Also issue 30 Trying to exit with grace and dignity
"There
are no
stories in the world. There is no such thing as a story, there are only
events
and occurrences. We tend to deny this, but it is the only truth. These
occurances are totally without moral interest or value. We
ascribe, we create, the moral aspects and the value to the events. We
pick the
events and subevents that we find salient or convenient, those that we
desire and link them together and
turn them into a story. It is at once a skill but also a natural
movement. Inescapable. It
is something we have in us, impossible to stifle. It is a natural urge, a
tic,
a fault really. I call it a fault because consider how frequently our
lives are
made worst by story creation. Consider how much our lives would be
improved if
we could just accept the randomness of events, could just accept that
things
happened for no reason. Consider how much happier we would be if we
didn’t get
stuck asking the why questions, or trying to figure out the how’s of the
world.
We would be so much happier, really. We would be freed from a lot of
time spent
ruminating and worrying. Of trying to connect disparate points. We would
just accept that things happen, nearly always
for no reason or at best out of chance.
We
wouldn’t look for reasons behind disasters or pain or
atrocity. We wouldn’t look for retribution or revenge or any of that. We
wouldn’t
try to live our lives like stories with defined heroes and villains and
narrative arcs but would simply accept what happened, what
came to us and let it be, knowing that nearly nothing occurred because
of our
own choosing but nearly always from outside sources and causes. Not only
in
ourselves this would free us up from other, and from creating narratives
for
larger things, like businesses, countries, religions.
Interesting how
religion is just a narrative. It is a story you tell yourself that then guides
your actions. Too narratives of the future, i.e. if I do this now then
these good things will happen to me in the future, these good situations will
be made inevitable somewhere down the line. How do these help us? Do they ever
really come true? Do these things come true most of the time or some of the
time or never?
These narratives
of the self, perhaps most disrupting, allow us to feel self-pity and
indignation and so on. We create one story for ourselves and when that story
does not fulfill we get angry and shunt these feelings to other places. We
sublimate these feelings in a way and end up in these locked in cycles that
just make us feel bad.
I guess none of
this is new. I think the really interesting part is how it is pretty much
impossible for us to keep ourselves from making narratives from random events.
Like what would it be like to totally train yourself to stop doing this? What
would a person who could do this be like? How would a person who had removed
the narratives of their lives live? Would this person be happier or feel more
free or be aware of this trait (I guess they would have to be because they
would force themselves to do this)? How would this person interact with the
world, how would this person approach things. It makes me thing that they would
be really strange, that they would be really unusual. It makes me thing they
would stand out in a crowd, or in conversation.
I mean but really
this would be impossible. It just wouldn’t work. This need to make stories.
This need to string together events and connect them. This need to connect ever
part of these events into a coherent string so that each part follows
(logically, I guess) from the once proceeding it. The tendency to take distinct
points in time and space and connect them and ascribe some value to those
points and then some value to the whole so that one ends up with this coherent
package, this thing that can be pointed to."
