Around ten years ago I spent a weekend reliving my teenage times by renting a couple of 90s WWF pay-per-views. I didn’t make my then-girlfriend watch them with me, but she received indirect exposure—for the first time. Apparently it’s a lot to take in: the strutting egos, the acrobatic violence, the melodrama, the bombast. She advised that while most of my hobbies and interests were respectable, this one really was “the dumbest thing ever.”
It’s okay if you share that view: this piece probably won’t change your mind and that isn’t my intention anyway. But I do think it’s worth considering how the alleged Dumbest Thing Ever can provide a useful tool for reflection on the bombast and melodrama of everyday life.
The Vocabulary of Illusion
When I got into pro wrestling as a young teenager, I could hardly walk past a magazine on the topic without opening my very thin Velcro wallet. Many of these mags, especially Pro Wrestling Illustrated, were known for preserving something called kayfabe. Kayfabe is the industry code of silence that, classically, insists that wrestling is real. To maintain kayfabe is to negate that wrestling’s outcomes are pre-determined, that alliances, antics, feuds, feats of Herculean heroism and infamous misdeeds, are the creative work of writers and trained professionals committed to crafting entertaining television and live events. It’s to act as if the world champion really is the most skilled or insuperable combatant, rather than one trusted to carry the leading role in a televised physical drama.
Magazines like Pro Wrestling Illustrated reported match outcomes as if they were competitive events and storylines as reality. The non-competitive nature of wrestling had been common knowledge among the public for many years, but the industry itself—including the magazines devoted to it—held the line, remaining committed to nurturing the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
Yet as the internet became more accessible and wrestling gossip flourished online, maintaining the charade seemed more futile than ever. PWI marched on, while others began catering to fans’ increasingly insider knowledge. I picked up a magazine around 1998 that included a glossary of wrestling terms laying out the whole thing. It included “kayfabe,” of course, which is really the linchpin (speaking as it does to a “backstage” reality). But there were more: gimmick, for instance, refers to a wrestler’s stage persona. Maybe he’s a tyrannical corrections officer (Big Boss Man) or a colossus hiding horrific burns under a leather mask (Kane). Wrestling is intensely melodramatic, so of course there are names for standard role types: there’s face, short for “babyface”—a good guy; bad guys are heels. When a babyface does bad guy stuff, he might be engaged in a heel turn—his character being transformed from a goodie to a baddie. At this point he hopes to draw heat: a clamorous response from the crowd that affirms its engagement in the drama.
And there was mark. A mark is someone who buys into the illusion. This contrasts with someone who’s smart—i.e., smart to the business, to wrestling’s true nature. The term mark stems from pro wrestling’s carnival sideshow origins, in which a mark is a kind of sucker, someone able to be duped. While wrestling performers, promoters and distributors naturally want people to engage enthusiastically with their product, to have their emotions aroused or even inflamed by it (just as they might find themselves worked up by a great movie), the term mark has always retained a sense of the pejorative. Not merely an appreciator, a mark is someone who’s gullible.
These days, kayfabe is maintained more loosely than ever: candid interviews and press events abound. Surely few people above the age of ten are pure marks—in the sense that they still believe in the reality of wrestling?
Marks of All Shapes and Sizes
There has long been an intriguing flexibility to the term mark that allows for the spectrum of ways people can be seduced by an illusion, and their fascinating tendency to do so despite really knowing better. A little while ago a wrestling publication invited fans through social media to identify good wrestlers with mediocre finishing moves. Someone nominated the “Cross Rhodes” rolling cutter, signature move of beloved babyface Cody Rhodes. Some agreed, some disagreed. Inevitably, though, some devotees were piqued to defensiveness: if it was indeed such a weak finisher, why had it capped off so many premier opponents?
This is a “mark” response. It finished them off because the matches are scripted that way. Cody’s antagonists aren’t really knocked irrecoverably flat. And people who make such comments really know better: they just get carried away. In an era in which websites and fans alike analyze pro wrestling as a creative product, such responses aren’t plausibly dismissed as simple ignorance. I think it’s instead indicative of the ease with which we tend toward reactivity, of how easy it is to be lured into infatuation or offence.
Mark responses emerge in numerous and seemingly unlikely forms. Social media is filled with interviews with wrestlers speaking out of character, out of kayfabe (what are termed “shoot” interviews). If they seem a bit too sucked into their own fame and fiction, they’ll be labelled “a mark for themselves” by commenters: acting as if they triumphed in a sporting meritocracy rather than through the assent of writers, bookers, and obliging “opponents.” According to PWTorch.com, a mark may also be a wrestler “preoccupied with fan-perception (such as holding a title belt) more than being concerned with being paid what he is worth).” Controversial ex-booker Vince Russo, whose disdain for fans who take wrestling too seriously is such that he calls one of his regular podcasts “Castrating the Marks,” has spoken about the danger of wrestling creatives themselves being marks for the talent. Buy into a wrestler’s mystique and they’ll badger you for matches, storylines, and attention that boost their personal profile to the detriment of overall content quality.
“Mark” seems to capture the idea that balance and perspective are not stable qualities. Fans can know what they know about wrestling but still find themselves “marking out” now and again.
“All the World’s a Stage”—or, an Arena
You might sense by now what this has to do with mindfulness. Mindfulness practices provide a tool for combating being “caught up,” for mistaking temporary impulses, thoughts, or feelings for reality. Every day we experience emotional responses that we act upon without reflection, that we take as a cue for what must happen, for how things really are or how they should be.
When we’re beset by anxiety, for example, the experience often seems totalizing, the tonal quality of reality itself is transformed—it’s hard to conceive that later we may feel differently. Mindfulness meditation offers the opportunity to practice perspectivizing, a kind of objectifying of our emotional responses. The emotions don’t typically disappear immediately, but we might be lifted gently above the current of believing everything we think or feel. And in doing so, we escape the reactiveness of being a mark—a mark for the hollering melodrama within.
This isn’t a “natural” process: it’s being a mark that comes most naturally. As Robert Wright points out in his discussion of the evolved purpose of emotions, feelings seem to “feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectivity.” In meditation, however, we can first allow our nervous system to settle, then recognize emotions as they present themselves—observing them without being them, without allowing them to direct the next thought or the next action. As we learn to reappraise these as the “experiences” they are, we might find breathing space beyond or around them and, through that, space for assessing a response to a problem (if one is indeed required): a smart response, rather than a mark one.
The perspective-taking fostered by meditation can also reveal the artificial frameworks we might be allowing to direct our thoughts and emotions. How many of those scenarios in which we find ourselves so fundamentally worked up seem, on mindful reflection, to have little more gravity than the ephemeral theatre of pro wrestling? Wrestling is a realm of reactivity, of the ego writ large. It’s a realm in which fiercely defined personae strut, strive, and retaliate. They clamber for dominance and grasp at recognition, with bold costumes and bold claims, all within a cartoon world that is both easily understandable and, from another perspective, absurd. You probably haven’t clobbered anyone with a folding chair lately, but could you honestly say you’re never sucked into scenarios that aren’t, in their own way, fictional? Scenarios that, for all their self-important momentum, seemed on sober reflection strangely arbitrary (or even The Dumbest Thing Ever)?
Workplace Costumes, Roles and Rumbles
Most jobs contain elements of pro wrestling: scenarios, routines or agendas that do not, in fact, have the weight or consequences we attribute to them in the moment. Large organizations, especially, always have their own kayfabe: things no one seriously believes but all nevertheless affirm. I’m sure you can think of beliefs in your job, or jobs you’ve had in the past, that are significant only because people believe them to be significant. There might be techniques you know to be ineffective but which are favored by management, or apocryphal metrics that are treated as gospel. In workplaces all over the world people are elevated to higher roles without evidence of excellence, or with evidence of the opposite.
Jobs are not moral quests: it’s not usually wise to run around decrying their every fiction. It’s healthy to know how to live with a certain amount of nonsense. But it’s not wise to choose the opposite path, either, and emotionally over-invest—to start believing that pro wrestling is real.
I once asked a very senior colleague how they were doing, to which they responded with serene emphasis: So good. I said I was happy to hear it—was it down to anything in particular? They responded, “I’m working toward retirement now, and it’s really nice to be in the position of feeling that I don’t need to prove myself to anyone.” This was someone with a career marked by considerable security, organizational status, and remuneration. I continued the conversation routinely but couldn’t help but feel how unfortunate it was to wait until you’re nearly retired to decide you don’t need to prove yourself to others. In such a response, wellbeing seemed completely bound up in status validation within a particular workplace, as if pro wrestling were very real indeed.
Yet how many of us engage in similar thinking in our own way, our attention ensnared by mere storylines? It’s easy to find our thoughts and moods not simply centered on daily melodrama but also mentally amplifying it, offering it heat. At the same time, being a mark might have very real-world consequences at home, as we withhold ourselves from loved ones because we’re still mentally trapped in some noisy pantomime.
Building Flexibility and Diagnosing Drama
So what can you do? Obviously, I think it’s okay to enjoy pro wrestling and, similarly, to sometimes enjoy life’s drama. You can hardly spend your life cynically attentive to the potential falsity of each encounter.
Again, the vocabulary of pro wrestling provides a suggestion: the “smart mark,” or “smark.” A smark is one who enjoys wrestling despite knowing its true nature: they’re wise to the act but enjoy the performance anyway. They allow for emotional responses but with a sense of self-awareness. They’re not fans who get blindly caught up.
And again it’s through meditation practice that this flexibility can be fostered. In meditation, we may realize how busy our consciousness is with old storylines, stale rumination or futile speculation. A popular technique for withdrawing from these involves labelling. When you find yourself carried away by an unhelpful thought, recognize what’s happening and blandly label it (e.g., “ruminating”), before letting it go. Ideally, this metacognitive tendency begins to cross into our day-to-day lives. The ability to recognize and evaluate thoughts and emotions allows us to better focus on what’s useful—to respond, not simply react.
In your day-to-day life, you might find it helpful to consider the Dumbest Thing Ever as a similar label—a tool for recognizing and shaking off the trance that daily dramas induce. The next time you feelcaught up in agitation, pause to evaluate: what is really at stake? Some of these situations will be serious ones with real consequences, sure. But some will really be pro wrestling: don’t be a mark.