The stories we tell (to ourselves and to others)

One of the long-awaited benefits of my recent change of podcast app has been that it unclogged the backlog of pending episodes. Another known but still unanticipated benefit is that I got another issue of my newly discovered favorite "In the Zone", by British science-fiction writer Hari Kunzru. Listening to him talk I feel transported to a different place, filled with deep introspection and thoughtful analysis, and I realize what a pleasure it is for me to listen to stories. In fact I do not only love listening to or reading stories, I have always loved writing them too. That is probably the reason why I keep writing this blog. But why is story-telling so interesting? Isn't it a form of evasion, of self-deception?

Self-deception is probably as long as the history of humanity. As this article (and many others) points out, we tend to focus on searching for reasons to maintain our views rather than analyzing the evidence and consider changing. But how are we able to handle the cognitive dissonance generated by the reality and believes that contradict it? The answer lies in the narrative.

Photo: PxHere

Many people believe that they "are not into spinning stories" and dismiss the concept as a fool's errand or a childish pass-time, but the fact is that we all create stories, and we do so all the time: pretty much with every decision we make we implicitly create a story (or a small portion of a story) that justifies why this decision is the right one. Sometimes the decisions is truly thought in depth, all the pros and cons weighed and only then one option is chosen. In those cases the narrative incorporates the reasons and the decision-making without a problem.

However, there are times where we decide on a whim (based in heuristics, as the psychologists say), without putting much thought to it and yet, when we look back at the moment of the decision we can find and absolutely reasonable explanation of why we chose the way we did. That, my dear readers, is again spinning a story: we are effectively putting together the reasons that we think we would have been able to recall if we had had the time or the peace of mind. Is this a bad habit? Not necessarily. 

Although our innate ability to create stories might seem delusional, they serve a very important purpose: becoming part of a group. Humans evolved as social animals, so belonging to a group is as essential to our survival as eating or breathing. Further more, as Yuval Noah Harari explains beautifully in his book Sapiens, complex societies would be impossible without the use of shared fictions such as money, countries, social norms, etc. and each of this concept is nothing but a story that someone created in a distant past and we have been telling one another for years and years.

So, next time you hear someone saying that they are not interested in creating stories, just ask them why and you will immediately have them creating a story of how they became to that belief, which you can use to disprove them. However, chances are that they will not be convinced by the argument and will continue to believe that they do not tell stories even if they obviously do. Have a nice evening!