You are NOT in a story.

Beginning

There is no story. Joe Rogan says to be the hero of your own movie. There is no movie. No one is watching your life and extracting lessons. No one is watching your life. Your life is not a comedy or a drama. Your life is not going to be made into a movie. No one will write about your life. There is no narrator. No author. No editor. No beginning, middle, and end. The notion of life being a story is wrong. Even if someone made a movie about you it would not be an accurate version of your life. It would be a manipulation of the information for some end. Even if you write about your life the result will be a manipulation or an outright lie or at best incomplete.

It all begins when we start to read to our children. We try to impart to them moral rules to control their behavior. We succeed when these children are civilized and not antisocial. If the child is violent then we set them aside and tell stories about the evils of violence. We use evil to identify and demonize that which our culture deems counterproductive to the goals of society. The culture creates and maintains social rules to perpetuate the culture. Stories about good and bad are directly related to cultural ideals. If the culture wants collectivist mentalities then it writes stories about the good of working as a group. The benefits of putting your needs behind the needs of others. The hero is the most self-sacrificial and the group succeeds. If your culture values individual freedom then it writes stories about a hero who stands alone against a foe, saves others, and gets recognition for it. Superman isn’t humble or altruistic. He is famous and venerated. People want what their stories tell them to want.

You must fight to be a hero in America. You must have an enemy and you must vanquish that enemy to be worthwhile in American mythology. The American hero is handsome or pretty so you must be handsome or pretty to be the hero, otherwise, you are the sidekick, or worse, the observer or the victim. The American hero has a home, a wife or husband, a few children but not too many, and not just one offspring—at least two children to keep the population even or three to keep the population increasing. The American hero has enough money to live to not highlight economic hardships. The American hero always gets enough money to not worry about bills or eating or buying a few nice things or they are outright rich like Bruce Wayne. The American hero might be rich but if they are they need to be philanthropic and willing to give away money. The American hero is generous to the poor and struggling. The American hero learns their lesson and becomes a better person. They learn to be a better parent, sibling, child, worker, spouse, or whatever. As long as they become better and more useful to others. They must be productive and socially engaged. This is a lie and there is no American hero. In many ways, the American hero is a Christian hero but I don't want to deal with religious archetypes right now.

Stories are tales we tell to entertain and teach. They take a moral lesson and add context, examples, and personalities to enhance the lesson. A story is more powerful than a rule commanded because it disguises itself as a description of the real world. It shows an example to the audience of how the rule can be implemented and the benefits of adhering to the rule. Propaganda is a good example of the usefulness of stories to control behavior. The propagandist will show a story of someone who challenged the government's dictums and how they were so wrong to do so and how so many suffered because of it and the people believe the story because they do not know what they do not know.

Stories feed on the human’s need for safety and survival. It is more important to learn a lesson about how to survive than to question a story that seems to be plausible. A good story has to be plausible and relatable or the audience will question it or deny it completely. People extract meaning and logic from stories regardless of missing information or fallacies that exist within the tale. Humans extract patterns out of everything to make a model of the world useful in our minds. We need to know how things work so that we can predict the future and increase our odds of surviving long enough to procreate. Procreation is a huge driver of behavior and so stories often tell us how to properly procreate. They outline the roles we play and how to treat each other. They denigrate sexual taboos and promote cultural norms.

Stories have always been a tool but what are the stories we hear today? What are the lessons of modern storytellers? What philosophies are being propagated? What is the result of these stories and their prescriptions for life? Are they working? Are there too many stories?

Another reason people want their life to be a story is that people believe that if their life is made into a story it will be remembered after they die. Humans fear death and one way to feel like their lives matter now is by thinking that it will matter later. We read the stories of past historical figures who accomplished great things and we hear of ancient kings and queens and we want what they have. Fame. We want to live forever but this is a delusion. We all die and we are all forgotten. Even the most infamous people will eventually be forgotten or purposefully disregarded. Given time and change everything dies and everything is forgotten. It is the ego that convinces us that we deserve immortality but it is a deception.

Middle

Your life is not a story. No matter how you slice it you're just an animal, born to a world that will destroy you and all you love, and any meaning there is is all determined by you and by society as a whole. All the complex language that humans have devised and all the confidence in human words don’t change the fact that there is no inherent judgment system in the universe. No god. No Heaven. No purgatory. No Karma. No afterlife. No ledger of deeds.

