A Love of Stories
The human advantage
Tonight is Family Movie Night and by my count it will be the 200th time we’ve sat down as a family to watch a movie together. For 200 Saturdays, we’ve sat down on a couch together with dinner and stepped into a story. For Spouse and me there might be some familiarity, but generally for Squirt it’s an entirely new story. But the experience of hearing the story is becoming familiar to him.
He knows who Kaiser Soze is. He watched Harry defeat Voldemort. He’s seen dead people with that kid and watched Hans fall off Nakatomi Tower. He knows the opening riff to Wayne’s World, and he knows what those other kids did last summer. Saw Truman sign off his show. Saw Arnold come back. Watched Phil live the same day over and over again for 34 years.
I am fascinated with stories. Stories are what make us something more than an animal grubbing in the dirt. Our ability to imagine a thing that isn’t real. To empathize. To create. Theory of mind is simply our ability to tell someone else’s story in our own head. Indeed, a standard mental model is really just a story. Systems are essentially storytelling devices, too. Writing code and writing a novel are in many ways the same thing to me.
Somewhere in the past our species gained the ability to tell stories, to believe fictions. To lie. Yuval Noah Harari frames this as the Cognitive Revolution and it was the beginning of our climb out of the muck. Stories make us what we are.
Every one of us carries a story around in our heads about ourselves. A story where we are the hero. Living a story filled with allies, enemies, conflict, and twists. Maybe we see it as a tragedy, where the hero won’t win and is beset on all sides by struggles. But hopefully we see it as a hero’s journey where we move and learn and grow.
We all live with our own story in our head, but it’s more rare to recognize the story outside ourselves. And even more rare to seek the stories of others.
A reader lives a thousand lives; the man who never reads lives only one.
~ George R. R. Martin
If Aladdin loaned me his lamp or Gandalf sat me down and asked what I wanted for the world I would have a ready answer. I’d ask for everyone to gain a love of stories. To recognize that the person across from them has a story of their own. To realize there’s no such thing as boredom when there’s one more page to turn, one more character to meet, and one more thing to learn.
Will be interesting to see which story Squirt chooses tonight.
Squirt Responds…
I like how you talk about how stories are what makes us different from animals. Animals cannot imagine. If you tell a monkey that if he gives you his banana he will live forever he won't give you his banana. He does not have any capabilities of thinking that way. That is what separates up from animals.