Everything is storytelling. It’s all a little bit of a lie, a little bit of truth, all in the quest for meaning. It’s all storytelling. This post is storytelling. History is storytelling. Governments and money are storytelling. Leadership is storytelling. Relationships are storytelling. It’s all about creating meaning through the approximation of reality.
When I see a lemon and say “This lemon is yellow”, it’s a bit of a lie. I may see something as yellow, but “I see this lemon as yellow” is also too simple. What happens in my optical pathways that then becomes a concept of “yellow” in my mind is so much more. And even that’s just a story. It’s all an approximation of reality and there’s never a way to fully understand it, just like in quantum physics. The instruments I have are not capable of fully comprehending reality. This is really what the study of complex systems is about. It’s about admitting to ourselves that in order to influence a system, we need to let go of the myth that we can fully understand it. Because if we don’t, we will be doomed to suffer, trying to asymptotically create a more accurate model. But it will remain just a model, producing results that are subtly different from reality, when we least expect it.
And that’s the root of the Fear of Destruction. It is the fear of complexity, the Fear of the Abyss, my fear of realizing that I will never fully comprehend or understand how the world works and I will never be truly safe from the outside world. Reality’s expanse of the challenge in front of me is infinite.
So I create stories. I create them to simplify, to make a good-enough model of the world in which I can be safe. I reduce the size of my challenge to be not so overwhelming. I look for signs of support. If I am lucky, my story will frame a combination of Challenge and Support in a way that is compelling and engaging, and I get to live my life joyously. If I am less lucky, I may create a story where that combination is way off, and I suffer interminably. But all of these are just stories. They are just my storytelling.
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