Bad stories, fun, and power
Consider this:
We are all products of the stories we live, the ones drawn from our memories,
the ones our parents tell us, the ones inflicted upon us by the world.
Our children are the stories we send out into the world.- Steve Almond, Bad Stories
According to Steve Almond, bad stories are the stories we tell ourselves that are delusional — they’re built on a faulty premise.
In his case, he’s debunking the bad stories people use to make sense of the 2016 U.S. election.
But I see this idea of bad stories at play in the marketplace that many of us work in. And also in our personal lives.
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Awhile back, I heard an interview with author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich. She was talking about her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, The Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
She said something that really got me. Many people who have the means have isolated themselves by obsessing over micro decisions about our bodies and health.
We’ve retreated from the world and into ourselves, by focusing on whether the apples we eat are organic.
This cuts a little close to home.
But it makes sense, right? When the world seems nuts, and it all feels like too damn much, we focus on what we can control.
Organic apples.
The bad story there? Our health is unrelated to our connection with other people, or our involvement in shaping our communities.
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I’ve been smelling bad stories in the online coaching industrial complex for a while.
It’s so focused on the individual –individual success, individual achievement, individual greatness.
But what if those are bad stories too?
We know that advertising invents needs in order to fill them with things that companies are selling.
So it’s important in advertising to tell a story – to sell a story — of the individual, to pull her away from the group and make her feel isolated and self-conscious about, say, her morning breath. To make up a medical-sounding term for it, even. Halitosis.
That sounds like enough of a problem to buy something to fix it, right?
The online coaching industrial complex does this shit ALL THE TIME.
It tells bad story after bad story:
- The way to become a great human being is through buying an online course
- Making a million dollars will make you happy
- Everyone can have their own business
- Having an Amazon bestseller because you gamed the algorithm is somehow like writing a good book
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What if we started looking for the bad stories, and made a habit of naming them?
Might that be fun?
WRITING PROMPT
What’s a bad story you’ve bought into?
What’s a bad story you tell yourself?
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Indeed, each one of us is living a story.
Whatever has happened to us along the way, we make up a story about it.
We also buy into the stories other people tell us.
In politics. In health. In buying stuff.
And in our relationships, conversations, and entertainment. There are stories everywhere. We are storytelling creatures.
But the thing is, most people don’t realize they’re doing it.
They assume that the story is inevitable, like the sunset.
But if you look closely, you can see a tiny little space between ‘what happened’ and ‘the story we tell ourselves.’
And that little space – that gap – is where the fun is.
Oh, did I say fun?
I meant to say power.
Well, both actually. Fun and power. I realize that’s an odd combo – we don’t hear much about fun and power.
Fun is frivolous and unserious.
Power is serious and stern.
So the story goes, eh?
But what if that’s a bad story, too?
What if we can make up a story about how Fun and Power are long lost cousins, who haven’t seen each other in awhile, but who are about to have a reunion?
What if we told ourselves the story that when we are loose and playful and unserious, we can actually go deeper into the taproot of our own influence?
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WRITING PROMPT
Write a dialogue between you, Fun, and Power.
What do these characters have to say to you?
What do they want you to know about their relationship to one another?
Where do they hold their reunion?
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Big love and stay the course, y’all,