You judge yourself and others. Others will judge you. You can go to jail and you are part of a system of rules and expectations but there is no story.

Let’s say there is a story of my life. What should it include? All the good stuff. All the bad stuff. All the neutral stuff life shitting, sleeping, and eating. What about the activities of my neurons and muscles? Should it only include the way I treat others based on cultural expectations? What about free will? Did I choose to do all the things I have done or have I made decisions in the moment based on habituation and instinct? If I was abused then does my story include such abuse as an explanation of my behavior? If I was abused does the story become about my parents? If I was abused and I act normal should we just edit out the abuse part? What if I wasn’t abused but engaged in high-risk behaviors? Am I just a thrill seeker?

I am not aware of all the things that have happened in my life. No one has observed my life entirely and so the accounting of my life can never be complete. There might be important details that shaped who I am that are completely lost to history because no one noticed them. So how can a life ever be represented correctly in a story? It can’t and it shouldn’t be. There is always a filter, always an editor of stories and there is always exaggeration and embellishment. No story is attempting to be factual because that would be boring. The true nature of cause and effect isn’t known either so, while stories attempt to point to cause and effect absolutes, the lesson of the story may be missing a piece of the puzzle that can account for some of the outcomes that the story doesn’t acknowledge.

People love stories so we use stories to be part of the group. We tell stories to get people to like us and we lie about ourselves in the stories we tell others to paint ourselves as the “good guy”. We tell stories to manipulate and control others. We tell ourselves stories to explain what is happening, what kind of people are around us, and what kind of person we are. We use stories to compare people, judge their actions, and account for their outcomes.

If you're not in a story then what are you in? You are in a life that is happening right now. You have only life and there is only the present time. You have a body and when it is done you are done. You will be compelled to keep that body alive and to procreate. Those are for certain. Death and taxes right? Others will judge you and you will affect others but the weight of that effect and those judgments is vague and the outcome of behaviors down the line is near impossible to predict. Whatever you do with your life is up to you and you are very limited in what you can do with it.

You can not do anything you want. You can experiment with how to get the results you desire by interacting with the environment. You can try not to worry about it and just do what you do. There is no ultimate meaning to life and anyone telling you what to do with your life is trying to sell you on whatever their belief system is. They might have a good belief system but they might have a terrible belief system, so be careful when evaluating belief systems. Or don’t. Stop listening to others who think they know what is happening. No one knows what is going on, they just want people to think they are smart so they can make money and mate.

End

Stories allow people to organize and judge behavior. Things can be labeled and interactions can be examined. By identifying potential dangers in the environment people can better predict the future and mitigate risk. This means identifying a spectrum of negative behaviors in others. This judgemental system evolved to allow humans to survive long enough to procreate and the systems of judgment are passed down from generation to generation. The great superpower of humans is their ability to communicate, teach, and learn. Stories are a major component of how humans accomplish this adaptive strategy.

One problem with imagining oneself as being in a story is that one tends to attach moral judgments to everything, including judging the self according to other people’s version of what is right and wrong. In judging one’s self or others one creates villains, enemies, and sinners. This tendency to judge becomes so important that people will start to judge everything and anything as being either fully righteous or fully evil. This can happen to actions that are either morally neutral or to contextually complicated occurrences. Also, some judgments are applied to natural human inclinations that are inescapable but judged nonetheless as negative. This incongruous paradigm can potentially create cognitive dissonance, depression, and self-loathing.

The stories that we grow up with play an important role in our development of values. If we grow up in a conservative Christian household, as I did, we internalize the stories we are told and the judgments contained in them. It may take years to discover alternative views to the values instilled in us and when we do discover alternatives we have an opportunity to challenge our current views but it is often the case that any contradictory values will be rejected fully. Rejecting the value system of our parents can be a very costly endeavor and it is more likely that we will reject evidence counter to our beliefs and seek out evidence that accords with our current moral paradigm to reify our position and create certainty and continued connection with our social group. Most cultural groups do not value critical skepticism of their group which makes breaking out of the value system we grew up in difficult at best.

