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…
The dangerous idea that life is a story
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 imaginat…
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#33Everything 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…
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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#35The 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
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 imaginat…
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 prog…
Finally, it's not clear that your last sentence really tells us much about the nature of altruism. What can't be turned into a matter of faith by someone whose business is selling faith?
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#37The 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.
Another way of saying that is "Life is a story; however, it's not Fiction"
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 imaginat…
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 prog…
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#39The 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.
Re: The dangerous idea that life is a story
#40Life is a obviously an open-ended sandbox game.