A Warning About Stories

I see life in stories.

Narratives sprawling, intertwining. Life is like a collection of long running television shows, each with their own main characters and side plots, but with frequent crossovers. Seasonal arcs, occasional cliffhangers. Plots culminate and resolve… usually. Sometimes you get the sense the writers don’t really know what they’re doing, and a plot thread is left dangling. Sometimes a show drags on longer than it should because the ratings are good.

But occasionally, you get a satisfying series finale, and a long-running story ends (although it might leave a spinoff series behind).

It’s fun to look at life this way. And it can be more than fun – poignant, and beautiful.

Also really dangerous.

The universe is built out of causes and effects, and mathematical relationships. And the math doesn’t care about good guys and bad guys and making sure that things have happy endings. Or even compelling, tragic endings that teach us valuable lessons. Bad things happen, sometimes for no reason.

If you go through life thinking that everything is an adventure and things will just work out, you’re likely to encounter a rude awakening or two. You may, in fact, just die for a stupid, pointless reason.

I begin with this warning, because I’ve found myself in the business of selling ritual, storytelling, and adventure to people, within the framework of rationality.

I believe that’s important. But I don’t deny that what I’m doing is dangerous. All the more so if I’m actually successful.

Narrative thinking is the default state for most people. Human brains were bred over millions of years to find patterns in the math around us, and to use stories to interpret those patterns and teach them to others. So even though life is not made out of stories, the stories we’re trained to see are not hard to find.

We’re not very good at math, but intuition and storytelling are pretty decent at helping small tribes of hunter gatherers to figure things out, survive, and have children.

But it’s not that great for making decisions about a modern economy, for evaluating scientific research, for deciding how to have an impact on a global scale. It’s not even that great at deciding how to run a small business. Or even how to be happy, in the modern world, increasingly different from the ancestral environment where we did most of our evolving.

Reason matters, whether you’re making decisions for yourself, or for the world around you.

It’s well and good to acknowledge that you should be more rational. But actually making that change is a lot of work. It’s often counter-intuitive, fighting your own natural psychology. It’s nigh-impossible to do alone. I’m writing this today because my life was changed dramatically, by having a community of people who are earnestly curious about the truth, who earnestly want to do good in the world, even if it means changing their minds about important things, and feeling silly about having been wrong in the past.

I’ve watched people become wiser, stronger and happier, because they share a community, a culture. My own life was transformed by having stories and ritual that helped

Stories and ritual are dangerous, but they’re also among the most powerful things in the world, and if we’re going to build a more rational world, I think we’re going to need them.