Larping and the case of larpers

I have been in Bangalore for a few months now, and I keep running into the same pattern: people larping a life instead of living it.

Not the fun kind of LARP. I mean the everyday roleplay: founder without a product, researcher without research, operator without operations. Everybody has the vocabulary. Everybody has the vibes. Nobody has a body of work.

It is easy to dismiss as harmless posturing, but it is not harmless. Every hour spent rehearsing an identity is an hour you could have spent building the capabilities that would make the identity true.

Every bit of neuroplasticity you spend learning to perform an identity is plasticity you are not spending on becoming capable. You can train yourself to do the thing, or train yourself to look like the kind of person who does the thing. One compounds. The other decays.

What larping looks like in the wild

Larping is not lying exactly. It is closer to premature narration. You claim a role before you have earned the constraints that come with it.

A builder has a calendar full of trade-offs. A larper has a calendar full of meetings.

A writer has drafts, edits, and a private graveyard of bad paragraphs. A larper has hot takes and a thread schedule.

An investor has a point of view and a record of decisions. A larper has a taste for being near the word ‘deal’.

Why it is so contagious

Bangalore is dense with ambition, which is good. But dense ambition also creates a market for shortcuts: signaling competence instead of acquiring it.

Social media rewards narrative coherence. Communities reward familiarity with the right nouns. Networks reward proximity. All of these can be farmed without doing the work.

And once you say the sentence out loud—‘I’m a founder’, ‘I’m an AI researcher’—your brain starts protecting it. You avoid situations that could reveal you are not that yet. The mask becomes fragile, and then you start spending more energy maintaining it.

The case of larpers: the hidden cost

The main cost is not that other people are fooled. The main cost is that you are.

If you keep repeating the identity, you get a cheap hit of progress without the pain of practice. You begin to confuse recognition with skill.

That is where the neuroplasticity point matters: your brain is always learning something. If you train it on performance, it gets better at performance. If you train it on reality, it gets better at reality.

Larping is a way to spend your adaptability on becoming a convincing character instead of a capable person.

An anti-larping protocol

1. Pick a craft and define output. Not ‘work on my startup’—ship a feature, close a sale, write 1,000 good words, solve a specific technical problem.

2. Reduce audience. If you feel an urge to post, delay it by a week. Use the week to produce something you can only produce by doing real work.

3. Collect receipts privately. Keep a log of what you built, what broke, and what you learned. The log is for you, not for applause.

4. Seek friction. Work that has no resistance is usually just roleplay. Pick tasks that can fail in public because they are real.

5. Let the label arrive late. Titles are a trailing indicator. If the work is real, people will assign the label for you.

A kinder framing

Most larpers are not malicious. They are anxious, ambitious, and surrounded by people who seem ahead. Larping is a coping strategy: it turns uncertainty into a story.

But if you care about becoming dangerous—in the good sense—then you have to stop spending your best learning hours on story.

Use your neuroplasticity somewhere better. Spend it on the work. Become the person quietly. Then talk.