There's No Such Thing As An Unwritten Life

It’s what every writer wants to do. Tell a story so well, with such ease and grace, that it becomes real. It doesn’t have to be fiction either. Even non-fiction writers are telling a story. We’re feeding our readers a narrative, one that we desperately want them to buy into. All writers are trying to convince you of something. It’s an inherently pedagogical profession. If they say otherwise, they’re lying, or worse, bad writers.

I’m more interested in the stories we tell ourselves, not the ones we hear from other people. Human beings are naturally pre-disposed towards narrative. We are the animal kingdom’s great explainers. When you see something strange, a phenomenon with which you are unfamiliar, what do you do? You typically try to figure out what you just saw. But immediately after that, you grasp for an explanation. We are not very comfortable with the unknown, and this makes a lot of evolutionary sense. Far from the platitude “what you don’t know, can’t hurt you,” from an evolutionary standpoint, what you don’t know will most likely lead to a very untimely death. In order to survive, our ancestors had to know where they could find the best hunting grounds. They also had to know where they could take shelter from predators, and how to use the land in the most economic way possible.

Now certainly, our explanatory powers have evolved, just as our bodies have. Our most ancient ancestors were not particularly concerned with ontological proofs of God’s existence, because their thoughts were (mostly) occupied with the necessities of daily survival. However, the same principle undergirds both philosophical inquiry, and knowledge of where the most wooly mammoths are: knowledge gathering. Human beings evolved a predilection for gathering as much knowledge as possible about everything because it helped us survive. We crave explanation and understanding because they’re useful, they are our most important tools when it comes to surviving in a hostile universe.

Our gift for explanation has a dark side, however. While we may be able to understand many aspects of our world, even when we lack understanding, we often just make it up, in order to make ourselves feel better. From this issues the entire concept of myth and narrative. There were many things we could not understand (and maybe still do not fully understand) in our early days. Human beings, ever predisposed to explanation, needed a way to wrap their heads around the capricious, and often dangerous, world in which they lived. What was early man supposed to do to explain the unexplainable, with his dearth of analytical tools? Where did lightning come from? Where did the crops come from? Why was there evil in the world? Of course, he invented stories.

Just because they were invented, products of the imagination and not experimentation, does not strip these stories of all their value. Indeed, they fulfilled their purpose with exactitude. Gods gave an explanation to weather and crop failures. The war between God and the Devil explained why evil was allowed to persist in the world. Beyond that, our stories are often beautiful for their own sake. There’s a reason we still read the Iliad and even the Bible. They speak to us on a very fundamental level, and it’s important that we listen to what these stories have to tell us, if only to understand an important part of our past, however objectionable we might find these myths from a belief standpoint.

The problem with our storytelling comes when we fail to acknowledge our stories for what they are. Our penchant for creating narratives comes back to bite us, because it boxes in our thinking. We look for causes where there sometimes are none. Humanity’s epitaph, if nothing else will be “because.” As children, we constantly ask our parents “because why? Because why?” Our childish desire to know, and to have easy explanations ready at hand, can lead us into some very illogical, and dangerous thinking. It hems us in. We try to set our thoughts down a tight track of causality, to make a story that makes sense.

We do this in the simplest of circumstances. I often find myself altering small details of a story or anecdote, to make it a better story. I’ll chop through a couple degrees of separation so I don’t have to explain how my cousin’s sister’s friend once met George Clooney. I just say my friend did. I don’t often let the truth get in the way of a good story. We do this in groups as well. When I get together with my friends, we spend the entire time telling stories, like old men playing dominoes outside of a coffee shop. We relive our shared mythology, but we add to it, and it changes in each telling. We make it more relevant, characters are emphasized or de-emphasized according to whether or not we like them or not. This can all seem natural and funny, and in a way it is, when the stakes are as low as who shotgunned how much, or who won beer olympics last summer. But the narrative style of thinking makes us not think, more often than not. We become gullible, because we want everything in the world to fit into neat explanatory patterns. We want to remake the world in our own image. We want to make it a story.

The problem is, that the narrative style of thinking, that makes everything into a story, and a changing story at that, becomes pervasive. I’m currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan. He proposes the following thought experiment: If I tell you I have a fair coin, and flip it 99 times, and it comes up heads each time, what are the odds that it comes up heads on the 100th throw. Well, of course the “right” answer is 1/2, since each coin flip is independent. But the answer Taleb proposes, through his character, Fat Tony, is that the coin must be loaded. I was disappointed with myself for not realizing this obvious answer. How could I be so gullible as to not even consider such a simple possibility? I may have told you that it’s fair, but why trust me, when in all probability, I’m lying? The likelihood of that coin coming up heads all those times is 1/2^99. Exceedingly unlikely. But why don’t we ever think of the obvious answer? For one, once we hear “thought experiment,” the real world goes out the window. We’re willing to endure even the most illogical cases, for the sake of the “story,” of the thought experiment.

And herein lies the problem of our inherent narrativity. We’ll scrape and mold, we’ll squish the facts until they fit into the narrative, or conceptual boxes we’ve created. We see this all the time. Scientists fudge data to make the it fit their theories. Politicians flip flop on their voting records in Congress, when their old positions become untenable. There’s the friend who claims to have slept with every woman who’s ever looked at him with anything other than a scowl.

We like stories, because they’re easier to digest. The world is in fact, too chaotic for us to deal with, without them. You have to take my assertion that the coin is fair at face value, because it’s simply too hard to live in a world where we challenge every proposition put before us. We need some way to anchor ourselves, and so, we make up some lies, until they all fit nice. But, like I said, we box ourselves in when we do that. A whole world stands outside even the most carefully wrought and wonderful stories. We have to be open to that world. Imagine how a character in a book would feel if he knew his own fate; to relive the same story over and over again and again, with no ability to literally get “outside the box,” that is, the rectangle of pages, he’s held in. Each and every character lives the Myth of Sisyphus, without even the knowing it.

Don’t get trapped in the story you’ve written for yourself. Much worse, never,ever get trapped in the story someone else has written for you. Think the unthinkable. More importantly, do the unthinkable. Question everything and everyone. Don’t sit back and assume some charlatan flipping coins is telling the truth! To some extent, all stories are predictable, but our lives don’t have to be. At the end of the day, our lives will always be stories in some way. We need our stories. They give us some form to the very scary, often funny but always chaotic collection of events we call our lives. So, the point is, not to make your life something other than a story, because it always will be one. Just don’t make it a boring story. Bonus points if you know where this line comes from, because it’s one of my favorites: “There’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one.”