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đź“° Against Narratives

Author: ava.substack.com

Full Title: Against Narratives

URL: https://ava.substack.com/p/against-narratives

Highlights from March 23rd, 2021.

For a long time I would default to a kind of Narrative playacting in every situation, trying to autopredict my own life.
Sometimes things happened exactly as I thought they would. But often they didn’t, and then I’d be disappointed and have to adjust the Narrative to account for the setback, hoping that the story would get back on course.
This narrative thinking was damaging in a way I didn’t realize: I was more engaged with the narrative than I was with my actual life. I lived half in reality, half in my head, and I was crushed when real life didn’t line up with the story in my head.
Most people believe that if we let go of Narrative we can’t move forward in our lives. But Singer thinks we don’t need a story: we can progress effectively just by doing the thing that seems most compelling at every point. Instead of acting in accordance to your Narrative preferences, you simply do the thing that’s tugging you forward.
Most of us immediately subject pure experience to Narrative processing, but you don’t need to do that. You can choose to experience every event through the lens of Narrative, or you can choose to reject it and live a life that’s not organized or confined by mental stories—to live an unstoried life.
The experience of consciousness radically differs depending on how you approach it. You could, if you wanted, experience your life as a wide-open sea of experience instead of a narrow river leading to one destination. What if the way to live a better story was to stop narrativizing constantly?