On Story Sickness

(I used LLMs to help proofread and work on structure in this essay)

A few months ago, I stood at the door of a student flat in Göttingen, and bade the most dishevelled bathroom I have ever known goodbye. Reflecting on the hardships, surprises, beginnings and endings of the past summer, I vowed to make something -- anything -- of my confusion. My parents had endured extensive hospital stays, my brother had left the country to pursue a degree of his own, and I had thrown myself back into what was doubtlessly my passion, after a period of having to take on many new responsibilities. With this new freedom to navel-gaze, I surrounded myself with musical equipment, books, games, movies, information - both good and bad - to still a hunger for sights and sounds. Yet, I was once again confronted with the aching absence of any expressive projects undertaken during that time, because I had consumed a large number of novels to cope. 

One of the manifold joys of reading fiction is the recognition of personal struggles in the lives of its characters. In many works, characters find themselves at a 'low point', or a 'crossroads'; a thematically pivotal moment in which, while the morale and the stakes have sunk to an essential infimum with the plot seemingly stagnant, each decision taken not only critically affects the next act, but also comes at almost no cost - since 'all has been lost'. Standing in that moldy bathroom one last time, I felt as though I were at such a crossroads myself. Rather than recognizing my life in the structure of a story, I had recognized a story in the structure of my life. 

Therefore, it was natural to ask the following questions: can the logic of narratives be applied to real human lives productively? Why are we so prone to thinking of our own lives, and the course of history, in terms of stories? And what are the properties of a particularly story-prone mind? What could be analysed here which may help form some answer to Plotinus' ancient question of τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; – who we are?

Nurture

Between the ages of 3-5, I succumbed to a rather severe memetic infection provided by titles like Man on the Moon (A Day in the Life of Bob) by Simon Bartram, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams,  and Leon and Bob by Simon James, where the frequency with which I forced my loving parents to read these stories to me, at least at those ages where I was still unable to, probably roughly follows Zipf's law in that order. In Simon Bartram's Man on the Moon, the day-in-day-out existence of Bob, a sort of interlunar park ranger, is elucidated, accompanying him on a routine journey to Earth's distant partner. The story has a variety of mythical properties; the moon has been a favourite object of contemplation for humans of and from all ages, from the species' infancy to its current state, and is understandably most interesting for a small child, as it embarks on mandatory exposition into our civilisation. 

The parable is an astonishing read, owing in no small part to the surrealist and glaucous illustrations, somewhere between Rockwell and Magritte, which really tickled my small brain (and continues to tickle the 'small brain'). Every page features vistas of wide and interpretative geography, the scenes in which rockets skip from rock to rock adorned with piercing, jagged flames of hypersonic exhaust fumes. Bartram covers each page in detail one gets lost in - control rooms, Bob's terrestrial house, his goofy 1960s space suit and fish bowl helmet - through which the exercise of his duties is lent a helping of space race mythos by presenting them in images which could be Sistinian murals, helping children learn to see the legendary in the mundane (activities such as collecting waste left by lunar tourists, interacting with the local fauna, etc.). 

Further, mischevious aliens provide many different challenges for Bob, screwing with him in benign ways, such as boarding his rocket as he commences his homeward journey for the day. In the end, as he returns home, flying overhead of a vast crowd of rush hour commuters, it is revealed that large parts of Earth society have been fully integrated with the extraterrestrials, and that Bob himself is a humanoid alien, hosting lavish parties, sights and sounds from outer space brought home. On a second reading, this point is ingeniously foreshadowed through the ever present eyes of distant alien figures, watching the activities center stage from their various hideouts in the background. 

Stories often have a structure of rising action, climax, and falling, and in Man on the Moon this structure is most evident when observing Bob's proximity to the Earth, to regularity, throughout the story. Did I read into it this much at the time? Of course not. I just accepted the ingenuity as children are prone to. Now that I am examining this memory after many years, without even so much as a copy of the book to refer to, the sheer size of this book became easily apparent, and could be rationally explained.

