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The dangerous idea that life is a story

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Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story

#21

Post by hodwik »

Retric wrote: post #18
hodwik wrote: post #15

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 posit…

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.

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.

Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story

#25

Post by oldmanjay »

hodwik wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we tell ourselves.

The presumption-to-word ratio of that sentence is pretty off the charts.

Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story

#26

Post by ashark »

smacktoward wrote: post #5
JoshTriplett wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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.

Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story

#27

Post by beamatronic »

hodwik wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

"They don't yet have a concept of truth and lies, and so are free to live entirely within their dreams."

The best description of working in Silicon Valley that I've ever heard!

Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story

#28

Post by Retric »

hodwik wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

And why should the season matter?

It's not that they provide meaning, however if you spend a lot of time out doors in most areas there are dramatic changes. There is something visceral about the feeling that you need to smell the wildflowers right now as they will soon be gone.

Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story

#29

Post by 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.

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