The dangerous idea that life is a story
aeon.co
aeon.co
The "happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma" JoshTriplett lists are the narrative projections which make life feel valuable in spite of life's trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and suffering.
The OP's argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist positions, who prescribe a lack of attachment to all mental constructs -- be that family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress, and so on.
I get the logic behind it, it's an attempt to reduce life to the unassailably true. However, I think that sort of detached reductionism invariably leads to the view of the universe as a meaningless expanse of material, with an ordered procession of predestined material actions and reactions.
Is the meaningless material universe the true universe? Perhaps, but life feels like much more than that.
I prefer the ancient Hindu philosophical counterpart. They also believed, as the Buddhists and Taoists do, that at the most fundamental level it's all meaningless, but that by some miracle the meaningful emerges from the meaningless by way of our experience of it. The mind gives reality to the unreal, and that's a good thing.
Sure, the narrative we project onto the world may be fiction, but without it the material universe is a blank book. If life be fiction, give me fiction.
I used to have quite a bit of existential angst and personally I found the most useful thing to do was finding something interesting and do/learn it. It's easy to get into a rut where month after month you follow the same patterns. Especially when living in doors most of the time removes most seasonal variations.
All of them are fundamentally narratives about power. Children incessantly dream of having more strength than they currently do. Why that is the case should be profoundly obvious.
It may not seem like meaning to us because of its naive purview, but to children their own narratives about their power are all-encompassing epics detailing a hoped-for relation to the world.
And why should the season matter? Outside of its aesthetic attributes, attributes we project upon it, it is merely a small change in temperature as the angle of the sun's rays move in relation to the crust of the Earth, followed by some shifts in the flora and fauna populations -- beings which are themselves merely carbon-based machines arising from the repetition of simple chemical processes over very large time scales.
Those things that we find interesting are so because of what we project upon them, not as a result of what they fundamentally, physically, objectively are. The very idea that something should be "interesting" implies a subjective witness to project their own feelings onto the meaningless physical trivia of the universe.
If your goal is to live a life without lies, you'll be living a life without meaning. There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we tell ourselves.
The beauty in childhood isn't that it's all truth, it's that its all lies. They don't yet have a concept of truth and lies, and so are free to live entirely within their dreams. We, on the other hand, are in some ways shackled to reality by our experiences of materiality.
The presumption-to-word ratio of that sentence is pretty off the charts.
The best description of working in Silicon Valley that I've ever heard!
It's not that they provide meaning, however if you spend a lot of time out doors in most areas there are dramatic changes. There is something visceral about the feeling that you need to smell the wildflowers right now as they will soon be gone.
I'm hoping if I spend enough time with them some of it will rub off (or back onto) me.
It's the adults who are mad!
Actually there is no one counterpart, It is a spectrum. At one end we have the likes of Advait folks who reduce everything to an Absolute devoid of any quality, while at the other end we have the Bhakti folks who are happy chanting praises at the feet of their beloved Supreme with all qualities.
Advaita is translated as nondual, ie. not-two, that is, the manifested is not separate from that which is the cause of the manifested (ie. that which gives rise to all is all, and everything is a modification of it).
Bhakti is a method towards the experiential realization of what I just stated, one wherein the subject-object (which in your case is the 'Bhakti folks' and their 'beloved Supreme') dichotomy collapses (or to put it in Buddhist terms, extinguishes, which is the proper translation of nirvana/nibbana) from the intensification (one can even say exaltation) of the human yearning for union.
The Taoist position is not to have no narrative. It is to apply relentless non-interference to things, people, and ideas that are in our lives. It is only by standing back, feeling unattached, doing nothing coercive, that family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, and progress arise naturally, so you can experience life to the fullest.
e.g. By trying to force a relationship/family/reunion/ideas into happening, it breaks it, and what was going to be, no longer will be.
Their actionable practice is to teach the common man and governors some amount of detachment.
Their metaphysical position, the one the Dao mentions less, is one of a foundational non-being --
"The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth",
"What does 'the greatest misfortune is the self' mean? The reason I have great misfortune is that I have the self. If I have no self, what misfortune do I have?",
and particularly nihilist: "Heaven and Earth are impartial, they regard myriad things as straw dogs. The sages are impartial, they regard people as straw dogs." (Straw dogs meaning straw effigies of dogs burnt during holidays.)
I'm arguing that their metaphysical position (not their actionable practice) if followed to the end, with the addition of a modern knowledge of physics and biology and so on, ultimately leads one to a metaphysical nihilism.
I was reminded of the book and its argument the other day while watching David Simon's HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, so I wrote a blog post about the connection: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/08/show-me-a-hero-and-the-lim...
I don't think it's a coincidence, for instance, that Paradise Lost reads so cinematically.
Maybe modern mass entertainment does have a larger effect, but I wouldn't take it as necessarily true. A little set design and presentation wizardry and a willing audience can fire the imagination in major ways. See: otherwise seemingly sane people joining ISIS to fulfill their role in a religious narrative. Usually if someone credits mass entertainment media for their violent acts, they were unbalanced loonies to begin with.
Finally, it's not clear that your last sentence really tells us much about the nature of altruism. What can't be turned into a matter of faith by someone whose business is selling faith?
Scientific altruism places faith in innovation. It can allow us to ignore reality, assuming someone else will fix things.
We should aspire to be scientists in our own lives. Not accepting conclusions at face value and working to improve understanding for people beyond ourselves.
