Life is not a story

There is probably a significant difference between living one's life and living one's life as a story.

What makes great experiences in a real life, don't necessarily make a good story.

Yet humans are suckers for stories. We crave them, and we do everything in our power to get more stories, and to share more stories.

The urge is so strong that some people live their own life as a story.

(The fact that Instagram has a feature of the same name is no coincidence)

What makes great experiences in a real life, don't necessarily make a good story.

A good story has a plot, an overarching purpose, a theme, a narrative. It has drama. It has action. It has presuppositions about who the protagonists are, and everybody is a player in a role.

But life is messy. Life doesn't care about narratives. Life doesn't have an overarching, consistent plot. Life is about experiences. Life is about personal expression. There is a freedom in life that doesn't come with a rigid storytelling framework.

So when people live their life like a story, personal needs gives way to the needs of storytelling, and priorities are misaligned. Happiness obviously fades. But perhaps more importantly, in a subjective framework, personal misalignment is cosmic misalignment.

This is my hypothesis to the question of the difference between greed, fantasy, and asking for what one needs. What we need is what we need, not what an imagined story of me as a protagonist needs. What's why winning the lottery is (usually) "greed" -- it makes for a great "story" (esp. in the instagram sense), but it's often what a person really needs. (for starters, money is most often a means to an end, not the main goal itself)