What can stories teach us about adulting, conspiracies and danger?

Humans are beings of fiction. They’re like fish and water. They can’t survive without stories. This is what Jonathan Gottschall writes in his book, “ The Storytelling Animal”. Here are a few things we ,“beings of fiction”, should know about storytelling.

Humans like to self aggrandize themselves

This is obviously not new. People like to think they’re better than they actually are. But Jonathan Gottschall shows humans are willing to go further than just glorifying their twitter bios and posting flattering photos of them on Facebook. Some people have written fictitious memoirs. Even for those who are not consciously changing their own stories, their memories and mind do it for them.

First-person pieces have been more visible in the media in the last years (think about these stories about I lived this, this happened to me, I realized this…). People now easily read and trust these stories just because they seem to be authentic because there is no middleman. There are no journalists interfering. However, these stories must be read with a critical eye.

Are we over consuming stories?

We love stories. It used to be that we were limited to oral stories before we had access to writing and reading. In the Middle Ages, only the educated (especially the clergy) knew how to read and write. Before the printer came, some monks would spend their days copying texts. Then came the radio and TV. Now, we have many screens, consoles, virtual reality headsets. In short, we can consume lots and lots of stories. But Gottschall wonders if they have become a problem: “There’s an analogy to be made between our craving for story and our craving for food.” He thinks over consuming stories is like over eating, it’s likely to “fatten us up and kill us young”

There are not only many stories but also a lot of them are just bad (anyone’s checked TMZ recently?). So can over consuming in a “world awash with junk story lead to something like a ‘mental diabetes epidemic’ ?” asks Gottschall building on Bryan Boyd’s expression.

Virtual lands are the new “new world”

Remember when Europeans sent their ships across the Atlantic ocean to explore and colonize the New World? Well, economist Edward Castronova thinks we are facing the greatest mass migration in the history of humanity. Where are people going? To the virtual world!

Gottschall cites a survey of 30,000 Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Game (MMORPG) players: 20 % of these players consider MMORPG land their “true home” while Earth is “merely a place they visit from time to time”.

Are we soon going to be so immersed in stories, we’ll rather live them than live our own life stories? Or will it be a mix of stories entwined with our lives like Augmented Reality?

We read stories to practice at life

Have you ever thought you were “bad at life”? Just think about all these millennials sharing their #adulting stories on social media. Maybe, we should all read more to practice at life.

“The psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley calls stories the flights simulators of human social life. Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality,” writes Gottschall in “The storytelling animal”. He adds that a lot of evolutionary thinkers agree that stories allow people to practice the “key skills of human social life”.

People are drawn to stories because of their low cost vicarious experience argues American writer, Janet Burroway.

So if you ever want to know what it’s like to be an old Argentinian fisherman at sea, just pick a copy of Hemimgway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”.

Danger and suffering are GREAT

Kids love imagining trouble despite what we think. Gottschall shares his own experience with his daughters who like to pretend sharks are trying to eat them. “The typical actions in orally told stories by young children include being lost, being stolen, being bitten, dying, being stepped on, being angry, calling the policy, running away or falling down. In their stories they portray a world of great flux, anarchy and disaster, ” writes scholar Brian Sutton-Smith.

It also reminds me of something oral storyteller Céline Jantet told me. She says, parents should not be scared to include dangers when inventing a story for a child.“There needs to be danger or else there is no learning,” she says.

Kids are not the only ones who like conflicts. Janet Burroway thinks that in literature, “only trouble is interesting”. She explains, “Conflict is the fundamental element of fiction.”

Charles Baxter sums it up nicely. “Hell is story-friendly”.

“To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens”

Some people are convinced that Neil Amstrong never put a foot on the moon. Others think Beyoncé is a clone.

Most people feel like this is a lot of nonsense. But conspiratorial thinking is not just for the ignorant or insane. “It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience. Conspiracy theories offer ultimate answers to a great mystery of the human condition: why are things so bad in the world,” writes Gottschall.

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