[1] http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/103192100330/cognitive-trop...
"We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes and the bonobo chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain, three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape. (II: 325)
...if you understand the power of story, and learn to detect abuses of it, you might actually deserve the appellation Homo sapiens."
I'm not calling for great acts of self-sacrifice, just suggesting that over-consideration of one's own narrative can lead to acts of great selfishness.
...And so, a life is an Exquisite Corpse.
"Un récit? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais."
The linked article provides some phrases/concepts which seem more amenable to grappling with/interacting with. Specifically, it breaks the concept of Narrativity into the psychological Narrativity thesis (That it is human nature to experience their lives as a story or collection of stories, with narrative arcs and plot points as we're used to describing in fiction), and the ethical Narrativity thesis (That the act of experiencing/conceiving of one's life as a narrative is a capital-g Good Thing, and that narrativity is essential to full personhood).
From there, it splits outlooks based on truth values. One could think that humans are innately narrative-driven in their thoughts and that this is good (many people here). Alternately, one could think that people are narrative-driven and this isn't good (This also shows up in the article). Contrarily, one could think that people aren't innately narrative (but that it's good to aspire to), or lastly that narrativism isn't innate, and that it isn't good to assume that this is the case.
I find the last one compelling, myself. Many people do continually tell themselves the story of themselves, but this isn't innate/required. One can have a series of events, see the causality, and have plans for the future without a Narrative. Believing in the Narrative would suggest things like believing that your life is part of the Campbellian Hero's Journey.
This is sometimes helpful, as it can suggest to people that they can hold on for things to get better, but it's also where we get things like the decried Nice Guy behavior where men expect that inputting kindness coins leads to the sex payoff, because those are the stories they're immersed in and the ones they believe in. I've seen schizophrenics describe their mental models as taking this pattern-matching wiring in humans and having it turned up to eleven. Seeing data points and watching connections form to where there's a Grand Narrative connecting things. (Not a point against them, though to me at least it does point towards narrative pattern-matching as something people can vary more and less in feeling tendencies towards.)
As for myself, I sometimes tell narrative tales of myself, but it feels like a deliberate thing. I can describe my past in narrative arcs (and it's a really good point made above that there's many incentives to do so in the workplace), but it's not something I feel is actually the case or needs to be the case. "Plucky young farmboy gets into computers, is drawn to the Big City by Megacorp, has a fall-from-grace there". Where does the story go from here? Under a Narrativist mindset, there's some predictive capacity here. Fall-from-grace leads to soul-searching and redemption? If we could use narratives to predict the future, that would definitely point towards Narrative as a driving force. On the other hand, being able to say "No, my story doesn't have to go like this, I don't have to have a story leading me in this direction" is powerful. By throwing off those chains of narrativity, it allows some measure of greater control.
So yes, I think people are drawn towards personal narratives. They're compelling. We're surrounded by stories all the time. There's incentives to talk about one's past in that way. But they can be confining, and they can lead to harmful behavior as people are immersed in stories suggesting specific arcs.
For instance most people don't know what they are doing at all. That includes politicians and leaders. But they build narratives and they use those narratives to lead, rule, assign punishments, and so on. Without narratives of history and the present, we would be utterly lost as to what to do now or next.
It's interesting today, in a world more connected than ever, to see how these narratives rub up against each other. It is clear that not all narratives have equal value. Older and more static narratives in particular aren't doing so great.
How would we evaluate a narrative? One way is by it's practical effects on peoples' lives and the levels of health and suffering it actively promotes, for both its adherents and opponents.
Another way is by the narrative's approximation to absolute reality. Thanks to the scientific method and its tools we are creeping closer to achieving an objective understanding of reality (although we are unlikely to ever reach one).
It seems obvious (at least to me) that understanding reality better will allow us to create better narratives and therefore enable us to think and act better. In other words, basing our actions on a narrative that is as true as possible would likely lead to better practical effects.
Of course measuring the positive or negative value of a narrative's effects is somewhat subjective, and what is 'better' for one person might not be for another, or even for the same person later on. For instance, when people use relatively poor narratives to give meaning to their suffering it might be some comfort to them (and therefore seem positive) but ultimately will lead to action that causes more suffering.
TL;DR: A better existence is achievable if we do not just accept whatever narratives are thrust upon us but instead actively refine and change them based on their practical results and to more closely approximate reality.
The random spawn system is broken in that game!
Anyway, saying that we're natural story tellers isn't saying much. What's a story? Wikipedia: "A narrative or story is any report of connected events"
i.e. a story (in this context) is some carefully curated data about the past, featuring us, and a pattern imposed on that data.
Obviously life isn't (just) a story. I imagine though, that someone who thinks they're very good at curating and connecting data about themselves, would place a high value on their stories, and those stories' predictive power. In the limit, the storyteller might disregard the gestalt data of their senses once the narrative is formed, which might give the impression that life is a story. This may work very well for the storyteller, but it's not the whole... story... the raw material remains in our minds, and has its own value. The best story misses much, adds much. Life is a process, stories are one product.
Another thing to notice: many of us here are assuming that 'story' means '..like in a book or movie!' I submit to y'all that the vast majority of told stories are vastly vastly different from such, to the point that we can often tell when someone's fictionalizing even when they're trying hard to disguise it. Stories about real life often have a meaningless or fractal bent that reveals the structure of their basis-memories, which is beautiful, I think.