“We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then there will be heat death. All the change in the universe will cease, the stars will die, and there’ll be nothing left of anything but infinite, dead, freezing void. Human life, in all it’s noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity….But that’s not how we live our lives. Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it.” (p 1)
The cure for this horror story? “Our brains.” Or our “evolved” brains. They distract us by filling our lives with….” The author here cites “hopeful goals,” but the better word to describe his thesis would be illusions or delusions. What he sees to be false beliefs about this world.
The main driver of those illusions? Story. “It’s story that makes us human.” What’s curious here is that he goes on to say “there is simply no way to understand the human world without stories.” (p2) But are we talking about humans understanding “the world” or humans understanding ourselves as world creating creatures? He even goes on to say that “the brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains.” (p3) Which of course means a perception of the world, be it one we create or one we interpret. In either case, it is storytelling creatures that brings about “complex human culture” that this world or worlds represents (p2)
A central point of the author- at the heart of every story is “me”, it’s star. After all, we only have our perception. Where the author is taking that is into the supposed interaction with others worlds. Again, whether we are all sharing the same world or just crossing into different illusions is unclear.
And just in case you find yourself resisting this idea, he says not to worry, “you’re already doing it.”
He then turns around and wants to shed some light on how and why his interest in the intersection between brain sceince and storytelling emerged. “I wanted to find out how intelligent people end up believing crazy things.” So wait a minute here. We ALL do this. Every belief is rooted in story which is rooted in illusion. So are we all believing in crazy things? Is that good or bad in your eyes? A problem? And what about his word intelligence? You’ve now inserted an imposed dichotomy into the equation that you have failed to define. Clarification comes in part on the ensuing page: “facts” versus “story.” Or the other way of wording that: facts versus ficiton (something he states outright in the end of the book)
So let’s just rewind here. We are storytelling creatures. You’ve made the argument this is essential to our survival. And now you’ve created a dichotomy between facts and fiction, one that represents intelligence and one that represents crazy. And seemingly it’s fair to argue here that the very thing you’ve said is necessary is the thing that makes us crazy. Because whatever these “facts” are, you see “story” as the most important. Until it comes to needing to bring in the facts to distinguish between the crazy.
It gets more confused. He states that on his endeavor to answer that above question (why do intelligent people believe crazy things), the study of the art of storytelling and the scientific exploration of the brain both led him to the same conclusions. I’m going to assume here that the conclusion is “we are all crazy” and that “facts don’t matter.” But I have a suspicion he’s going to confuse those assumptions as we go here. I mean, this is only page 4.
Ah. So we get more a little further in to the book.
“The challenge any of us faces is that of grabbing and keeping the attention of other people’s brains. I’m convinced we can all become better at what we do by finding out a bit about how they work.”
So here we go. I am assume “better” is attached to intelligence. Become “more intelligent” at what we do, since “finding out” relates to facts, and facts make us better. So what are we becoming better at? Seemingly the art of manipulation of other peoples illusions/delusions. Because intelligent people don’t hold to illusions they hold to facts. And that’s how we move the world forward. But wait, I thought it was storytelling that moved the world forward? And don’t we need those storytelling creatures to manipulate in order to move the world forward?
I think I’m tracking. Maybe. Not really.
Now he takes a big shot across the bow: he goes after Joseph Campbell. The breaking down of the notion of story into a Monomyth (breaking a singular truth down into varied movements). Hugely successful seemingly because it is based on facts. And it has allowed us to manufacture storytelling using that information and formulating it into controlled storytelling technique. But now he has a problem: reducing story to that also makes story “cold, corporate and seemingly cooked up by committee.” (p5). How does this happen? A preoccupation with the facts, or in other words reducing story to the facts that we can then control. That’s basically what he goes on to say. And what drives that is a human but somewhat misplaced obsession with seeking the one true story that can make this world, this reality, coherent.
In case you’ve forgotten: this cold meaningless reality. That’s “the facts.” Also in case you’ve forgotten: he wants to know why intelligent (people with knowledge of the facts) people believe crazy things (like the idea that the world has meaning and isn’t cold).
What science and storytelling have revealed to him through these parallel studies is that most stories just turn out to be “variations on the standard five-act plot which is successful not because of some secret cosmic truth, or any universal law of storytelling, but because it’s the neatest way of showing deep character change.” Or as he puts it, “perfectly tooled to capture the attention of masses of brains.” And isn’t that what the intelligent people want? Masses of brains held captive to illusions that they can manipulate? After all, there is no cosmic truth to appeal to, even though that’s precisely what people appraently need to appeal to- it’s why we tell stories after all.
