Storytelling is, I believe, how we humans see the world. I am on point with E for that one. They say we can't remember anything before the age of 3 or so, because we can't organize out memories into narratives, so we just can't remember them. We want to see plots and characters and beginnings, middles and ends. Its how we organize things to explain them later.
This leaves us with funny habits though. We need our characters to be consistent, and complex, but interesting, and yet characters are not real people. They cannot be nearly complicated and convoluted, ambivalent or rich as characters. We are not simple. We are infinitely more complicated by experience and history and baggage.
But humans are storytellers. We include the relevant information; we characterize people. Funny story. When I was 15 and had my first job, me and my co-worker had a lot of time on our hands some days. So she came up with a game. Well, she noticed a peculiar habit of mine, and made it into a game. Aka she would say a word, any word, and I could come up with a story that referred to it. My favourite: Dinosaur. As in, my buddy J, who had a mohawk in high school, or, for part of high school at least, Came up to me in english class one day and asked if I thought he looked like a dinosaur. Because his cousin had said his hair made him look like a brontosaurus. I said no, of course, but kinda. In a punk-kid-o-saurus kind of way.
But all this storytelling has had a weird effect in the social media world, apparently. We post so many pictures and status updates and tweets about these awesome stories, the photos of us having fun and smiling and being, well, perfect in our own ways. But the lack of truth, the lack of context, and the tunnel vision of these posts, these photos, makes people feel more alone, less satisfied with their lives, and gives them more of a complex about their own lives. So regardless of the content of our own posts, we believe other people's more. Which is one of those wonderful little paradoxes of life.
So really, Chuck Klosterman is right, in a way. Choices make us happier in the short term, in the now, but less happy in the long run because it makes us feel more alone and less connected. So I propose something unorthodox. Ambivalent stories. Stories that are good and bad, funny and sad, shallow and deep. Because I believe that we can use all of this media to share. We can use all of the things available to us to connect more, or at least, in more authentic ways, because we can be ourselves, have those options, and connect with people all the same. Connect with people who are better suited to us. More options means that we don't all have to fit into a clear cut mould. And that can be better. If we stopped comparing ourselves to other people and judging our lives against snapshots.
-K
p.s. Ambivalent story of the day: Last spring I had accepted my grad school offer and had all these plans for the future and had, at least on paper, figured out my life. But I was bored as crap. Waiting to start your life, or a chapter of your life, is incredibly dull. I worked a bit, I volunteered, and I hung out. And ya, I had fun, but empty fun. Unsatisfying, vapid, useless fun. I don't regret it, and I feel bad calling it vapid when I made friends out of it and do have fond memories of bits of it. So I saw how those people live. The ones who go out all the time, and make random friends and hang out and have fun, and produce Texts from Last Night. Its funny, sure, but life is about a lot more than soundbites and tweets.
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