The Reason Why We Tell Stories

Behind even the smallest encounter is a story. This may sound like a large call to make, yet psychology would vouch it as true (well at least the majority). Since identity has become so important to us in this reign of the individual, we need a story to verify our own existence. Are you sophisticated? Prove it with the coffee you drink. Are you ethical? Prove it by donating to a charity, or helping an elderly person cross the road. Witty? Find things in the news that are both funny and intelligent. The ways in which we 'prove' our identities, often through activities we already like doing, structure even the smallest details of our everyday lives.

 The problem with telling stories is that there is often a very fine line between a story and a lie. 'Telling stories' is, in fact, the wording for telling lies (just put in a much nicer way). Yet telling stories is what we rely so much upon in everyday decisions. Which shampoo you buy is very much dictated by who you think you are (are you thrifty, girly, would you even buy your shampoo from the supermarket?). So are general acts of kindness, or driving habits, or search terms; and, one could argue, even the fact whether there is a decision to do something at all (after all, these things might not apply to your life narrative at all).

Furthermore, your identity in your life story often seems to fit into one prescribed by society. The terms you would use to describe yourself are cut out for you - nerd, narcissist, drop-out, handsome - and all rely on societal norms anyhow. And yet, all of us want to be individual. We try and fight the restrictions placed upon who we can and can't be. Nevertheless, these societal 'stories' are the tools which others use to place us in their stories. Categories of stories help people know where other people 'fit'. Which leads you easily to the question - are our whole lives just a bunch of stories? Or, to put it harshly, a pack of lies?

 This may seem a highly strung question for a Thursday morning (I would agree with you). Yet in a world where no one actually knows what the real deal is (unless you are religious or religiously-scientific), lies are what you cling to. It is really up to society to deem your life story, or you, as authentic (remembering that you, too, are an actor in that society). These narratives that we use to make sense of the world are the only things that make sense. They are external and they are real - you can grab on to them, blog them, remember them with photos, have them re-told to you. You can make up your own authenticity; after all, who is to prove that any of the stories are objectively true? They are all released into the current frame of who you think you now are, or who you want to be.

The most common desired life narratives are picked up by marketers and advertisers, who insert their products into the way you live your life. If you can use a brand of toothpaste or drink a brand of tea every morning, then that too is part of your (at least external) identity. Life stories are developed much before the time you could write an autobiography: they are persistent in your persistence to repeat the same things over and over as life rituals. Psychologically, we are built to love rituals - they help our mental health. And so we become, increasingly, what we do, but also what we buy, as a reflection of what we desire. Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are all authors of at least our own existence, pencilling down the grittiest of details for ourselves to see.

 So what does all this matter, really? Well, it just makes you more aware that much of what sells today is really bottled familiarity and desire. The objects we want, and crave, are those that we believe will help us get that little bit closer to the person we want to be (whether consciously or not). Even negating buying is part of this; your ability to not buy is a part of you believing you are a person that would not be 'sucked in'. The things you use everyday, in this way, are not so much tools as objects of memory - objects that remind you of what you are aspiring to become, where you've been and maybe even a bit of  past sentimentality in-between. As humans are already anthropologically connected to possessions in ways not fully discovered, that daily mirror you use could indeed be a cultural reflection of you. You, at least, branded.