The stories you tell yourself are not the truth
but they do shape your life in meaningful ways
The stories you tell yourself have this property of false self-advertisement: they project themselves as “the truth.” Consider: “I joined this startup because I wanted to maximize my impact.” That is just a simple, truthful statement isn’t it?
As you develop, you recognize the mind’s capacity to rationalize. To confabulate. There are annoying neuroscience studies about this but it is best appreciated as a personal experience. When you told a story about yourself that you later realized was a lie; you told yourself you cared about something or liked someone when you actually didn’t. You think, “oh wow, my stories about myself and what I say matters and what my principles are can be completely off base from the truth.”
Here something critical can happen: you can overreact. You start going, I don’t bother with stories at all. Who cares about life updates. In my own case it manifested particularly as an intense dislike of interviews. If someone asked, “why did you take this job?” what I wanted to say is How the fuck could I ever possibly know why I took this job, stop asking me that you underdeveloped imbecile.1
The way I actually think about it today is: yes, stories are not the full truth. Our own justifications for our lives are not at all a direct representation of what’s actually going on. (Be very mistrustful of all Substack writers.) But, they do shape our lives! The stories you tell do shape your life in some small way.
That’s why it is helpful to reflect now and then and say, “what is the coherent story I can tell about all of this?” What am I doing, what do I want, what do I care about? It is, of course, all a hypothesis! If you think you know yourself, you’re a fool. But if you think that your stories about yourself mean absolutely nothing, you’re only a slightly wiser fool.
Every time you try to tell a coherent story about your life, you shape your future actions in some small way. When I give my friends “here’s the update from the past month,” that is my ego trying to make sense of the vast ocean it is swimming in. Making sense of the ocean is futile, but useful. It makes you a little bit more reliable and definable as a person, which is helpful for functioning in society. It also helps you slowly orient towards greater alignment between the various parts of yourself (your ego, your body, your subconscious), which feels amazing. The ego is navigating the turbulent Ocean of Being in a boat, and when it tells stories it is simply…adjusting the sail to be more aligned with the winds. (Sorry I’ve never been sailing.)
Telling stories about yourself can also help you slowly get a deeper understanding of yourself. Just as we humans have a limited perspective on the world but we can try to augment and extend and deepen that perspective with science and philosophy and life experience, likewise our ego has a limited perspective on the Ocean of Our Being and it can try to augment and deepen that perspective by talking about itself and its experiences.
There is also just something precious about having wild things happen to you and being like “oh my God let me tell you about this story.” It sort of makes it more real you know. Let me tell you about The Final Time I Hung Out With Y because it is such a crazy and beautiful story to me. The more you let go of “life narratives as a false attempt at self-control”, the more you can lean into life narratives as an expression of beauty.
In case it needs explaining, here is my model of the mind: while a small part of your mind (the ego) operates on reasons, the rest of your being (your psyche, your body) does not operate on reasons. At least, not any kind of reasons you have direct access to, that you could articulate in as clean of a sentence as “I took this job because I wanted to maximize my impact.”
We can liken the ego to a diligent PR manager for an extremely erratic and unpredictable celebrity. You have no control over the celebrity’s whims and actions but you have to constantly explain them in a way that seems reasonable.
"Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." I love the wild celebrity/PR handler analogy in the footnote.
We arrived at the same post-naive place by opposite roads, and yours is the one I keep not taking. I also stopped believing the story is the truth. But where you loosened your grip, I tightened mine. My stories run architectural: a frame (non-linear path, phase transitions, built to found rather than follow) that’s load-bearing, not provisional. You hold your narratives as hypotheses you might be wrong about. I hold mine like a thesis I’ve already decided to defend.
Here’s the asymmetry your piece exposed. My skepticism points one way. I’ve gotten good at interrogating the stories that diminish me and almost never turn the lens on the ones that build me up. Yours is omnidirectional, distrusting the flattering ones most of all. That’s the harder half and I’ve been doing the easy one.
What’s refreshing is where you land. Beauty. Everything I tell about myself arrives pre-interpreted, processed into a lesson before it leaves my mouth. I sold my console last year and wrote about it as addiction-fighting, an arc I won, but never as the strange absurd thing it actually was, carrying the box out with no meaning attached. For someone who thinks in trajectories the unprocessed version barely registers as a story. You’re pointing at a register where the telling doesn’t have to prove anything. I don’t live there. Your essay made me want to visit.
You didn’t convert me. The frame still feels true. But you got one hand off the tiller for a paragraph, which is more than most writing manages.