You know, so many of us, it seems like so much of our mental world, the way that we experience the world, is influenced by stories.
We have all these stories, especially movies, TV, books, we have all these great stories that, you know, people really get into, and we fill our minds with all of these fictional stories, because they’re great, because we love them so much.
But it seems like this- there’s no way that it cannot have an effect on us.
Somehow, living in this world where these fictional universes, these fictional stories, are a big part of our lives, that’s going to influence the way that we see our own lives.
I can see that for myself, even though, of course, logically I know that I’m not living in a story, you know, I’m not a superhero.
I’m not gonna have like a perfectly tailored hero’s journey and everything, you know, happening, you know, in a well-constructed way, you know, going through the adventure and reaching a goal.
My life is not gonna be like that.
Even though I know that, it’s still influenced by all the stories that I’m used to.
When I think about my life, telling the story of my life, how do I describe my life? How do I look at my situation in life? It’s influenced by all these stories.
I think, well, how would I tell my life as a story? And when I see it that way, it’s very disappointing.
It’s like my life would not make a great story.
You know, maybe this is part of the reason why, you know, I really feel like oh, wouldn’t it be great to go just wind the clock back to a young age and be able to do it right, so I can, you know, tell the story properly.
Because it seems like real life is just so messy and disorganized and really not always a great story.
It seems like stories are these distilled essences that are extracted out of life.
Life doesn’t have these stories just happening as a full life.
Like your life is not going to make a story automatically.
Now, maybe in some cases your life may just fit itself well to a story without much being done to it, but it seems even then, the storyline has to be pulled out and extracted of just the most important bits, and all kinds of things that are messy, that are maybe distractions from the main storyline, things that just muddy the picture, would just make it like a really, really long movie or book where a bunch of boring things happen that have nothing to do with the main character arc.
Even the most exciting and story-like life would still be full of all those things.
But it seems like for the average life, it’s nothing like a story arc.
We can look at our lives and try to find storylines in it, and try to make a hero’s journey, or maybe it’s a tragedy, maybe it’s a comedy.
We can try to get a storyline by sort of focusing and picking particular elements of our lives, and then we can sort of imagine that we’re characters in a story.
But it seems like it’s only possible to do that by being very selective.
And even then, you know, it’s compared to masterpieces of, you know, grand hero’s journeys and where, you know, everything is just so epic and a great story, it’s very hard to make the average life stand up, and you know, be something like that.
Even though we know that, you know, our lives are not gonna be full of like magic and dragons, and you know, we’re not gonna be like kings and have all this kind of grand, grandiose stuff, we can know that it doesn’t have to be like that, but we still kind of want it to be this arc of character development, you go through adventure, and you know, you learn something, and you have a satisfying story, something you could just tie up in a bow and say “What a great story.” It seems like there’s a part of me that kind of wants that and is kind of automatically trying to apply that to my own life, even though real life isn’t like that.
So maybe it’s time to think about leaving stories behind.
And just how would I see my life if I didn’t need it to be like a story, I didn’t even consider that it was anything like a story? Imagine your life is not a story.
What would that mean?
#lifestory #notastory #reallife