
The dangerous idea that life is a story - prostoalex
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story/
======
hodwik
To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning.  If you don't view
life as narrative, what do your actions matter? 

The "happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma"
JoshTriplett lists are the narrative projections which make life feel valuable
in spite of life's trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and
suffering. 

The OP's argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist positions, who
prescribe a lack of attachment to all mental constructs -- be that family,
culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress, and so on. 

I get the logic behind it, it's an attempt to reduce life to the unassailably
true.  However, I think that sort of detached reductionism invariably leads to
the view of the universe as a meaningless expanse of material, with an ordered
procession of predestined material actions and reactions. 

Is the meaningless material universe the true universe?  Perhaps, but life
feels like much more than that. 

I prefer the ancient Hindu philosophical counterpart.  They also believed, as
the Buddhists and Taoists do, that at the most fundamental level it's all
meaningless, but that by some miracle the meaningful emerges from the
meaningless by way of our experience of it.  The mind gives reality to the
unreal, and that's a good thing. 

Sure, the narrative we project onto the world may be fiction, but without it
the material universe is a blank book.  If life be fiction, give me fiction. 

~~~
Retric
Young children don't need 'meaning' to enough life, which IMO is a philosophy
as valid as any other. 

I used to have quite a bit of existential angst and personally I found the
most useful thing to do was finding something interesting and do/learn it. 
It's easy to get into a rut where month after month you follow the same
patterns.  Especially when living in doors most of the time removes most
seasonal variations. 

~~~
hodwik
Children live a life of pure fiction.  My two year old in the last day has
believed himself to be a Jaguar hunting our chihuahua, a pirate sailing our
living room couch, a bear eating ravioli, and countless other tiny dreams. 

All of them are fundamentally narratives about power.  Children incessantly
dream of having more strength than they currently do.  Why that is the case
should be profoundly obvious. 

It may not seem like meaning to us because of its naive purview, but to
children their own narratives about their power are all-encompassing epics
detailing a hoped-for relation to the world. 

And why should the season matter?  Outside of its aesthetic attributes,
attributes we project upon it, it is merely a small change in temperature as
the angle of the sun's rays move in relation to the crust of the Earth,
followed by some shifts in the flora and fauna populations -- beings which are
themselves merely carbon-based machines arising from the repetition of simple
chemical processes over very large time scales. 

Those things that we find interesting are so because of what we project upon
them, not as a result of what they fundamentally, physically, objectively are. 
The very idea that something should be "interesting" implies a subjective
witness to project their own feelings onto the meaningless physical trivia of
the universe. 

If your goal is to live a life without lies, you'll be living a life without
meaning.  There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we
tell ourselves. 

The beauty in childhood isn't that it's all truth, it's that its all lies. 
They don't yet have a concept of truth and lies, and so are free to live
entirely within their dreams.  We, on the other hand, are in some ways shackled
to reality by our experiences of materiality. 

~~~
fineline
There is a multi-billion dollar industry selling people all kinds of
fashionable, pharmaceutical and surgical means of "preserving their youth".  If
only people realised that what they are trying to relive is the state of not
knowing or caring about that crap, and that "Living the dream" is not about
acquiring material accessories, but preserving a sense of wonder, excitement
and imagination.  Whenever an old person is described as "youthful", its not
because they've had plastic surgery, it's because they haven't grown out of
dreaming. 

~~~
branchless
This is probably the best part about having kids: seeing things through their
eyes. 

I'm hoping if I spend enough time with them some of it will rub off (or back
onto) me. 

It's the adults who are mad! 

------
JoshTriplett
The dangerous thing about thinking of life as a story is starting to apply
story tropes to it.  Life doesn't inherently have happy endings, fairness,
justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma, or any other tropes.  You can try
to make your corner of it better, and in some cases you can make quite a lot
of it better, but life doesn't obey narrative causality. 

~~~
smacktoward
There was an interesting book called _Life, the Movie_ written back in the
late '90s that argued people were even then already so steeped in
entertainment media that they had internalized the mechanics of story and
viewed their own lives through them: [http://www.amazon.com/Life-Movie-
Entertainment-Conquered-Rea...](http://www.amazon.com/Life-Movie-
Entertainment-Conquered-Reality/dp/0375706534/)

I was reminded of the book and its argument the other day while watching David
Simon's HBO miniseries _Show Me a Hero_ , so I wrote a blog post about the
connection: [http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/08/show-me-a-hero-and-the-
lim...](http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/08/show-me-a-hero-and-the-limits-of-
life-the-movie/)

~~~
ashark
I'd guess that, at least in some times and places, a religious narrative of
life and the forces in it filled that role to some degree. 

