Life is about stories
What is life? What is it really about? What’s the best way to live mine? These are universal questions with no clear answers.
Some people need to find meaning in their lives to drive them forwards — family, religion, career, making a boatload of money or making the world a better place. Others choose to not think about it at all and just enjoy each day as it comes. I currently find myself somewhere in between.
It’s fun to ponder on grand, open questions, until rationality kicks in, gently whispering: “What’s the point? It’s out of your control anyway right?” The (wannabe) philosopher within me suggests that there is both great beauty and functionality in being able to distill as grandiose a concept as life, into a sliver of understandable and communicable words, that serve not as a singular dictating principle, but rather a lens through which to perceive and guide our daily actions and a framework to interpret and internalize their consequences.
As a scientist by day, my job is to observe the world, form hypotheses and test them. So here is my current hypothesis on the phenomenon we call life:
Life is a collection of stories. Stories we internalize from our experiences and stories we hear from the experiences of others.
Relationships are the vessel through which stories are shared. The stronger the quantity and quality of shared stories, the stronger the relationship. Someone you choose to share your stories with, to listen to their stories, and create new stories together — thats a friend. Those who, like it or not, are irreplaceable characters in our stories — they’re family.
Ultimately, “success” in life can mean multiple things. You can maximize for any combination of happiness, money, influence, legacy or other things entirely. I posit that the key feature in the life maximization problem is how skilled at the art of “stories” you are. In non-nerdy talk: The better you are at telling, sharing, creating and internalizing stories, the better your life will be.
Happiness. Experiences can be good, bad, boring or exceedingly ambivalent among other things. All these descriptors are relative, and a single experience can be perceived as all of the above — depending on what kind of story you want to internalize from it, and how you choose to share (or not share) it. A lot of my favourite memories were terrible situations at the time, or were really close calls with what could have been REALLY horrific situations. Maybe I’m just an adrenaline junkie, but I like to think it’s rather that I choose to internalize potentially negative experiences into stories in a way such that they can be remembered and shared as didactic, fortunate, humorous, and/or thrilling. In general, the sharing of stories is the crux of human happiness. The conclusion to the longest study of human happiness was that the overwhelmingly primary factor for long life, good health and happiness was how strong of relationships people had! Not number, not length, but strength. I’m sure many of you have that one friend who you talk to twice a year maybe, but in those 2 catchups you spill your guts out to each other and feel blessed to have them in your life.
Career. It’s all about how good of a story you tell. Can you market yourself, your business, your research, your meme stock, well enough so people care to listen, feel invested, and/or spend their hard earned money? It’s also about how good at listening you are too. Can you find the right mentors to listen to, (and really listen) to grow from internalizing their stories? Can you listen to another individual or the broader public and empathize with their stories and somehow turn that into a fruitful opportunity? The onus is on you. You don’t have to have a genius IQ, posh background or fancy attire — if you have mastery over “stories”, you will always have the leg up over those who don’t.
Influence & legacy. Why do so many of us care about these things? They’re the mechanism by which our stories will propagate! A legacy is a super appealing thing for our egotistical selves, as it’s the only way by which we continue to have life even after biological death.
So why is it that we came to be this way? Why are stories so important? Perhaps due to evolution. Perhaps those who were better at stories over the years survived and propagated and those who weren’t died out, resulting in all us modern people being story fiends. A good story is the most addictive high of all, it would explain why we’re all so hooked on TV.
Key Takeaways:
- Do fun, crazy stuff, often. Experience as much as possible, generate fun stories to tell.
- Tell them! To people you care about, to whoever will listen to you. Our species evolved by sharing, and the world we built as a result revolves around it.
- Don’t forget to listen too — no one person has the lifespan (yet) to experience all there is to experience and learn all there is to learn, so out of necessity we must absorb from others.
- The more you practice at stories the better you will get at telling, listening, internalizing and thus — living.
