You thoroughly enjoy a good book, movie, show, a play or a story someone is telling you. You find yourself sucked and griped by it escaping the solitary destiny of living in your own mind all the time. This is a part of being human. This innate affinity towards stories raises and and enculturates us and in a feedback loop shapes our societies in a way that will enculturate subsequent generations.

You’re being of stories and you can’t escape it although your preferred medium may be anything from the vocal, to visual, gastronomic, sonic, tactile or any combination – we talk to each other in so many ways, from the chemical to the verbal level encompassing all the layers in between and, even if there is no possible way to tell the objective truth of a person or society, stories are fundamentally all we have. They are the structures and values we inhabit mentally, morally and physically ( ex. an architecture of a specific epoch for example that mimics the leading stories society told itself at that time). There are values and morals exhibited in every story we hear even if it is virtually impossible for a media to deliver a story without their own stance already being waved in, a friend cannot tell you the objective truth of what happened to them yesterday in a manner of a police report and will undoubtedly intermingle it with their own character and retell it through the prism of who they are, the stories we tell ourselves are fictional edifices loosely based on reality… but we need them, we need them all because that is the only way we know how to be.

We’d love to consider ourselves very “rational” in comparison to all other that came before us but the basics haven’t changed. We might have gone high tech in recounting our myths and stories but they still hold the same framework – you’ll send a wacapp voice message instead of sitting in front of the fire somewhere in the forest but the stories are still of value, loss, love, life, death, mundane lessons and struggles, raising children, food, relationships, power… None of us is a reliable judge of reality on our own but if you listen carefully to the stories around you and pay attention you’ll get the benefit of acquiring knowledge from multiple life experiences – so although the truth is ungraspable there are approximations of it at the intersection of all stories – and it will be enough. You don’t have the time to make all of your mistakes alone, so listen – not to wait for your cue to start talking, but to really hear.