I don't think it's a coincidence, for instance, that _Paradise Lost_ reads so
_cinematically_. 

Maybe modern mass entertainment does have a larger effect, but I wouldn't take
it as necessarily true.  A little set design and presentation wizardry and a
willing audience can fire the imagination in major ways.  See: otherwise
seemingly sane people joining ISIS to fulfill their role in a religious
narrative.  Usually if someone credits mass entertainment media for their
violent acts, they were unbalanced loonies to begin with. 

~~~
olewhalehunter
Not religion, ideology: secular humanism too seems to operate on a narrative
that technological and cultural progress will continue without interruption
from chaotic cosmological catastrophe, that those things contribute to human
happiness while ignoring that humanity has higher rates of mental illness and
slavery today than any other time in a global world culture defined for the
last 200 years by technological progress.  Scientific altruism is just as much
a faith and just as exploitable as religious dogma by powerful people and
organizations. 

~~~
xacaxulu
I doubt scientific altruism is just as exploitable as religious dogma.  I think
the abysmal record of religion in such fields as education, race relations,
gender equality, human rights, slavery, genocide, rape, the outright fighting
of scientific advancements including stem cell studies, etc.,  can stand as
its' own negation of your statement. 

~~~
pm90
Well, religion isn't always bad w.r.t literacy at least.  Many Catholic
institutions were the first to introduce and run very good english-medium
schools in India, which have benefited millions.  It actually had its own term:
"convent schools". 

------
rkroondotnet
I am reminded of Pratchett and co's ideas on narrativium, which I apparently
imbibed and internalized early enough that it has made me one of these life-
writers. 

"We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man.  We are the third chimpanzee.  What
distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes and the bonobo
chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain,
three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight.  It is what that
brain makes possible.  And the most significant contribution that our large
brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of
story.  We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape. ( II: 325)

...if you understand the power of story, and learn to detect abuses of it, you
might actually deserve the appellation Homo sapiens." 

[http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Narrativium](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Narrativium)

------
ThrustVectoring
I think having a story is fine, but being a story is much more dangerous -
mostly for reasons like lacking control, choice, and agency over it.  The
answer isn't to abandon the story, but to choose your story and how you relate
to it. 

~~~
rm445
Well said - I agree with you that considering oneself to be a story is
dangerous, but I believe the danger is primarily to the people around you. 
It's important to find the rest of the world real and valid, even more
important than one's own journey through life. 

I'm not calling for great acts of self-sacrifice, just suggesting that over-
consideration of one's own narrative can lead to acts of great selfishness. 

------
outofcuriosity
A life is certainly not a story, since we are never the sole authors of our
circumstances.  If you accept the "narrative model," a whirlwind of events and
situations authored by others surrounds the tiny moments of our life which we
have the ability to author. 

...And so, a life is an Exquisite Corpse. 

------
sageikosa
If life's a narrative, I'm inclined to think it a Terry Gilliam movie. 

------
mkorfmann
Life is a game, I pity those thinking life is a story or movie, since that's
quite a passive life to live. 

------
hblanks
Maurice Blanchot, you are still waiting for us to catch up. 

"Un récit?  Non, pas de récit, plus jamais." 

------
daviross
This entire thread seems somewhat missing without the famous predecessor
article Against Narrativity
[http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf](http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf)
by the same author. 

The linked article provides some phrases/concepts which seem more amenable to
grappling with/interacting with.  Specifically, it breaks the concept of
Narrativity into the psychological Narrativity thesis (That it is human nature
to experience their lives as a story or collection of stories, with narrative
arcs and plot points as we're used to describing in fiction), and the ethical
Narrativity thesis (That the act of experiencing/conceiving of one's life as a
narrative is a capital-g Good Thing, and that narrativity is essential to full
personhood). 

From there, it splits outlooks based on truth values.  One could think that
humans are innately narrative-driven in their thoughts and that this is good
(many people here).  Alternately, one could think that people are narrative-
driven and this isn't good (This also shows up in the article).  Contrarily,
one could think that people aren't innately narrative (but that it's good to
aspire to), or lastly that narrativism isn't innate, and that it isn't good to
assume that this is the case. 

I find the last one compelling, myself.  Many people do continually tell
themselves the story of themselves, but this isn't innate/required.  One can
have a series of events, see the causality, and have plans for the future
without a Narrative.  Believing in the Narrative would suggest things like
believing that your life is part of the Campbellian Hero's Journey. 

