Narrative Life

 

 

Life is a string of moments and as social apes we are predestined pattern recognition units.

The most powerful patterns are narratives, scientific, sociopolitical and personal.

We spend every waking moment of our life asserting and or recompiling our own narratives.

And our societies exist on the scaffolding of collectively held interwoven multi textural narratives.

Sometimes, online I come across ‘news’ ‘information’ reports of pre ported reality and my initial response is to be triggered almost instinctively into feeling strongly, sometimes the elements of a narrative are arranged in such a way that the emotion on the surface that’s triggered is so immediate that further thought seems excess to requirements. I feel angry or outraged or strongly in some way that I am right, that my feeling is undeniably true and because I feel this way and thinking any further would dilute this feeling I’ve learnt that this is an instance, and we all have them, when the power of the narrative uses me and the emotions associated are byproducts of that construct.

Facebook is a wonderful illustration wherein propaganda of all sorts bounces around giving people self important goosebumps. Nothing actually happens other than narratives pay their toll of injecting self righteous flushes of piousness as they multiply throughout the network. Trump, Syria, Oil spills,..placating little squirts of artificial narrative feed into our own, lubricated by cats and sentiment and people falling off skateboards while we stare at screens convinced we are authors of our destinies. when it just as well could be argued that the ultimate sentimentality is to believe we are much more than amplifiers of mostly synthetic and deliberately fostered narratives that serve not ourselves but those who restrict our human experience as the cost of their desires.