Life is a game, I pity those thinking life is a story or movie, since that's quite a passive life to live.
The dangerous idea that life is a story
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#12what is it then?
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Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#13what is it then?
I heard a fella once say that's rather a play, with all of us playing our parts in turn... Bill something or other...
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#14Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#15To 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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#16The 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 have not read that book or yet seen that show, but I enjoyed your analysis. It rings true.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#17The 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 catch myself thinking about my own life in story/movie ideas constantly
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#18To 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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#19The 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.
See also: Cognitive trope therapy [1]
[1] http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/103192100330/cognitive-trop...
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#20I 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."