Telling a Good Story

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Lately I’ve been thinking about narrative, particularly the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our own lives. I’ve started thinking about narrative as a sort of third level of reality – and in fact, the level of reality in which we truly engage the world as "real."

Very quickly the first 2 levels of reality being 1) that metaphysical reality that exists beyond our perceptions or knowledge – we know (presume) such a reality must exist but only can talk about it in the most generalized (and unsubstantiated) ways. Perhaps the world of Mathematics occupy this space. 2) The phenomenological reality, that reality we experience and know directly through our senses. We understand the phenomenological space has some inherent flaws (e.g. optical illusions, bad science) but it is a world that we can begin to discover and know more about -  or at least make some accurate predictions.

Narrative though, seems to be to be a necessary next layer. Narrative provides reason to act, it sorts through our perceptions, identifies objects, concepts, and intentions, and places them into categories: good, bad, table, chair, friend, foe, etc. Without narrative there would be no reason to move beyond our perceptions. There are no threats or problems to solve, without narrative even the passage of time may be absent. Perhaps this is the realm meditation delivers, pure perception without our internal dialogue deconstructing it into its parts, rather leaving it a whole “one” of the now. The future and past only come into meaningful existence by virtue of narrative.

Since I’ve started thought experiment a few things have fallen in place for me. I’ve always been sympathetic to the existentialist view that our lives are aesthetic projects – viewing them now as narrative, and exploring their narrative structure provides a new lens to examine one's life. We are the heroes of our own journeys; we engage in our quests, as we look for problems that we can solve. We hope for happy endings, that our story arc shows how we've grown and become better - or that we've vanquished our enemies.

The thing about narratives though, is that they are almost always fiction. That’s where things get both troublesome and interesting. As much as we’d like to believe our stories as true, they seldom are. Our memories are often demonstrably false, and our futures seldom turn out as expected. We survive through the shorthand of stories, the generalizations of what is good and bad, the filters of our prejudice, our retroactive justifications for our acts, and the nonexistent problems we try to solve.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provide a menu of problems to be solved, the bottom tiers, physiology and safety clearly articulate our need for food and shelter, the basic problem of survival. But as we climb the pyramid – to self-actualization – is that really a problem that can be solved? Is inauthenticity real? Or is it a problem of our restlessness, a need to resolve the inconsistent stories about ourselves? Philosophers condemn the unexamined life, but isn't that too is a fiction?

Of course there is science; if the scientific method does not reveal truth, it at least takes us to some place of verisimilitude. At the very least science offers an ability to make reliable predictions based on presumed cause and effect. Science however, is also told in stories. Occam’s razor is evoked giving preference to the "simpler" explanation as "true." A theory prevails until it meets a case it cannot properly describe. There are always outliers, and we have to decide if it’s the science or the experiment that is bad. Our stories carry a bias that make us cling to our preexisting beliefs – In our recollections they have lead to previous successes, so clearly they are true(er).

This leads me to thinking of narrative in our political differences. The more complex things become, the more we have to place our trust in others, for doing the proper science, investigation, or fact checking. Who we trust is then also colored by who the heroes and villains are in our stories. We are forced to make a leap of faith in deciding what story we tell, to justify our past actions, and plan our future actions. As sides become polarized the stories clash. Even when we agree on the facts, their meanings are subject to the interpretations of our stories.

In a way this is just a restatement of existentialism. Life has no objective meaning so we are forced to create one. Viewing this from the lens of narrative though reveals  the dilemma of competing narratives, but also provides a different way of thinking about living an authentic life as telling a good story.