The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'an ornate storybook.'
Reality as we understand it is a fiction created by our own minds. We ourselves and everyone we know are characters in this fictional reality. This doesn't mean that no objective world exists. But it does mean that the world we inhabit isn't a place of objective truths. Instead, it's a place made of stories.
While some may find this existential subjectivity disconcerting, it's also empowering. Any autobiographical narratives holding us back can in theory be changed. So can the stories we tell about others. And changing these stories literally changes the world.
This power to change the world is accessible to any of us. It's accessible, but harnessing it requires skills that not everyone develops and space that not everyone can easily find. Moreover, we're all actively discouraged from taking control of the stories we use to describe ourselves and each other. Instead, we're encouraged or even forced to accept the version of reality manufactured for us by the control regime to keep us in line.
Do you have a desirable place in that manufactured reality? I don't. Neither do most of the people that I know. If society is a game, we will never be winners of this game. Instead, unseen powers will continue to pit us all against each other in an endless Hobbesian fight for resources that have been made artificially scarce.
Society prescribes autobiographies for us that serve the control regime over our own interests. These prescribed stories give great importance to demographic categories like race and gender. They encourage us to seek status by serving the regime. To conform and to treat nonconformists poorly. To idolize celebrities and dream of winning a lottery we're never going to win.
Retaking control of our autobiographies naturally involves a social component. Our identities cannot change without social recognition of that change on some level. In many traditional cultures, religious rituals were used to structure the process of individual transformation as well as community recognition of that transformation. We don't have anything like that in modern America.
In my personal life, there have been a few times when the stories I was telling myself about myself and the world stopped working. Times when these stories started getting in the way of progress instead of helping me make sense of things. The end of childhood. Joining the workforce. Becoming aware that the economy was designed to keep us caged.
Each instance was accompanied by great disillusionment as the stories I was living by lost their power. Finding new stories to live by was never easy or instant. There was usually an acutely uncomfortable period of transition involved. A time when nothing seemed to make sense.
Right now there are millions of people experiencing a transition like this. They're looking around and seeing undeniable evidence that the official story is a lie. They don't yet know what to believe next so they're grasping for truths everywhere they look. What is this world I find myself in? Who am I supposed to be here? They're asking deep questions like these and society's ready-made answers are shallow and unsatisfying.
One of my own most challenging story revision moments accompanied the onset of cluster headaches. This is one of the most painful conditions known to medical science and it has no cure. When I began experiencing incapacitating headache attacks and could no longer work, many of the stories I told myself about who I was fell apart. Suddenly, I was no longer an adventurer with career prospects and a bright future ahead of me. Instead, I was barely functional, with years of torment ahead of me.
Eventually, a breakthrough came with the realization that there simply was no place for me in the world as most people understood it, nor was there ever likely to be. In light of this, it would have been foolish to continue seeing myself in relation to society at all. This uncomfortable realization made it possible to totally let go of all of the stories that society had prescribed for me.
In their place emerged a new story which transformed my self image into something more operative. In this new story, I became an unimportant city mouse coping with dystopia by embracing relentless creativity. This story got me through some hard years, but its purpose was more individual than social.
As a society right now we're desperate for new stories. The media and entertainment industries are ignoring our desperation and presenting us instead with the same endlessly repackaged stories that led us into our undesirable present state. This situation isn't sustainable. When a society's stories stop working for enough people, new stories will inevitably arise.
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