The Strange Comfort of Living Life Like a Sitcom

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There are days when life feels vaguely normal, like you are going through the motions of being a responsible adult who occasionally eats spinach and pays bills on time. And then there are days when your brain decides to go full director, producer, and narrator for a sitcom you never signed up to star in. You drop your coffee mug? Cue laugh track. You make eye contact with your crush and immediately trip over your own shoelaces? Freeze frame, zoom in, voiceover: “Yep, that’s me. You are probably wondering how I ended up here.”

Welcome to the mental sitcom, a mildly chaotic, overly narrated reality where everything you do is accompanied by a voiceover, an imaginary studio audience, and a running commentary that makes even your grocery run feel like peak episode material.

It usually starts innocently. Maybe you are walking into a meeting and your brain decides to play commentator: “She had no idea what she was doing, but that wasn’t going to stop her.” Or you open the fridge to discover a single spoonful of hummus and a spinach leaf that has seen better decades, and suddenly there is a serious-sounding narrator in your head saying, “Budgeting. Not even once.” And you find yourself nodding along, because yes, that is exactly the tragic arc of this week’s episode.

This is not madness. It is simply how some brains process the absurdity of life. Part coping mechanism, part hyper self-awareness, part creative overdrive. And honestly, it is oddly comforting to imagine someone, even a fictional laugh track, is bearing witness to the weirdness of your everyday existence.

Some days the vibe is full sitcom energy. Cue laugh tracks, awkward silences, and you breaking the fourth wall as you stare at the camera only you can see. Other days, your brain shifts into mockumentary mode. You find yourself doing “talking head” confessionals in the mirror, explaining why you texted “lol” instead of actually answering a question. You catch yourself narrating in the shower, as if a hidden production crew is capturing the raw chaos of your thought process.

If you live in South Africa, the sitcom-brain upgrade feels almost inevitable. Real life here already has built-in absurdity. Load shedding schedules that could qualify as experimental theatre. Traffic robots with more personality than most reality TV contestants. Municipal hold music so punishing it deserves its own villain arc. When life is already unintentionally comedic, your brain adding narration is not insanity—it is survival. It is creating a narrative structure for nonsense, a little self-deprecating humour to soften the existential dread.

People with sitcom-brains tend to overanalyse everything. The way you said “you too” to the waiter who told you to enjoy your meal. The awkward pause in a WhatsApp message that might mean you are being ghosted, or might just mean your friend is stuck in a Spar parking lot with bad signal. The way your laugh sounded weird when you told that joke, and now you are replaying it like a badly edited rerun. Every moment is a scene. Every interaction, a subplot. And your internal monologue is equal parts sarcastic best friend and emotionally detached narrator who refuses to cut you any slack.

It sounds exhausting, but it is kind of brilliant. Sitcom-brain keeps you sharp. It forces you to observe, to contextualise, to turn mundane moments into creative fodder. You laugh at yourself more often. You find meaning in things that might otherwise feel flat. It is cathartic. It is creative. It is deeply relatable in a “do I need therapy or just a studio audience?” kind of way.

And it is not all silliness either. There is a strange wisdom in this mental sitcom habit. Humans are meaning-making machines. We crave stories, structure, beginnings, and endings. When life feels chaotic or meaningless, turning it into episodes makes it bearable. Instead of facing endless monotony, you have cliff-hangers. Instead of drowning in awkward silence, you get a laugh track. Instead of feeling isolated in your struggles, you imagine an audience who gets the joke. And sometimes, that is enough.

The internet, of course, has turned this phenomenon into content. There are memes about narrating your life like David Attenborough describing a penguin slipping on ice. There are TikToks of people walking into rooms to canned laughter, mouthing along to their own voiceovers. Tumblr has entire threads devoted to the “main character energy” of turning your tragedies into comedy episodes. And while some dismiss it as self-indulgent, it is actually deeply communal. Everyone has experienced that moment of thinking, “Wow, if someone saw this, they would laugh.” Sitcom-brain just takes that impulse and runs with it.

There is also something profoundly South African about it. We are a country where absurdity is baked into the daily routine. You tell a story about power going out mid-meal, and everyone nods like it is the most normal thing in the world. You joke about potholes being deep enough to require scuba gear, and the audience laughs because they have seen it too. Sitcom-brain just formalises what we already do as a nation: laugh through the chaos.

Of course, there is a downside. Sitcom-brain makes you hyper-aware of yourself. Every misstep feels like it was caught on camera. Every mistake gets magnified, replayed, and over-analysed. You cringe at yourself more often. You get stuck in reruns of embarrassing memories, unable to change the channel. It can make you feel like a parody of yourself, always under surveillance, always being reviewed by an imaginary audience. But even then, humour softens the sting. At least the laugh track is loyal.

So what do you do if you have a sitcom brain? You embrace it. Lean into the narration. Let your inner commentator monologue about your fridge disasters and your texting mishaps. Pause dramatically when you trip, as if waiting for the applause. Break the fourth wall in your own mirror when life feels too much. Let the running commentary be a reminder that your story is funny, even when it feels tragic.

Because here is the truth. We might not get to choose what happens in life, but we get to choose how we frame it. Sitcom-brain reframes embarrassment as humour, loneliness as absurdity, and everyday chaos as entertainment. It is not denial. It is survival. It is the brain saying, “If we have to endure this, we may as well enjoy the episode.”

So if you ever feel like your life is being delivered in episodes, complete with cliff-hangers, awkward pauses, and the occasional dramatic zoom, do not fight it. Embrace it. It means your brain has found a way to stay entertained, to survive the mundane, and to stitch some kind of structure onto a world that often makes zero sense.

You might not have a real audience. You might not even get a second season. But your brain has already picked up the slack. And honestly? It is doing a pretty solid job with the soundtrack.