Member-only story
How To Use Storytelling To Become Our Best Selves
The stories we tell ourselves today shape the stories we will tell ourselves tomorrow. They are inevitably distorted, but we can still use them to our advantage.
Humans and stories go a long way. At some point, our brains developed, probably, like any iteration of evolution, by accident, the ability to create stories. That little tweak in our physiology and psychology made us, at lighting speed, masters of the world.
Stories are powerful. In fact, they might be infinitely powerful. Almost single-handedly, storytelling has articulated belief systems, ideas for which we have killed and died, a sense of community well beyond our actual knowledge of all the individual community members.
Our beloved Neanderthal cousins, with their bigger brains and bigger muscles, were no match: we could trust each other without knowing each other, we could launch organised armies of thousands of us to exterminate scattered gangs of handfuls of them.
Does this mean that stories are responsible for all the wars and all the pain and misery and climate change and its denying demagogues? Well, yes, kind of, sorry.