Discover the true importance of the stories we share.
Let me prove to you that God exists.
God exists because if something is organized, there must be an organizer. — The present (creation) only exists if the past (creator) exists.
You cannot live in a cause-effect universe without a first cause (creator).
Rachel from the FRIENDS series wouldn’t have a surprise birthday party if Monica and Phoebe hadn’t arranged it for her.
There always HAS to be someone to organize things: the balloons, the confetti, the punch, the cake, Joey, Chandler, and Ross’s hiding place for them to yell “Surprise!” when someone opens the door and the presents 🙂
In life, it’s the same.
Someone has prepared the party: gravity so you don’t spend the day floating through clouds, a sun that’s just the proper distance away to allow life without scorching our hair, a moon that wolves can howl at, a DNA strand that makes your eyes a divine color 😉
Conclusion: Someone or something with intelligence that we do not understand must have created the reality that we inhabit because this set-up is so precise that it cannot be the result of chance.
But the important thing is not whether or not I have convinced you that God exists. What is important is the story I have used to try to convince you.
1. The power of stories and their function
Stories are a vehicle that facilitates the integration of new knowledge from existing knowledge.
It is like a bridge.
It is how old knowledge phagocytizes new knowledge.
The more familiar the story/metaphor we use to explain something new, the more accessible it is for the message receiver to understand that knowledge.
That is why all spiritual traditions try to explain the unknown (God, the existence of life after death, spirits, you name it) through stories.
- The Bible is a book of stories
- The Bhagavadgītā is a book of stories.
- Zen fables are stories.
The power of a story lies in establishing metaphors (parallels/bridges) that are easy to understand so that a person outside the knowledge we want to convey can know what we are explaining.
I have used the series FRIENDS to explain my point about God. Because it is a series that most people are familiar with.
And that story allows me to explain something new (my theory about the organizing God) based on something you already know (The FRIENDS series).
People romanticize the series of the nineties because it gives us a shared past, which, besides generating nostalgia, allows us to create bridges (tell each other stories) to transmit information.
The problem is that in 2023, what happened in the nineties no longer occurs; we don’t all consume the same series, listen to the same songs, etc.
2. We know less and less about more and more things.
Because we consume information in a fractal way by scrolling through our feeds: one-minute videos, tweets, selfies, and random news that we read around.
And we have become a culture without context. Having no context is the only context we share.
Everyone consumes their music, their series, and their art. And it is increasingly diverse and fractal.
And that creates weaker bridges (stories) with which to share information.
Because the strength of a story lies in the number of people who know it, the less known the story, the less power it has.
3. The superficiality of language infantilizes us
The videos and stories we see everywhere tend to be more and more straightforward (the hero’s journey remixed to infinity) for the public to understand them.
And that will do some nasty things to our culture.
- The infantilization of society will increase because all the knowledge transmitted remains on the surface: we see this with the rise of emojis or memes to express emotional states.
- There will be more and more misunderstandings and communication problems between people or social groups because, without familiar stories, we can speak English, but that English may sound like Korean because we do not have the same cultural agents (the same familiar stories) behind us to support the things we want to communicate.
- It will increase the loss of interest on the part of the receiver of the message because their attention span is poorly trained, limiting the patience needed to absorb complex knowledge.
4. Communication without context weakens us
Language is a reflection of culture. A lazy language gives rise to a society composed of individuals of elementary impulses and, therefore, weak. — We are a culture of memes and emojis (we are so screwed).
The lazy language without context will turn us into increasingly impulsive individuals. Unable to control our reactive states (let’s face it, we are becoming increasingly impatient).
This is a problem because as we become lazier, we choose pleasure (short-term rewards: eating treats, watching kitten videos on YouTube, spending money compulsively on nonsense) over enjoyment (long-term rewards, like doing a puzzle that makes us feel fulfilled when we finish it).
And that weakens us.
Why?
The one who solves puzzles in his spare time (the one who seeks long-term rewards) is more prepared to face problems (being unemployed, being dumped) than the one who spends the day consuming one-minute videos of kittens (the one who seeks short-term rewards).
And today, most of us consume the damn videos instead of reading Seneca. (I’m guilty of it too 🙂
5. The impact of time on language
Time also influences a lot.
In a society without context, everything goes very fast. All information is quickly obsolete after being consumed. Therefore, people do not invest time backing up what they communicate.
In addition, you can play the fool after saying an outrageous thing without data since people will be focused on the new trendy topic and not on your mistake, which frees you from shame, asking for forgiveness, and facing the consequences.
And that makes us worse people.
6. Conclusion
- In the age of globalization, where language was supposed to unite, it is increasingly isolating us from each other.
- Words were supposed to serve to unite, not to separate, to deepen, not to be superficial, to add, not to subtract, to build, not to dissociate us from reality. And just the opposite happens.
- Stories should serve us to connect. Without that connection, information cannot be transmitted efficiently, only partially. This fosters misunderstandings, social phobia, and isolation.
- The stories we tell each other build the external world but also the internal world of each individual. If we do not have shared stories, we will be increasingly lonely in both the outside world and the inner world.
- Societies are built on shared stories; if you run out of shared narratives, society loses its group identity, and that destroys it.
- In today’s communication, only the now is essential. Everything is continuously present, and if you run out of the past that familiar stories give us, we will run out of the material to build a decent future to aspire to. The present will cease to have structure. It will become liquid, and chaos will begin.
- We have a shared past, and we need it to have a common future. We need to share the same histories to move in the same direction.
As Miguel de Unamuno once wrote, “Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. One lives in Memory and by Memory, and our spiritual life is nothing but the effort of our Memory to persevere, to become hope, the effort of our past to become the future.”
A virtual hug
AG
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