Are You a Product of Productive or Unproductive Stories?

How we think lends to meaning-making, not necessarily truth-seeking, yet we go about our days arguing whose account of things is most correct, more truthful. Questions about the human condition simply can’t be reduced to scientific explanations.

Journalist Joan Didion once wrote "we live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

Tracy Chapman the lyricist–vocalist reflected similar sentiment in her song "Telling Stories." You should listen to it if you don’t know it because her choice of words to reflect an idea is ingenious.

Renowned psychologist Jerome Bruner proposed "when someone tells you about their life it is always a cognitive achievement rather than a through-the-clear-crystal recital of something univocally given…in the end it is a narrative achievement [as] there is no such thing psychologically as life itself."

Stories That Limit Us

Bruner went further to say life stories reflect the prevailing theories about "possible lives" that are part of one’s culture, suggesting who we become is in some ways limited by the stories we tell, the stories we promulgate and sanctify as being representative of some kind of ultimate "truth."

The following might be stories that limit us at present, consciously or subconsciously:

• Failure is bad; success is good.
• One political ideology is right; the other is wrong; there isn’t a way to reconcile this.
• Talent is inborn.
• The world is fair or just, so bad and good people get what they deserve.

What’s the cost of subscribing to one version of a story over another if two or more versions may be acceptable and none open to scrutiny using the scientific method?

How about personal stories? Have you been following any of these lately?

• I am...[defective, shameful, unlovable].
• I can’t...[do x or y or z; the thing is maybe you can if you try].
• I shouldn’t...[feel uncomfortable, show my flaws, take risks].
• I must...[be fiercely independent, successful, win].

Stories are not concerned with truth. They concern potential motives or reasons that differ depending on what perspective you take over genuine cause–effect relationships. Which perspective you take depends on your prior experiences.

Mediums for Transformation

Now here’s the clincher: The nonfactual or mutable quality of stories makes them appropriate mediums for personal and societal transformation.

You can’t change concrete, hard-wired facts like the unequivocal composition of water being one atom of oxygen bonded by two atoms of hydrogen, but you can change stories.

Years ago, Bruner claimed we actualise the stories we tell: "that eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organise memory, to segment and purpose-build the very events of a life."

Put simply, the girl told she is not built for sport or there is no career path for women in sports probably won’t consider ever becoming a sportsperson even if the initial desire or interest is there.

So, let’s tell her something different. Moreover, let’s avoid messages that are unhelpfully open to interpretation because not saying enough can have the same restrictive effect on who she becomes and how she sees herself.

There may be little point telling her it’s OK to age gracefully if we expose her daily to pictures of wrinkles alongside promises that we have Botox and creams that can fix that. What she will learn is a presupposition that will guide her interpretation of messages relating to aging and beauty—that is, wrinkles are ugly and unacceptable. We needn’t say it directly.

Cognition Essential Reads

Left-Handedness and Cognition: New Insights

Men and the Hidden Costs of Overthinking

Restructuring Stories

I propose we start restructuring the stories that affect us negatively over continuing to impute them with the false veracity they have acquired over the course of unquestioned retellings.

Unhappiness with life can be a product of the stories we ascribe to it, which can be limited by the number and type of stories society provides to make sense of things. Faulty autobiographical memory is a given and makes us overly reliant on stories.

Daniel Kahneman, who is well known for research into cognitive biases, showed that it is not possible to remember moment-to-moment encounters given we recall events as endings and peaks omitting details of what happens between these two points of experience. His often-quoted example of our fallible memories is of someone enjoying a half-hour symphony recording only to conclude the whole experience was ruined on account of it ending with a screech. The screeching finale didn’t undo the enjoyment of the prior composition; however, the recall of it was tarnished, rendering it bad.

Kahneman’s studies have been used to support the presence of two selves, an experiencing self and a remembering self, and it is said the remembering self constitutes life in the psychological sense.

Making meaningful memories counts more than squabbling over the accuracy of our histories.

The workings of a "remembering self" attests there is no such thing psychologically as life itself, and to a narrative line that is imposed upon the shifting phantasmagoria of experience, as cited earlier.

Our "real lives" comprise chained moments of about three seconds amounting to 20,000 in a waking day and 500 million over a 70-year period, according to Kahneman, moments we cannot remember.

Is the fact that you have 200 more TikTok/Twitter followers today or weigh 65 kg now relative to 70 kg three weeks ago going to count or seem socially significant when you reflect in years to come?

Maybe it will. Perhaps it won’t. Whatever the case, it is up to you to decide, which reminds me of Chapman’s lyrics: "write it down but it doesn’t mean you’re not just telling stories."