![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
panuru"Truth be told, I long for a bit of dullness."
--Malcolm Reynolds
On principle, I don't blog about work much. But working in technical support, one thing I miss about working full time at an immigration firm is getting to hear peoples' stories. People trying to come into the country, whether for family or business, fall somewhere on a story arc: they live one place, have a reason to want to live in another place, and here they are in the middle. These days, in quality assurance, the closest thing I can make to a story of my day goes like this: "I have bills to pay, so I filed some audits and gathered data so the statistics people can write up reports. For this I receive money biweekly." People like hearing that as much as I enjoy telling it.
For better or worse, people usually have trouble relating to things that can't be expressed in the form of story. Even people who love quantitative processing usually need some understanding of why the specific thing they're looking at is important. Stories make it much easier for us to remember things.
But our love of stories can get us into trouble.
If we're not careful, spending too much time in stories can give us unrealistic expectations of what ordinary life is supposed to be like. There's no such thing as a happily-ever-after ending. And we just don't see blockbuster-level drama very often in everyday life; if we're expecting ordinary happenings to be as compelling as a film plot, we come off as histrionic or worse. There are also larger social consequences to enough people wanting to live in a film.
Life is rarely as simple as a story. False simplicity is the current vogue in Western political propaganda: people will believe just about any lie that can be captured in a narrative and reinforces their beliefs and assumptions. News agencies are obsessed with narratives, even when that preoccupation leads to false reporting.
And in the realm of creativity, it is desperately hard to escape using formulas, and even deeper arcs like the Hero's Journey get stale after enough years reading and writing the same thing with different trappings.
How do we fix this?
Well, I don't think we do. We need stories. The tale of my daily audit results is not going to magically become interesting with discipline or numeracy or any amount of meditation on open-mindedness, and narratives (true or false) in the media aren't going to be any less persuasive. But to make sure we don't gorge ourselves on stories, I think there are three good appetites to cultivate:
1) Like Captain Mal, an appreciation for dullness. Or rather, empty or underused time that gives us time to contemplate. No less than Bertrand Russell lavished praise on idleness.
2) Ernest Hemingway's built-in, shock-proof shit detector. Or failing that, an appreciation for annoying questions. Who is telling me this? How do they know it? What opinions am I thinking about changing, and who would benefit from that (politically or financially)? Just as the unexamined life isn't worth living, the unexamined claim isn't worth sharing.
3) A hunger for weirdly bizarre things that can't be shoehorned into preexisting assumptions. Russian ostrich mechs? Yes, please. Ham and bananas hollandaise? Ick, but lol. Gas flowing uphill in the spring? WTF, Mars?
Stories are fun, but thankfully there is so much more to life.
--Malcolm Reynolds
On principle, I don't blog about work much. But working in technical support, one thing I miss about working full time at an immigration firm is getting to hear peoples' stories. People trying to come into the country, whether for family or business, fall somewhere on a story arc: they live one place, have a reason to want to live in another place, and here they are in the middle. These days, in quality assurance, the closest thing I can make to a story of my day goes like this: "I have bills to pay, so I filed some audits and gathered data so the statistics people can write up reports. For this I receive money biweekly." People like hearing that as much as I enjoy telling it.
For better or worse, people usually have trouble relating to things that can't be expressed in the form of story. Even people who love quantitative processing usually need some understanding of why the specific thing they're looking at is important. Stories make it much easier for us to remember things.
But our love of stories can get us into trouble.
If we're not careful, spending too much time in stories can give us unrealistic expectations of what ordinary life is supposed to be like. There's no such thing as a happily-ever-after ending. And we just don't see blockbuster-level drama very often in everyday life; if we're expecting ordinary happenings to be as compelling as a film plot, we come off as histrionic or worse. There are also larger social consequences to enough people wanting to live in a film.
Life is rarely as simple as a story. False simplicity is the current vogue in Western political propaganda: people will believe just about any lie that can be captured in a narrative and reinforces their beliefs and assumptions. News agencies are obsessed with narratives, even when that preoccupation leads to false reporting.
And in the realm of creativity, it is desperately hard to escape using formulas, and even deeper arcs like the Hero's Journey get stale after enough years reading and writing the same thing with different trappings.
How do we fix this?
Well, I don't think we do. We need stories. The tale of my daily audit results is not going to magically become interesting with discipline or numeracy or any amount of meditation on open-mindedness, and narratives (true or false) in the media aren't going to be any less persuasive. But to make sure we don't gorge ourselves on stories, I think there are three good appetites to cultivate:
1) Like Captain Mal, an appreciation for dullness. Or rather, empty or underused time that gives us time to contemplate. No less than Bertrand Russell lavished praise on idleness.
2) Ernest Hemingway's built-in, shock-proof shit detector. Or failing that, an appreciation for annoying questions. Who is telling me this? How do they know it? What opinions am I thinking about changing, and who would benefit from that (politically or financially)? Just as the unexamined life isn't worth living, the unexamined claim isn't worth sharing.
3) A hunger for weirdly bizarre things that can't be shoehorned into preexisting assumptions. Russian ostrich mechs? Yes, please. Ham and bananas hollandaise? Ick, but lol. Gas flowing uphill in the spring? WTF, Mars?
Stories are fun, but thankfully there is so much more to life.
