The Life of Stories
- Because of the inaccurate way in which our minds and language represent the world, there is an obvious disconnect between the stories that we tell and the stories that we live.
- The stories that we live lure us into fabricating the stories that we tell.
- Our minds add meaning to the original story; emphasize some details and downplay others.
- We search for the meaning that matters to us, and shape the story to maximize that meaning.
- The stories that we tell acquire more meaning, compared with the real stories, and thefore become more powerful.
- Human minds are very bad at photographing the real, but very good at communicating meaning to other minds.
- The stories that we live have a life of their own: they use our minds to create new stories, slightly different stories, variations of the original one, stories that nobody has ever lived but that now suddenly exist in human minds.
- And these stories in turn become slightly different stories in the minds and the language of other people.
- Stories evolve and reproduce.
- And these unlived stories generate real stories because they are the strongest influence in determining our real actions, the real actions of real people that constitute real stories.
- And the cycle resumes, endlessly weaving together the real and the fictional, one feeding into the other.
- The history of our world is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed.
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