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The Real Reason We Consume Stories
How stories bridge the gap between reality and the fictions we believe in
I have written before about the significance I read in the emergence of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens as a cultural phenomenon. The enormous popularity of a book which universally characterised human belief structures — from religions to countries — as fictions is an indication of how much the traditional theatrical, story-telling mode by which we humans have sought to make meaning of our lives throughout history has collapsed, replaced by a barren rationality.
Yet stories remain utterly vital to our psychological life. We can see this in the hunger that children have for stories, a hunger that can sometimes even supersede their appetite for food itself. They will watch the same movie ten times, as if sucking out every last imaginative nutrient, and sit in silent, rapt attention at story-time, their otherwise boundless physical energy miraculously tamed for as long as Arthur the giraffe is on the lam from the zoo, or Horton is incubating the egg of that good-for-nothing bird.
As adults, we are barely less ravenous. How many of us end the day plonked in front of the TV, consuming stories with the same enraptured attention? Then when we go to bed, it seems the compulsion continues, as our unconscious minds weave…