Romance and The Myth of Nationalism

I am german. That's what my passport says. But I'm also british. That's what my other passport says. I was told these things from a young age. But my German-ness or Britishness is not as easily apparent as is the colour of my skin or my eyes or my hair. Despite this, those categories were equivalent to me as a child. I was told them repeatedly, as statements of fact. That colour which you've seen outside before, that's called yellow. The people around you, they're called german. Later on, when you're older, you learn that it's unwise to call people yellow and colours german, because of how to do so would entail this othering process which leads to herds of poor, helpless, afraid humans being herded into gas chambers - a horror enabled by the belief in stories about who ‘belongs’ and who does not. And it's happening as we speak, helped along by those claiming to have learnt this lesson.

Indeed, we have the myth of nationalism to thank for many of history's most notorious disgraces, but we hold onto it and induct our very children into it, because in a moderate, stately, morally acceptable form, it is no less effective at bewitching us. As adults, we continue to consume narratives which portray countries as people: people with decisions, wills, and goals that they enact their decisions towards achieving. Nationalism is just one form of tribalistic thinking, arguably the foremost in terms of magnitude, but certainly not alone. Apple vs Microsoft, Windows vs Linux, Democrat, Republican, White, Black, Blue, Green, Mauve, Fuchsia etc. The random assortment of colours I just named is certain to have called to mind some movement or group, even though those colours themselves contain no information about position, maxims, axioms or anything at all. 

Obviously, nationalism is an extremely strong effect which has proven time and time again to get humans to become immune to acquiring rational and critical thinking abilities, or worse yet, to abandon them once held. All because there exists a story a person can hold on to, a distilled narrative that overarches the collective behaviour of millions of people. It is not rationally permitted to think of organised human life in terms of these types of reductive stories, but we do. While I am not the enemy of a worker in China due to the historic allegiance between a country I grew up in and a country that has strategic objectives at odds with those of China, I have in the past thought of myself that way. I gain nothing from supporting economic warfare against people every bit like me, who enter the night as I wake, and vice versa, nor does anyone around me. And yet the idea persists, justified after the fact through social contract theory and (retch) transcendent historical greatness.

The result is an extensive, deeply compelling and complex set of behaviours which are immune to analysis, like the weather, known to turn at seemingly any moment, and explained after the fact as obvious inevitabilities.

Languishing

When living near criticality, one can be particularly prone to the following type of thinking:

"Those [boomers, politicians, suits, squares, etc.]. Fuck them. They don't know anything. For their part in plunging the world into its current state of irreparable decay, they deserve all the fear and discomfort the various follies of modern living provide for them."

Most of my thinking of the past years has been dominated by the idea that there exists some big other which has my spine, wrists, and ankles by a thread. That every economic exchange I participate in is predetermined, that every action sees a completely deterministic outcome, that every piece of information relevant to my life is set in stone by the arrangement of every atom in the universe at the point of my conception, which itself was a predictable configuration. A hyper-rigid absolute determinism. I must have forgotten how fucking unpredictable and intractible the real world is. If our most capable digital agents operate on stochasticity, Laplace's demon is dead.

Whether you choose to worship a particular political philosophy, you face a form of this problem. The [capitalists, jews, politicians, russians, etc.] DON'T have it rigged. None of these groups are homogenous, and to narrate a story which suggests they are, is dangerous. I'm not advocating for political impotence, but every such philosophy starts with a story, and we had better read between the lines every time we dabble. I have yet to find a party or movement which I identify with beyond mere aesthetics, but I do believe in the theoretical possibility of such a thing. For many months I struggled with a vengeful form of communism I developed for myself, coated in a thin veneer of nonconformity and utterly hollow, which I only shed once I admitted I had a psychological problem.

Where is this coming from and why? With seemingly imminent system collapse, when one story is superseded or made redundant, why is conspiratorial thinking often the kneejerk reaction? I would argue that it's because such ideas have a low entropy. They're the starting point for a lot of valuable thinking. For example, the universality principle, championed by Isaac Newton, held that the same laws that govern earthly happenings are governing those among the stars. One could certainly characterise this line of thinking as vaguely conspiratorial, that there is some determinable inner working of the universe which can be quantified. The big other could be seen as some sort of reservoir, imposing an externally determined thermodynamic potential (the availability) on whatever system is the subject of analysis (I won't push this too far, don't worry Sokal/Bricmont). I am not saying that conspiracies do not exist, but we should only identify them where they ACTUALLY are, to ensure we are making beliefs pay rent. The statistical ensemble comes in handy in physics when its configuration is too complicated to make more detailed statements about, but we indeed can and should try to pierce beyond the fuzziness of a thermodynamic approach. It helps to exercise the principle of scientific parsimony; explaining the set of qualia and stimuli with a preferably minimal (or otherwise appropriate) number of Zebras in our surroundings.

Bayesian thought is perhaps still a story-forming mechanism in the sense that it portrays causal relationships, but it's so general that it is free from emotional charge. The emphasis lies on the difference between priorisms and the more valuable a posteriori probability, reflecting back on how true the story we tell ourselves really is.

Doubts

We come now to the most important story any person will ever write; the story of who they are, and how they came to be themselves. I once came up with a sort of cringe maxim, which is the idea that you should never point a formalistic rifle at yourself. I've spent endless hours trying to introspect, and it has led to absolutely nothing not known to Socrates. I don't like to think of my life as a story anymore. Many times I was told by guidance counsellors, ex-girlfriends, parents, and friends, that at a particular turning point I should try to 'write a new chapter', but I'm not writing, I am living. I must, however, admit that in some essential sense, the view of one's life as a story is essentially correct, not as a process by which every day contributes a sentence, but rather as an evaluative process taking place entirely after the fact. If someone asks me to recount my life, I can't perform jumping jacks for them and say, 'look how alive I am!'. I would have to take the pen to the paper. So, how best to complete this task?

Decide on some themes, characters, and messages, but don't start writing until you have all the parts.

What the LLM Said:  

"Even if we accept that narrative is an illusion applied a posteriori, it may also be the only didactic mechanism through which the mind becomes intelligible to itself. Ontologically, a being aware of time must account for itself in time — and doing so almost requires constructing before, after, why, and therefore. These are not merely linguistic structures; they are cognitive scaffolding. From the moment a child asks "why?" they are not demanding an atomic fact — they are demanding a narrative of cause, a story that renders the world coherent. Even philosophy, with all its suspicion of mythos, often teaches by example, by parable, by Socratic dialogue. Without narrative, our learning systems — moral, social, historical — become intractable. In this light, the illusion is not a flaw in human cognition, but its foundational grammar. The problem, then, is not that we impose stories on life, but that we forget we are doing so.

If reason is always a posteriori — if it arises after the flash, after the pattern is felt, after the gestalt snaps into place — then it’s not the generator of insight, but the historian of it. Reason doesn’t discover; it narrates. It spins coherence out of something that was already grasped, already known, somehow, somewhere deeper."

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Closing Thoughts

I really don't intend on telling a story here, some overarching narrative about who I am. I don't think that a mere sequence of events is necessarily a story. I don't suggest any particular lesson to learn other than the ones I have chosen to learn. My point here has hopefully been that applying the aspects and structures of stories onto ones lived experiences happens a posteriori and is therefore almost exclusively illusory. I sit here at a new desk in a new room in Göttingen, with a new girlfriend and a new story. Who's to say how good this story is to be, how well it will age? A new story I have chosen to tell myself about myself is that I am a scientific rationalist, and that I am beholden to certain inviolable principles: probity (a tautology), humility, openness, and magnanimity, among others. I am no longer resistant to treatment for depression, nor am I resistant to the idea that change is possible. I exercise epistemic humility in my life, day upon day, week upon week, and continue to illustrate my mind. I liked the pictures much more than the words anyways.