This is sometimes helpful, as it can suggest to people that they can hold on
for things to get better, but it's also where we get things like the decried
Nice Guy behavior where men expect that inputting kindness coins leads to the
sex payoff, because those are the stories they're immersed in and the ones
they believe in.  I've seen schizophrenics describe their mental models as
taking this pattern-matching wiring in humans and having it turned up to
eleven.  Seeing data points and watching connections form to where there's a
Grand Narrative connecting things. ( Not a point against them, though to me at
least it does point towards narrative pattern-matching as something people can
vary more and less in feeling tendencies towards.) 

As for myself, I sometimes tell narrative tales of myself, but it feels like a
deliberate thing.  I can describe my past in narrative arcs (and it's a really
good point made above that there's many incentives to do so in the workplace),
but it's not something I feel is actually the case or needs to be the case. 
"Plucky young farmboy gets into computers, is drawn to the Big City by
Megacorp, has a fall-from-grace there".  Where does the story go from here? 
Under a Narrativist mindset, there's some predictive capacity here.  Fall-from-
grace leads to soul-searching and redemption?  If we could use narratives to
predict the future, that would definitely point towards Narrative as a driving
force.  On the other hand, being able to say "No, my story doesn't have to go
like this, I don't have to have a story leading me in this direction" is
powerful.  By throwing off those chains of narrativity, it allows some measure
of greater control. 

So yes, I think people are drawn towards personal narratives.  They're
compelling.  We're surrounded by stories all the time.  There's incentives to
talk about one's past in that way.  But they can be confining, and they can
lead to harmful behavior as people are immersed in stories suggesting specific
arcs. 

------
dominotw
what is it then? 

~~~
TheGrimDerp1
I heard a fella once say that's rather a play, with all of us playing our
parts in turn... Bill something or other...

~~~
gdubya
Murray? 

~~~
x5n1
Bill Murray Shakespeare. 

------
x5n1
Everything in human existence is a narrative.  The reality for human beings is
a story; in fact that is all that metaphysics is a meta story about the nature
of human reality.  If it's not a story, then it's just one damn thing after
another, which is what it really is... but we prefer our stories and
narratives about how things are, versus how they actually are.  All meaning is
built from narratives, without narratives there is no meaning.  And for many
people narratives help people find meaning in their suffering, which is a
solace to having nothing. 

For instance most people don't know what they are doing at all.  That includes
politicians and leaders.  But they build narratives and they use those
narratives to lead, rule, assign punishments, and so on.  Without narratives of
history and the present, we would be utterly lost as to what to do now or
next. 

~~~
narrator
The reason we cast our memories into narratives is that narratives are easier
to remember.  Our brains are hardwired for them.  In fact, a lot of memory
techniques practiced by people who compete in memory contests involve making a
bizarre narrative to encode things like the order of card decks. 

~~~
x5n1
I don't think we do it just because they are easier to remember, though we are
definitely wired for it.  I think the main reason we do it for our existence to
mean something.  For our actions to signify something about ourselves and the
world.  And that actually affects our present and future behavior.  For instance
narratives about marriage and love.  We are now breaking down the traditional
narratives and that is having a profound impact on relationships. 

------
throwaway999777
Life is a obviously an open-ended sandbox game. 

~~~
mikeash
See also the /r/outside subreddit, full of gems like "Please nerf the
inheritance system."  and "Question: why can't I understand most other
players?" 

~~~
throwaway999777
> "Please nerf the inheritance system." 

The random spawn system is broken in that game! 

------
curiousjorge
narrative means structure, structure means judgement.  pro narrative is pro
judgement. 

------
fimbaz
A mind must seem divided to its owner (since we're parallel processors and
consider many things at once) but unified to most observers (so they can model
us and our behavior without immense time and effort).  Stories about ourselves,
that we believe, give us a self-knowledge that can be imparted.  The quality of
these knowledge-nuggets varies wildly, as does our belief in them. 

Anyway, saying that we're natural story tellers isn't saying much.  What's a
story?  Wikipedia: "A narrative or story is any report of connected events"

i.e. a story (in this context) is some carefully curated data about the past,
featuring us, and a pattern imposed on that data. 

Obviously life isn't (just) a story.  I imagine though, that someone who thinks
they're very good at curating and connecting data about themselves, would
place a high value on their stories, and those stories' predictive power.  In
the limit, the storyteller might disregard the gestalt data of their senses
once the narrative is formed, which might give the impression that life is a
story.  This may work very well for the storyteller, but it's not the whole...
story... the raw material remains in our minds, and has its own value.  The
best story misses much, adds much.  Life is a process, stories are one product. 

Another thing to notice: many of us here are assuming that 'story' means
'..like in a book or movie!'  I submit to y'all that the vast majority of told
stories are vastly vastly different from such, to the point that we can often
tell when someone's fictionalizing even when they're trying hard to disguise
it.  Stories about real life often have a meaningless or fractal bent that
reveals the structure of their basis-memories, which is beautiful, I think.