Did I just say writing is dangerous? You mean sitting at your desk all day and typing on a computer?! Geez, must be hard. The act of writing may not be dangerous (although for all you writers out there, lower back pains, wrist cramps, and forgetting to eat are all things I’ve experienced).
But what is dangerous are the things that writing produces: stories.
I just finished reading one of the greatest books ever (at least in my eyes). It’s The Story Paradox by Johnathan Gottschall. I, first, highly recommend you read this book and support this amazing author.
The Story Paradox is about the ubiquitous force of storytelling in all of our lives and how it brings people together, but also tears people apart, causes wars, and is threatening the threads that hold together our society in this very moment.
This book felt like a sort of religious awakening for me (it is not lost on me that religion itself is a collection of stories).
I’ve always been obsessed with stories and have dedicated my life to creating stories, specifically about the future. Right now I’m working on a book called Millennium Game (psttt read to the bottom of the email for a surprise here). It’s a story about a world in which the worst effects of climate change have been managed and a sustainable future achieved by making the global currency carbon. When you hit your limit of carbon, you die.
It’s a story that seeks to question current narratives around climate change and proposed solutions, whether that be technocracy, denialism, market-mania rule, or hyper-centralized regulations. It’s a story that seeks to make the enemy humans, specifically humans proposing a specific view of the future (you will have to read to find this vision out), instead of the impossibly big and hard to define “climate” that is so often put at the center of the conversation.
And ultimately, I hope to have you look at the world a bit differently at the end of an adrenaline-fueled thrill ride. I want you to ask questions like who decides what is sustainable and what is not and why? Who loses in a “sustainable” future and who wins? Whose vision of the future are we buying into and whose futures are we excluding? And the biggest question of all: how do our current systems of society and our culture value human life, and how might these values be broken in a way that can lead to disaster (and already has)?
These may all sound like great questions.
I think they are quite fun. It’s why I’m spending hundreds of hours creating a fictional world, extrapolated from our present-day reality, as a playground to explore them and hang out with my new fictional friends (I’ll share more about them later). All while going to college, which only one more final left this semester so yay!
Here’s the thing though, my story is my vision of the future. My story wields a special psychological power, the power of storytelling, that is an inescapable yet poisonous force that feels like playing with fire in the middle of a gas station.
And we all play with that fire: every single day. And no matter what happens, whether an EMP apocalypse comes true like in my last series World Gone Mad (which btw, sequels coming out soonish to close this out) or we all are transported to Mark Zuckberg’s Metaverse (I’ll opt out of that..), story will always be pervasive in our lives.
My motto is together we are boundless. It’s something very close to my heart and my fundamental belief in the power of storytelling to bring societies together and compel us all to bold action to make our lives better.
The Story Paradox agrees with this. But it also makes another point that is maybe obvious but no less scary: stories are about the good guys in conflict with villains. And as much as it brings the good guys together, it divides society among the good and the evil.
In the hunter-gatherer days, it is argued, this was quite useful. Stories enabled one to be instilled with a moral code, learn how to be a better person, and know the people they were fighting with and fighting against.
When the villain of the story becomes our next door neighbor, or 40% of the American population who likes to sport a specific red hat, or another roughly 40% of Americans who think the red hat is the devil, is when things get tricky.
Storytelling is everywhere.
This is something I realized a long time ago. In fact, just this last year, as part of my adventures, I vlogged my life on YouTube and traveled the country in a bus with my friend (well, the bus broke down but that’s a longer story).
After being immersed in the creator economy, the tools and companies built to support people who create content online and bring communities together in the interwebs, I realized that it was broken.
Discovery of stories is driven by algorithms that promote sensationalized content and divide people. I worked with my friends to start a tech company that would seek to bring humans back into the equation: enabling a curated discovery of content on social platforms that gives power back to the people.
It sounded great. But ultimately, I stopped working on that project and on YouTube to begin writing again. Stories are what I love and as much as tech entrepreneurs are storytellers, there is a lot else involved in the process of being a CEO that made school, writing, and business-building an impossible task. I chose to keep writing (or more like get back to writing… something I covered way-in depth in my last post).
But The Story Paradox taught me that even if we succeeded in building a human-curated network of content discovery on the internet, changing how we all get served the stories that rule so much of our lives, it would likely come short in its ultimate mission. This isn’t to say don’t build a human-curated network of content discovery, a step in a better direction for mediating the role story has in our lives is a great thing!
But, stories that make enemies of humans and turn truth into lies are remarkably more exciting, engaging, and ultimately impactful than stories of truth and balance. It’s a deep neurological mechanism that we don’t fully understand and only with some stories have been able to overcome.
In short, not only did I realize that I have a lot more learning to do (as does the whole world) on the science of story and how it would interact with any information tech-company I work on (or anyone else does), I also realized that my stories, in order to be entertaining and engaging for even me as a writer, are captive to the neurological basis of storytelling.
We love stories with conflict (often making my futures more dystopian rather than utopian, even though it’s always a gray area). We love clear enemies and when our protagonists win (except the world has no clear enemies, and we all like to believe we are the heroes, but in someone else’s story we are also the enemy). And, most of all, stories have a power to compel one to believe in the lessons they share (whether it’s the Bible, one of my books, or conspiracy theories that bring one to commit mass murders).
That’s some powerful stuff.
And it’s a fundamental reality of how storytelling operates in our world that we can all see and feel every day. In fact, the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we share with friends and family all follow similar principles and carry heavyweight.
So if I can leave you with anything it’s two things:
- As an author my stories will ultimately try to fill you with hope and bring the collective human spirit together, but that mission won’t be easy and will be a forever craft to refine (I’m excited for it and very excited to have you here).
- As a storyteller (and I’m talking to you, cause everyone is a storyteller in one way or another) and story consumer (reader, viewer, etc) always remember the world is a gray area that we find comfort in painting as black and white. So when you can break free of your boundaries — be boundless — and be grounded in truth (this is the goal of science to pursue, but my diatribe on its problems will have to wait for another day).
I hope everyone is having an amazing holiday season. Please reach out. And a big thanks to Johnathan Gottschall, the author of The Story Paradox, this piece was inspired by him.
And don’t forget,
Together we are boundless.
P.S. If you’d like to be added to my alpha reader team let me know. As I put the final touches on the first draft, I’ll let you read my book and get a sneak peek before anyone else.
Author’s Note: It’s December 10, 2021, and I am almost done with my second semester at Harvard. It’s been challenging, but loads of fun learning in every way imaginable. I’ve focused a lot on self-care (getting good sleep, meditating, going to therapy). It’s changed my life for the better, especially being nicer to myself. I hope you can do that too. I promise you deserve it.