The way I mentally visualise our past, humans lived in small hunter-gather communities and later in agricultural communities. I imagine our ancestors telling each other stories around a communal fire, maybe after eating together. Or maybe a few people became popular as story-tellers in each community. However it was, I imagine some stories becoming favourites, being retold and slightly changing or becoming more detailed in each retelling. Maybe some of these stories told the history of the communities or of travellers, maybe some were completely fictional. I do think these had value in building a coherent community and to allow people to play out scenarios in safety, to develop a common sense of morality, of accepted and unaccepted behaviour, to practise dangerous or difficult situations and to rehearse certain situations. Later the entertainment value probably became significant but did not completely supplant the historical and role-play value. Some of the tales involved immortals and some of these developed into religions, giving the communities moral values and benefiting the communities in various ways. Probably people had their own favourite stories and for sure there were favourite and recurring themes, such as people suffering for betrayal or benefitting from loyalty.
Today we have too many stories. We can stream endless movies, television series, e-books, audiobooks and other media for storytelling. Our storytellers have learned what keeps us coming back for more, plot twists, conflict, unresolved plots where our curiosity about what happens next keeps us hungry for more. There is so much of this that we no longer live so much of our own lives as before. Increasingly we live through proxies, through the stories of other people’s lives, we are addicted to finding out ‘what happens next’ forgetting that these are fictional characters, that these are lives not lived, we forget to live our own lives.
Even when we go out ourselves in search of ‘experiences’ we neglect to experience these, rather taking a quick photo or selfie and either posting it online or saving it somewhere and forgetting about it.
We are addicted to too many stories and neglect to live our own.
Liam Mor's Blog