Jargogled Impressions.

Narratives are attractive. They bind you into a hypothesis through a story arc that you can follow along. Narratives become the myths which become the stories of God. Narratives simplify the complex and enumerate the unexplainable. Narratives reframe our conversations into a different lens, a human lens, with which to identify with a said conjecture, remember what is being said, and recycle it when the right time arises. There’s a virality to narratives that creates a compounding growth loop for it to propagate farther than its origination point. A narrative that strikes the right general chord with humanity and our pathos and our human condition can spread faster than wildfire.

Narratives are how our minds make sense of the world around us. Our brains are hard-wired to recognize narrative and associate them with the countless others that the neurons fire in response. Little surprise then that everyone around us endeavors to create narratives – the marketers do it, the entrepreneurs do it, the salesperson does it, the pediatrician does it, the lawyers do. Let’s do it, let’s create narratives all around us. Or as Salman Rushdie would say – we should be swimming in an ocean of kahani, of stories, of narratives.

But which narrative to believe in, and which to discard? Narratives can be misleading too; in that they appeal to the built-in biases and blind spots we have in our consciousness and tap into make-believe to solve an express purpose. Heck, some narratives become powerful doing just this and transcend from a semiotic medium to something more, something bigger, something to defend and take offense for. These narratives take a life of their own, and often dominate the discourse and our decisions in life without us realizing it.

Businesses leverage narratives to create brands with the ultimate end goal being the brand superseding the product qualities and attributes so much so that they eliminate decision making for the vast majority of customers. Universities and educational institutions create narratives around their pedagogy and instruction methodologies that are aimed at alienating the instructor from the instructed, with the brand standing in between. Far removed from the ancient ways in which knowledge has been transmitted. Founders create narratives around the problem they are solving, how they got to it, and what is motivating them to solve it, all to create this sense of authenticity around their core purpose and their ambitions. Even as money is the most successful narrative story of all, somehow, when we are selling to the investors, to the users, to the partners, money does not a narrative make. There’s something artificial about it that makes it not a good fodder for a touching, humane story.

Narratives aim to relate, never to shock. But some narratives, when they steer too close to the truth, baring the raw emotions in man, can shake us to our bones. Human suffering can be awful narratives but provide much to learn from. Human achievements on the other hand, find a place in narratives which seek to inspire and encourage. These narratives form the apostle of human endeavor, tethering to itself everything that it means to constantly strive ahead. Some narratives are warnings, written in clear, precise tones to reflect the dangers of not noticing. They seek to empower more than entertain, educate more than inform, and show more than tell.

What if we every one of us had the power of crafting narratives for what we see around us? To bind together our experiences and our thoughts in a way that others can understand and relate to find their entertainment from, derive a sense of community through. What if each one of us had the power to be a creator? We collectively seem to be moving in that direction anyways with the rise of social media and of creator economy. As recently as 5 years back, we tended to separate consumption and creation, with the vast majority of folks content with the former even as they lead a life of quiet implosion, familiar with their human condition, but not keen on flashing it out to anyone and everyone to see. Today, the idea of consumption without creation seems anomaly instead of the norm even though the vast majority still lie in the bygone spectrum. But there’s a secular trend, a time-tested historical cycle of bundling and unbundling that’s driving all this energy into creating that meme, that dance step, that viral video of you eating Cheetos, etc.

All those flash in the pan TikToks, Snaps, or Gram reels are narratives unfolding in the ether. They have democratized narratives for the layperson and opened up the kimono for creative juices. A million monkeys typing on the keyboard – odds are that a Shakespeare is amongst them, if not a herd of them. Would be interesting to see this new channel, this new medium, this new discovery platform, this new mirror with which we can understand ourselves. A century down the line, these videos would still be around waiting to be dug up. What would our descendants think of us? Is this where the beginning of the end was? Or was this the tectonic shift that made the world richer, denser, more vibrant, and more real?

Whatever the outcome, narratives would continue to thrive with humans because that’s the primary and the most potent way we communicate ideas and shape our imaginations. The leverage that’s baked into narratives is impossible to resist and knows no dams that can stem its tide. It has an edge over algorithms, over microcode, over change. We are all part of this ‘selfish narrative’ ala selfish gene wherein the narrative propagates itself regardless of what it means or implies for humans. We need to be careful about which narratives to push up versus which to tide down for they have a strong hand to play in how our societies get organized, what we pay attention to, get offended or riled by, play truant on, or fight over. A gentle, human narrative arc is desired, if humanity is to sustain.

References:

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie