ends of varying lengths. We can live those stages trying to protect ourselves from mistakes and misfortune, or we can venture forth assuming survival in the face of what is new or hard. There are times and places - and workplaces - where such optimism is unwarranted. Risks might be punished. But there are plenty of other instances where we overestimate the downside of putting ourselves out there. Like when there is an important problem we feel called to solve. Or if there is a way we want to change things for the better.

The Roman philosopher Seneca once wrote in a letter to his friend Lucilius Junior, "There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality."

When it comes to our own stories, there's a fine line between imagination and rumination. When I was young, I was a bookworm which led to a time of unfettered imagination. It never occurred to me to worry over my prequalifications to be or do what I read - an astronaut or Olympic athlete or famous writer. This was good training for taking on seemingly insurmountable challenges later in life. At its best, imagination is a kind of plot armor that makes us believe in the story that we are good enough to get the job done, and then - with hard work and some lucky opportunities - we might just make good on that belief.

Of course, there are times the magic of make believe eludes us, and I've sometimes succumbed to Seneca's imagined suffering before I took even one step into the unknown. But I have regretted that paralysis every time, and it's not the right mindset for a time like this.

Seneca went on to write, "Weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer." In other words, assume some plot armor in uncertain times.

This year will progress in ways that we cannot predict. We don't have the pen in a plot that will surprise us in ways both good and bad. But whatever happens, we are needed for the story. May we end the year - however it ends - as the protagonist of those plots, protected not from tough times but more importantly, from regrets of inaction.