I spend a lot of time thinking about storytelling. I’m typically reading at least 3-6 books at any given time, and I’ll often watch two movies back to back on a weeknight. In fact, I’ve built a career around sharing the stories that I find in the world, through films, photos and podcasts. So I started wondering - where does this lifelong fascination with stories come from?
Human beings are just another earth-bound animal making the most of our short lives. Eating, sleeping, playing. There are reminders every day of how intricately we are woven into the fabric of the natural world, like ants on an anthill. But of course, there are some things that set us apart - things that make us unique and distinct from all other animals.
Our humanity is defined by our sentience: awareness of self.. recognition of the singular blessing of being alive. And this sentience is really just awareness of a narrative - a story at which we are each individually at the center.
That sense of story is innate - we are born with it. We dream in stories; we experience that longing for resolution to the conflicts in our mind, to get back to sleep so we can complete some goal; we know deep down what a proper story resolution is; we construct our sense of the world around us in stories, each little event carried by a beginning, middle and end. Stories allow us to make sense of the world around us, so our brain has a thread on which to attach the events of our daily lives and the world around us.
Stories are the most effective vehicle for meaning, often the only way to get people to care about something. A person in Nebraska might not care about climate change, but show them a film about a polar brown starving on a shrinking iceberg and they will care about the bear. Hopefully.
These stories that we tell have power - the power to inform, and the power to misinform; to communicate values subliminally in ways that data never can, couching it in the human experience so it resonates and gets internalized in our brains. But that pendulum swings both ways, as stories can also be used against us - weaponized in propaganda and manipulated with disinformation, spinning whatever narrative will sell the most ad space, regardless of how nuanced the situation actually is.
It is the responsibility of storytellers to tread lightly, bring integrity to the process, and tell the truth. Not Truth with a capital “T”, but the truth of the subjects within the story. It is our responsibility to wield this power gracefully, and to understand it’s nuances. Because we, as a species, are defined by the sum total of the story that we tell.
So let’s make it a good one.
