escaping the narrative

last week, i had an experience i can only describe as scarring. i witnessed a friend have a horrific accident and i am struggling to deal with that. in this struggle, i have noticed a pattern in my thinking and i'm facing the question that it might not be a particularly helpful one, though it seems hard to escape.

i realized, i have this tendency to narrativize everything that happens in my life in an attempt to make sense of it. the first time that i remember doing this was when i fell in love for the first time and i came up with this grand story about what was going on within me and the person i was in love with and between us. years later, i came to understand that at best there were small glimpses of truth within that story, but the majority of it was false. maybe this should have been a warning for me to question these narratives more intensely, but instead i embarked on a journey to find more fitting stories about myself, ones that explained what was going on in ways that were closer to the truth. i saw that these stories helped me connect to people and made me interesting to them. so i started to also change the way i lived my life in order to be able to tell better stories about it.

i understand that this is a perfectly natural thing to do and that it is not uncommon at all. i think there is probably something in the human mind as a sense-making and pattern-seeking species that drives you innately to do this to some degree. but i also think that there are certain conditions in our historical moment that lead a lot of people to think about themselves in these terms even more. i have a few ideas as to what might play a role in this.

for one, i think we grow up in a world where children are already bombarded with narratives in an intensity that feels to me as if it is a pretty recent innovation. obviously, there has been plenty of children's stories for a long time and they have always been a huge part of childhood, but even just having grown up in a world where tv exists and where a majority of the kids around me spent hours watching it every day, only for almost all of us to graduate to watching shitty early 2010s youtube videos and later short-form video strikes me as a pretty novel way to be socialized into this world we inhabit. seeing it sketched out like this, it seems to me also as if over the years there has been a major flattening in the stories that we consume, paralleling the destruction of most of our attention spans. with the flattening of the stories, there comes a tendency to make cheap morality or self-insert stories. i don't think it is very far from these to thinking about yourself as just a character in a story. a development that is mirrored in modern lingo: people talk about "main characters" and "npcs", "romanticising their lives" and "doing it for the plot" (i feel that most of these terms might not actually be super contemporary anymore, but that's probably just due to me having aged out of really knowing how kids talk anymore, there would probably be some more apt terms currently in use in the same vein)

relatedly, another big part in this development has to be played by social media pervading every last corner of our social lives. the entire structure of these platforms incentivizes you to tell a story about yourself and the best way to do that is for yourself to actually believe the story that you're telling. it has become trite to even say out loud that everyone is faking it on their social media pages and it feels like everyone has been saying for ten years now that the currency of the internet is authenticity, but all that has led to is just billions of people faking authenticity in order to be successful and try and get their little droplets from the ad money well that is clearly drying up. i don't think i was ever really deep in that mode of storytelling, but i think that is mostly due to the fact that i was never any good at it.

lastly, i think that capitalism has at this point hollowed out most of the social institutions in the western world that otherwise functioned as meaning-making devices. i do believe that only people living in a miserable society even need such a thing as meaning-making devices, but for the individual they do serve a purpose in not making them go insane. to name a few, capitalism first got rid of religion and the church as a collective majority phenomenon. with its requirements for flexibility and the expansion of the working population, it emptied out the family from much of its content while maintaining a lot of the expectations on the individual around it. also, mass politics has for obvious reasons been destroyed, which could serve as an anchor to feel part of a meaningful project to change the world. don't get me wrong, i don't believe that religion or the family as institutions are worth defending, but rather had to be overcome anyways, but a world where all of these communal ways of understanding oneself have been made obsolete, coming up with an individual story of your own hero's journey is a reasonable response in the face of the meaninglessness of the life as a worker under capitalism. not to mention the fact that it is very easy to sell a lot of stuff to people that think about themselves in this way and ads keep reinforcing these patterns of thought.

back to the accident i was talking about in the beginning. right in the aftermath, i frantically tried to come up with some kind of story around it, some explanation as to why this terrible thing had happened. the problem is that i pretty quickly realized that such a freak accident doesn't conform to a neat little story. i still tried anyways and i went so far as to almost try and feel the feelings of other witnesses, ones that i talked to them about. once more had to understand i just couldn't know what goes on in other people's heads. i saw that when faced with the seriousness of life and death, in a situation where it's not even possible to know why the thing that happened came to pass and why the victim took the risk that they did, it almost becomes insulting to try and invent a story around it.

all of this makes me question as to how i want to continue dealing with this pattern i have. i think writing this blog is an attempt at changing my perspective on it. getting my stories out there, so i can let them rest in my head for a bit. i think i'm hoping to find some calm, because it can get so exhausting to think about yourself so much and i also really know that it can make you quite the overwhelming person to be around. i don't want to organize my entire life around not being overwhelming, but i do like to keep the people around me in mind when thinking about the person i want to be. i also don't know to which degree i can or even want to get rid of it. partly, because i think it can be fun sometimes to talk about yourself and other people in these terms and speculate a bit. it's just important to keep in mind that we're really good at seeing patterns, but struggle to see the little imperfections in them, so not to treat them as gospel. i'm unhappy with that conclusion, but i don't have a better one for now. other than that, i'm thinking about a dear friend who recently recommended me zen buddhism. maybe that's the way out?