Reading this post, where the author introspects and finds a strong desire to be able to tell a good story about their career, suggests that a way of understanding how people will make decisions will be heavily constrained by the sorts of stories about your career that are definitely common knowledge.
I remember at the end of my degree, there was a ceremony where all the students dressed in silly gowns and the parents came and sat in a circular hall while we got given our degrees and several older people told stories about how your children have become men and women, after studying and learning so much at the university.
This was a dumb/false story, because I’m quite confident the university did not teach these people most important skills for being an adult, and certainly my own development was largely directed by the projects I did on my own dime, not through much of anything the university taught.
But everyone was sat in a circle, where they could see each other listen to the speech in silence, as though it were (a) important and (b) true. And it served as a coordination mechanism, saying “If you go into the world and tell people that your child came to university and grew into an adult, then people will react appropriately and treat your child with respect and not look at them weird asking why spending 3 or 4 years passing exams with no bearing on the rest of their lives is considered worthy of respect.” It lets those people tell a narrative, which in turn makes it seem okay for other people to send their kids to the university, and for the kids themselves to feel like they’ve matured.
Needless to say, I felt quite missed by this narrative, and only played along so my mother could have a nice day out. I remember doing a silly thing—I noticed I had a spot on my face, and instead of removing it that morning, I left it there just as a self-signal that I didn’t respect the ceremony.
Anyway, I don’t really have any narrative for my life at the minute. I recall Paul Graham saying that he never answers the question “What do you do?” with a proper answer (he says he writes Lisp compilers and that usually shuts people up). Perhaps I will continue to avoid narratives. But I think a healthy society would be able to give me a true narrative that I felt comfortable following.
Another solution would be to build a small circle of trusted and supportive friends with whom we share a narrative about me that I endorse, and try to continue to not want to get social support from a wider circle than that.
Peter Thiel has the opinion that many of our stories are breaking down. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on what stories we tell ourselves, which ones are intact, and which are changing.
I remember the narrative breaking, really hard, in two particular occasions:
The twin towers attack.
The 2008 mortgage financial crisis.
I don’t think, particularly, that the narrative is broken now, but I think that it has lost some of its harmony (Trump having won the 2014 elections, I believe, is a symptom of that).
This is very close to what fellows like Thiel and Weinstein are talking about. In this particular sense, yes, I understand it’s crucial to maintain the narrative although I don’t know anymore whose job it’s—to keep it from breaking out entirely (for example, say, in a explosion of the American student debt, or China going awry with its USD holdings).
These stories are not part of any law of our universe, so they are bound to break at anytime. It takes only a few smart, uncaring individuals to tear at the fabric of reality until it breaks—that is not okay!
So that it’s why I believe is happening at the macro-narrative; but to be more directed towards the individual, which is what your post seems to hint at, I don’t think for a second that your life does not run from narrative, maybe that’s a narrative itself. I believe further that some rituals are important to keep and to have an individual story is important to be able to do any work we deem important.
It may be more apt for the fifth post in his sequence (Stories About Progress) but it’s not posted yet. But I think it sort-of works in both and it’s more of a shortform comment than anything!
Reading this post, where the author introspects and finds a strong desire to be able to tell a good story about their career, suggests that a way of understanding how people will make decisions will be heavily constrained by the sorts of stories about your career that are definitely common knowledge.
I remember at the end of my degree, there was a ceremony where all the students dressed in silly gowns and the parents came and sat in a circular hall while we got given our degrees and several older people told stories about how your children have become men and women, after studying and learning so much at the university.
This was a dumb/false story, because I’m quite confident the university did not teach these people most important skills for being an adult, and certainly my own development was largely directed by the projects I did on my own dime, not through much of anything the university taught.
But everyone was sat in a circle, where they could see each other listen to the speech in silence, as though it were (a) important and (b) true. And it served as a coordination mechanism, saying “If you go into the world and tell people that your child came to university and grew into an adult, then people will react appropriately and treat your child with respect and not look at them weird asking why spending 3 or 4 years passing exams with no bearing on the rest of their lives is considered worthy of respect.” It lets those people tell a narrative, which in turn makes it seem okay for other people to send their kids to the university, and for the kids themselves to feel like they’ve matured.
Needless to say, I felt quite missed by this narrative, and only played along so my mother could have a nice day out. I remember doing a silly thing—I noticed I had a spot on my face, and instead of removing it that morning, I left it there just as a self-signal that I didn’t respect the ceremony.
Anyway, I don’t really have any narrative for my life at the minute. I recall Paul Graham saying that he never answers the question “What do you do?” with a proper answer (he says he writes Lisp compilers and that usually shuts people up). Perhaps I will continue to avoid narratives. But I think a healthy society would be able to give me a true narrative that I felt comfortable following.
Another solution would be to build a small circle of trusted and supportive friends with whom we share a narrative about me that I endorse, and try to continue to not want to get social support from a wider circle than that.
Peter Thiel has the opinion that many of our stories are breaking down. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on what stories we tell ourselves, which ones are intact, and which are changing.
I remember the narrative breaking, really hard, in two particular occasions:
The twin towers attack.
The 2008 mortgage financial crisis.
I don’t think, particularly, that the narrative is broken now, but I think that it has lost some of its harmony (Trump having won the 2014 elections, I believe, is a symptom of that).
This is very close to what fellows like Thiel and Weinstein are talking about. In this particular sense, yes, I understand it’s crucial to maintain the narrative although I don’t know anymore whose job it’s—to keep it from breaking out entirely (for example, say, in a explosion of the American student debt, or China going awry with its USD holdings).
These stories are not part of any law of our universe, so they are bound to break at anytime. It takes only a few smart, uncaring individuals to tear at the fabric of reality until it breaks—that is not okay!
So that it’s why I believe is happening at the macro-narrative; but to be more directed towards the individual, which is what your post seems to hint at, I don’t think for a second that your life does not run from narrative, maybe that’s a narrative itself. I believe further that some rituals are important to keep and to have an individual story is important to be able to do any work we deem important.
(I’m not sure if you meant to reply to Benito’s shortform comment here, or one of Ben’s recent Thiel/Weinstein transcript posts)
Yes!
It may be more apt for the fifth post in his sequence (Stories About Progress) but it’s not posted yet. But I think it sort-of works in both and it’s more of a shortform comment than anything!