The image above was made with stable diffusion using the prompt, "an alien artifact made of metal in a stone temple.' I've been enjoying this image paired with this song. The resulting vibe is interesting. I'm not sure what kind of story would go with it.
I recently ran across an article titled 'We are fictional characters of our own creation.' The piece argues, fairly convincingly, that our realities are essentially fictionalized by our minds. Here's a quote:
The stories we tell ourselves about our motives, beliefs, and values are not merely unreliable in their specifics but are fictitious through and through. They are improvisations, created in retrospect by the astonishing story-spinner that is the human mind. ... The very same story-spinning machinery our brains use to create explanations for the actions of fictional characters are used when we interpret the actions of people around us, and indeed, ourselves. We are, in a very real sense, fictional characters of our own creation.
Findings in neurology and psychology appear to support this view. Our brains tell us stories about ourselves and the world around us and not all of these stories are factual. Our autobiographies are mythologies. Our stories about one another are similarly constructed. This perspective may sound threatening. It undermines the whole idea of objectivity. But I don't see it as threatening. I see it as empowering.
In a sense, it means that the world is literally made of stories. Stories that are the creative products of our own minds. While the production of these stories is mostly automated, I feel like we have a measure of influence over the process. This seems true both of our individual stories and of the stories we share.
Personally, I've had good luck with deliberately involving my conscious self in my mind's construction of autobiographical narrative. Sometimes doing this can be quite therapeutic, though it's not what I would call easy. My most intense moment was probably putting together Navigating Dystopia, which condensed years of childhood trouble into a neat and tidy collection of essays.
In general in society right now, we don't so much have universal shared stories. We have a heterogeneous panorama of perspectives, varying in popularity, competing for our attention. Many of these perspectives were manufactured for us by our rulers. They know the power of stories.
Knowing that our brains naturally fictionalize the world around us and remembering that this is the case in a given moment are two different things. That fiction can feel pretty real. And the perspectives manufactured for us by our rulers can be very convincing. Fortunately, we don't need their stories. We're perfectly capable of telling our own.
Read my novels:
See my NFTs:
