The plot of a book is similar to how we construct stories for our own lives. Narrative momentum is absolutely necessary for a healthy person to have. It gives us a reason to wake up in the morning, to leave the house, and makes every day an adventure--its own little story. In fact, the Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, discovered this inside one of the Nazi's internments camps when he noticed that the survivors tended to be those who gave themselves a reason to live. Those who didn't, who simply bumped through the horrors in a daze, were less likely to survive. An article posted in Natural Bias says of Frankl's ideas: "The process of striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal is what keeps us hungry for life and is what provides us with fulfillment once the goal is accomplished. This fulfillment creates precious memories of the past that can never be revoked or stolen, and in turn, these memories, eliminate regret and foster the courage to not have an excessive and unhealthy fear of death." A horrible event (even as something as devastating as the Holocaust) can be understood to be a jumping stone for the logical progression of your story. Once you find the meaning in unavoidable suffering it will allow you to continue on with your life.
The Atlantic posted an article titled "Why Storytellers Lie" discussing Jonathan Gotschall's new book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Maura Kelly, the writer of the piece, says that the author "argues that we're all storytellers—and all liars too, even if most of us don't realize it, even if most of us are lying primarily to ourselves." Gotschall continues, saying that not only do yarns give the author a perceived intelligence for mating (Aeneus in Virgil's Aeneid) and instructions for tasks, they also provide more than that: "They help us to believe our lives are meaningful". Gotschall says everyone constructs stories. In public we gossip to bring someone closer to us and when we return home in the evening we relive the day to our family. However, in private we are also writing a personal memoir, Maury says, one which will most likely never be published or written down. She continues, "Every day of our lives—sometimes with help working things out via tweets or Facebook status updates—we fine-tune the grand narratives of our lives; the stories of who we are, and how we came to be." Our identity is molded and shaped constantly by the ego, and the stories we create are downright lies. Each time a memory passes through our consciousness, we are reworking it, placing it in a new box to fit more closely in with our story. Information technology is also changing the way we concoct our witch's brew. Our online face is a mask, presenting to the outside world the way we want to be perceived. It also helps in the understanding of our life. Nothing is private online. Facebook is a Pokedex of people you can file and collect.
The film "We Live in Public" tells Josh Harris' story, an early online entrepreneur who gave up his identity in the desire for fame:
The internet is already causing a loss of identity--you will turn increasingly misty as you lose any sense of self because of the loss of control of your own narrative.
As we retell a story over again, it changes subtly, and these changes amalgamate overtime: "As Gotschall puts it, 'We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble—if flawed—protagonists of first-person dramas. ... A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative ... replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meanings.' For this reason, he asserts, all memoirs, no matter how much their authors believe them to be true, should come with a disclaimer: 'Based on a true story.'" Psychotherapists have begun using a treatment which has the patient constantly repeat their own story again and again, causing them to "mismember". Hypnotists know that implanting a false memory is easily done when a person is in a trance-like state. Would it not be easy to reshape somebody's life for the better? To completely erase bad memories that were causing the person distress? As Maury reports, "As studies have shown, depressives tend to have more realistic—and less inflated—perceptions of their importance, abilities, and power in the world than others. So those of us who benefit from therapy may like it in large part because it helps us to do what others can do more naturally: to see ourselves as heroes; to write (and re-write) the stories of our lives in ways that cast us in the best possible light; to believe that we have grown from helpless orphans or outcasts to warriors in control of our fate." The danger in these fictional histories is that they portray the teller as the hero. And what does a hero need? Villains. It begins us on the path of dehumanizing others, of justifying bad deeds, as well as allowing for the creation of abstract ideas in the justification of society's morals and what it perceives itself to be. The ego resides in the left brain! It reshapes the 'mist' as need be.
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