The Case Against Storytellers
Let me tell you a story, a story about my friend Cindy. Cindy is a 20-something that absolutely hated her 9 to 5 job; she felt like there had to be more to life but couldn’t quite figure out what. Self-help books, visioning workshops, therapy, nothing quite cut it. One day, she decided she just couldn’t do it anymore. She quit her job, sold her car and most of her possessions. She used that money to buy a one way ticket and traveled the world for a year. There she discovered her passion was to create curated experiential tours for millenials. Now she travels the world living out her dream.
And then she lived happily ever after.
Or something like that.
What’s wrong with this story? It seems stories like these are the call to prayer of every millenial with an existential crisis (which is every millenial).
We as a human race have been obsessed with storytellers for a long time, reaching a feverish pitch in the social media era. So much so that a simple search on LinkedIn yields over 89,000 people with Storyteller in their job titles. It’s no longer just the purview of Mad Men-esque advertisers who sold us cigarettes but it seems everyone today can sell a dream — with the right story. There seems to be no dearth of books, articles, podcasts that tell stories of the modern heroes; the ones that built successful businesses, or started a movement and how they did it, so we can do it too.
But our over reliance on stories have rendered us incapable of writing our own. Here’s why telling stories is not as innocuous as it might seen.
There is a reason that the hero’s journey archetype has served us well for decades; we love the idea of a hero that conquers all obstacles and comes home transformed. Every fairy tale growing up either found you in the arms of Prince Charming or some version of happily ever after. We don’t seem to care if that’s actually the end of the story; it’s the point at which we want to stop reading because we want to believe it’s the end.
It’s true that we have a basic human need to want to experience more positive emotion and keep our negative emotions to a minimum. But when stories leave us believing it’s about reaching a happy ending, we lost sight of the messiness that real life is. Even worse, you start to believe that in the absence of the happy ending, you are a failure. No matter how fulfilling a chapter in your story might be, you are not taught to celebrate it, but rather compare it to someone else’s version of a happily ever after and find your narrative lacking.
Capitalist societies thrive on scarcity psychology; if there was more than enough to go around then we’d probably all get our piece of the pie. Instead we are programmed to believe that if the boy next door got a piece, that’s one less piece for the rest of us. Success feels like a scarce commodity and the more stories of success we hear, the more we start to believe our story will never be one of those.
Even storytellers feed their own unworthiness by doing a disservice to the self that drudged through the drudgery. You didn’t wake up and spend every minute of your day hustling; you didn’t always persevere. You also spent your time wondering if you were good enough, if you’d ever make it, if you’d be or do anything worthwhile. Which all happen to be valid, human, sensible emotions to cycle through. But those are not chapters in the story we narrate. We start to believe that those imperfect versions of ourselves were lesser than, or weaker. Worst of all, we ignore those same version of ourselves in the telling of the story, the sign of ultimate contempt for our vulnerabilities. But in our plight to establish invincibility, we eviscerate those who are in those stages of progress themselves, seeking validation for themselves in us.
“Failure is everywhere. It’s just that most of the time we’d rather avoid confronting that fact.” ~ Oliver Burkeman
Something like 90% of products fail; which means we are much more likely to fail than succeed. Yet, the stories that are overwhelmingly told are success stories, of the triumphant returns and the rise to glory. While it’s heartwarming to so selectively celebrate human resilience, it also discredits the effort it takes to get there and all the failures along the way. It makes us feel that failure is the tiny little blip in the chart, not the complete flat lining. We don’t want to hear the stories of people who are struggling through addiction, we want the story of the one who struggled through it, beat it and lives on to tell the story of how they have transformed their lives. The before is never interesting without the after. We prefer to enter a home knowing it has been staged to have us believe an illusion, even though we know there is messiness, before we got there, and after we leave.
History is strewn with fallen heroes, those that we built up and then let us down. Let us down from the stage of perfection we put them on. The ones we believed to be infallible because we wanted to believe in a savior; a faultless super human. Because faults disgust us in ourselves and we’d rather tear down an external embodiment of it.
From the times of Aristotle, tragic heroes have been mainstays in our stories, but only as a cautionary tale. Only as a reminder that perfection is expected of our heros, and any faltering, any sign of vincibility renders us unworthy of folklore status. We want to erect statues that preserve a hero at their peak; a crack surfaces, and we are left wondering if we need to tear it down.
Why do we want to believe that heroes are different from us? That they are perfect in ways we can’t be. Is it aspiration for a higher self? If so, Buddha would be happy. But then the same Buddha taught us compassion, which we seem to forget when we cut down our imperfect heroes.
The thing is, if you read enough stories, enough times, that have the same moral, you start to believe there is no room for an alternate ending. How many alternate endings are left on the cutting room floor, never to be revisited again? We close the door to our cutting room floor, believing that if we don’t fit an archetype, we are not worthy of our own storyline. We want the success formula, the one that will guarantee the same outcome we read about. Five habits that make all CEOs successful? Great, write that down. Every self-made entrepreneur quit their 9 to 5 jobs? Noted. There are whole businesses that make a living out of charting the exact course that a hero walked, attempting to dispel any ambiguity; 30 days for guaranteed success or your money back, they say.
These success guarantees make us walk gingerly on the icy lake of life; it reflects back what we want to see, but one step this way or that, and we risk shattering the whole thing. Instead, maybe we need to walk the long way around the perimeter of the lake. Or climb the rocky hill. Or maybe it’s OK if we just stay home snuggled up with a hot cup of cocoa. It might not make for a great story but you might just have to live with that.
The Case Against Storytellers
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