On Stories
All human communication is storytelling.
Storytelling is simply the most human-accessible, least resistance way to communicate. By telling each other what happened in our life, someone else’s life, or some imaginary life, we are doing what our brains were built to do. We are transferring truth to another’s mind via episodes of connected moments that magically package meaning. This ideally happens in a way that forces the audience to feel something. Forever embedding a truth in your nervous system - learning the lessons of experiences of others without having to go through them yourself. Fucking magic.
Stories are efficient too. They compress data in the brain. A few details of a known story can naturally produce more and more details in memory as you continue to unpack it in your mind. Even more impressive is how they’re able to bundle both details and meaning. Packages of emotional energy delivered directly to you.
Feelings beat facts.
People like it when something makes them truly feel something. This is why music, movies, and art in general are such powerful forces in our culture and societies. Like it or not, a human life is just a collection of feelings that were felt. And every intentional story is pushing to make you feel something.
A good story gives you a feeling. People are stories. Posts are stories. Clips are stories. Brands are stories. Products are stories. Stores are stories. Homes are stories. And all forms of art are just different media for storytelling. Different ways to package the same underlying mechanism of distributing a feeling to a population.
Stories stack into culture, creating an immortal memory. The lessons of each shared frequently amongst those closest to one another, building ancestral lore passed on from one generation to the next. Symbols, rituals, songs, family traditions, and repeated jokes all are stories. Stories are how we get through the day and the scaffolding of truth we stand on to extend our civilization higher. Stories bring us to move, bring us follow, bring us to lead. Stories change the way we interact with our environment. Feeling a certain way can change DNA expression such that it’s more heritable. So in a real way stories drive the evolution of our species.
Everything can be framed as a story.
Anything with a history can be a story. Stories are broadly more expressive than math equations, because they can bundle dynamics of unobservable phenomena in a way mathematical models cannot. Unlike maths, they can speak about and play with variables without needing to explicitly define every attribute of those variables. Stories can build worlds and play with analogies in ways maths simply isn’t allowed to do.
This also means stories are more ambiguous than equations, but in that ambiguity lies some amount of explanatory power unreachable through calculus. Some observer at some point will interpret the story in a way that reveals a hidden truth unattainable through any other means.
This also puts great power in the observer. Stories leverage the dot-connecting function of the brain to fill in the gaps of things the storyteller could not see. With all the dot-connectors working to fill in its gaps, the greatest stories find timeless truths that emerge after grand audience consumption.
This is likely why religious texts have been more readily relied upon than technical books when it comes to big questions of human existence. Religious texts are collections of stories. Where equations have momentary correctness (until falsified or modified), gaps in stories allow for long-term convergence to time-varying, wider truths. Basically, stories can conceivably be true for all time where equations have a shelf-life.
Stories are broad. Equations are deep.
The superpower of equations is in their specificity. If we’re trying to design a circuit, telling a story about electricity isn’t going to help, but establishing reproducible relationships between electricity, materials, and magnetism will help use build something useful. So equations are really just the most distilled version of a specific story about how things work within a specific domain of use, removing as much ambiguity as possible. That’s why they’re boring to most people and certainly not viral. People will never cry over the truths of an equation because their scope is limited too much.
When it comes to stepping out of human-bubble truths, equations also help to remove the usual limitations of our experience. If one would like to standardize a truth irregardless of the type of observer, an axiomatic system is required. The axiom systems of our maths cover much deeper scopes, while storytelling covers wider, but shallower scopes. So maths can monomaniacally dig a tunnel to the core of the onion, while stories can peel off the top layers and make you cry.
So the superpower of stories is their ambiguity. The ambiguity is a puzzle your brain forces itself to solve until the act of resolving it stamps its mark on your mind for good. Like a mini test of understanding. Bad stories are easy puzzles and don’t stay with us, where good stories seem magical in the truths they are able to impart.
Stories form connections.
Because stories can package and transfer meaning, they have the power of creating epiphanic explosions of associations in the brain. This forms memories, understanding, and intelligence. They assemble the associative tree of knowledge in your mind by building branches between things you never thought were connected. They create formless mental forms that are as real to you now as anything outside your mind, but can’t be described without existential dependence on the story that made them.
Even famous mathematicians relied on a form storytelling to enhance their thinking. Richard Feynman commented on John Tukey’s use of mental hooks to pull esoteric formulae or relations from memory. “He’d always remember things I’d forgot.” Tukey used a trick of little internal stories to map meaning to things usually relegated to meaninglessness.
Our mind is best built from bricks made of stories. Rote memorization will never beat meaning assignment when it comes to memorizing something. And the only way to assign real meaning to an abstract idea is through a story.
Why is this useful to think about?
If you can practice and be intentional about the stories your are telling, your life will improve dramatically. Your success and status in society is propped up on your influence (directly or indirectly) of those who listen to you.
Job interviews, presentations, brand content, product design, physical motivation, sales calls, relationships, happiness, regret are all driven by stories we tell others or tell ourselves. What stories are you telling? Who’s your audience? How are you telling them? What stories are you telling yourself? Why those stories? What stories do you want others to tell about you?
In another post, I will outline how I like to look at stories, including:
the core elements that make a story “good” or “bad”
retelling old stories versus creating your own stories
different media versions of the same story
habitualizing good storytelling