As we get older and are hopefully exposed to a larger array of values, moral concepts, and alternative lifestyles we may start to question our held beliefs and start to alter our view of humanity and how we judge ourselves and others. We essentially treat ourselves like a special version of a person. One has a version of oneself in one’s mind and applies judgments to that self, similar to how we judge others but with the one very important caveat. The caveat is that we are instinctually predisposed to protect ourselves. To defend one's self one will reject information that paints oneself in a negative light. One will create justifications and excuses that soften the ego-questioning blow that comes from negative self-assessments.

These negative self-assessments may be accurate or they may be just another attempt at applying someone else's arbitrary value system on yourself without much in the way of critical examination. It is important that one attempt to disentangle the desire to be part of a social group and the desire to understand what is motivating behavior from a more objective perspective. It is likely impossible to be entirely objective but by attempting to take an objective perspective one might gain insight. Insight into one's internal motivations can help with the discovery of false evaluations and to identification of internalized systems designed to manipulate and control.

One benefit of realizing that our internal value systems were placed there by others is that when you reject them you are not rejecting yourself but rather you are redefining value in a way that you can be responsible for. To understand yourself, you have to understand where you start and others begin. By identifying the attempts at manipulation that stories represent then we can start to redefine our expectations and start to judge in a way that accords with an individually derived value system. This allows one to act in a way that accords with a value system that is not in constant conflict with other value systems but is adhered to with confidence.

It is important to remember that we live in the now. Any story we tell about the past or the future is likely to be riddled with bias, self-serving justifications, ego-driven exaggerations, or anxiety-inducing predictions. While planning and learning from mistakes are real and important they are a means to an end and not the end itself. No matter what anyone claims is the purpose for living or the reason anything matters, life is only lived in the present. That present can either be peaceful or stressful or boring and it is up to each of us to attempt to live in a way that maximizes our goals. Goals that we can take responsibility for and change as we see fit. Stories are tools and should be seen as such, not as realities to be generated and idolized. Real life is messy, boring sometimes, confusing, complicated, and sometimes it can be awesome.

Appendix

In defense of stories:

Stories are one of the best ways to communicate ideas. Stories allow us to organize elements that have meaning and show how they interact. Stories depict consequences and attribute blame to discrete entities and actions. Stories reinforce cultural norms and foster pro-social behavior. Stories leash the wild nature of humanity. Stories tell kids how to act and what will happen when they misbehave. Stories mark time as a linear progression where one action causes another action and the result can be predicted. This reinforces planning and promotes the concept of free will. If we look back at the story of an event we can see points in time where an action could have been altered and if so the outcome would be changed. It empowers us to take our actions seriously and to imagine the consequences in a way that hopefully works in the best interest of the group as well as the individual.

Stories also personalize and reinforce meaningful concepts. It is difficult if not impossible to drive a moral imperative from a scientific fact and so science has a hard time convincing people to engage in morally acceptable behaviors. Stories about good and evil solidify the costs and benefits of acting in socially acceptable ways and are much more convincing than citing research papers that admit their potential fallibilities.

Justice and ethics rely on facts and those facts are not elements of a story but they do require a timeline and an acceptance of cause and effect. When these facts are presented in this way we almost immediately create a story or narrative to organize the relevant variables. While constructing the timeline of events we invariably inject personality and cultural significance to the acts in the scenario. As we abstract out the events we generate a type of story. This invariably injects errors and assumptions but allows for a more comprehensive and relatable representation of the scenario which also allows it to be better remembered and easier to analyze.

This is nothing wrong with stories. Stories are awesome and I like to write my own stories. Using the imagination is a great exercise in looking at the world differently. The point of this post is to remind myself that the stories that I tell myself about who I am and about what I am supposed to be doing are often sources of confusion, doubt, and shame. When I remember that the stories I tell myself are fictions based on normative value systems imparted by a society with collective goals in mind I can refocus my judgments about myself and others based on my perspective and understanding of the world. By having a little bit of compassion for myself I can have more compassion for others. As we are all running around trying to be heroes I can try to be satisfied with just being a person.

This doesn’t mean I don’t try to develop my abilities or try to be better or even that I don’t judge myself. It just means that my goals and expectations of myself are based on my own decisions about what matters. When there is no story about how things were I can focus on how things are. Instead of seeking fame and immortality, I would prefer to seek peace and wisdom. Others can do what they want and the world can make up stories about it but it doesn’t mean that I have to take them seriously or agree with them. Stories are a part of life and they have as much power as we want to give them but stories are not the same as life.