The dangerous idea that life is a story
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Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#2The 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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#3A 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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#4I 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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#5The 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.
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...
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...
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#6Life is a obviously an open-ended sandbox game.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#7I 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.
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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#8[deleted]
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#9what is it then?
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#10A 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.
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