Now it gets downright baffling. He suspects that “belief in plot as a magic structure” (read story that reformulates this world of meaninglessness into wonder and awe that explains and defines the human experience) leads to the cold and clinical feeling that he doesn’t like and is reacting against. How dare they reduce the world to the facts. He thus throws in this observation: “A plot can never work in isolation.” Rather it works in concert with people (p6), which his first chapter will go on to describe as a material being that experiences “constant change.” It is people who make stories fascinating and compelling, not plot. After all, what does plot do but remind us that we are all believing in a false world, right? Forget the fact that all the change and responsivness that change brings about isn’t actually engaging with antyhing real or true. We’ll just ignore that. Unless we are among the intellignet, then we can use it to manipulate the stories (read: people) to serve the star of our own (read: ourselves).
If you can feel a bit of the saracasm at play here that’s intentional. Albeit intentional because it’s precisely what the books introduction handed me. I used to work as a youth pastor. This introduction, and the book that follows, reminds me of the endless conversations I had with youth who would go on to graduate and head to university where they would walk into a first year religion course that has defined such beliefse as “illusions in your head” and end up back in my office telling me their whole world had been blown up and that they have now become enlightened. I understand why this kind of experience makes them feel intellectually superior. The problem is such approaches can’t attend for where its own logic begins and ends. Worse, it’s not honest bout its own beliefs. Thus it feels like its saying something true, and it can manipulate us into thinking “meaningless world” and “meaninful lives” just works together without imposing any logical problems on our belief system. But that doesn’t make it true (or to use the book’s own language: intelligent).
In chapter one the author clearly thinks “change” is the antidote that all that ails such cognitive disonnance. As he says, “Change is hope. Change is promise.” And yet he says this in the face of the facts he already outlined in the introduction: “We already know how this ends: all the change in the world will cease.” The real problem that the author runs into here on a logical level then is this; is the world meaningless now (he certainly made that claim), or will it become meangless when change ceases. This is an important question, because it really categorizese why story matters, something he has kind of bypassed without really answering the question. If story isn’t revealing a world that is actually meaningful now then all change is in fact manipulation of feelings in order to make us feel as though it is. Otherwise reality becomes the dark abyss that it actually is, in reality. It gives us the illusion that meaning exists. That’s what he is really arguing. Which is what makes the whole intellectual exercise problematic. The facts don’t remove him from this necessary illusion, it just hands him a utilitarian means of manipulating which illusions he wants the world to believe from the vantage point of his own. Which of course, given that “he” is at the center of his own story means manipulating people within his own perspective of this world.
Never mind that he effectively reduces the aims of the whole human enterprise as storytellers to those two necessary traits of a materialist or naturalistic worldview: survival and reproduction. Or survive to reproduce. That’s it. That’s what is behind it all in a meaningless world.
Here change is the number one tool in the hands of intelligent people. Manipulate change and you have people’s attention. I’ve recently finished numerous books on the brain in 2025, all of which seem to throw some of his understandings of the science into question. The brain is, according to the science, a predicting machine. That’s how it learns. It predicts what reality is. He cites this as the brains need to “control” But thats not actually what’s happening. It’s not in fact “storms of information that loop and flow around your brain’s distant territories” which we must learn to control. Information is not external facts, its internal perception based on predictive function, something he kind of comes back to in p21 but in a way that contradicts his initial position. He keeps wanting to prioritize “fact checking” (a world that is actually there) while also saying we don’t have access to this world (our brains create a replication of reality). That’s why “change” appears as it does. There is no inherent curiousity at play, despite him romanticizing the “facts” in this way (p17). There is no human “controlling the world,” despite what his secular humanism wants to uphold in his metanarrative of the myth of progress. There is no aim. Curiousity isn’t a secret hidden in the realm of “facts” waiting to be unearthed. It’s manipulation of biological function. He cites certain studies that describe the human need to resolve information gaps (p18), but the thing with that is, we aren’t resolving “factual” gaps, we are resolving “reasoned” or “logical” gaps in our beliefs. We are dealing with the abstract, not, as he wants to spin it, gaps in scientific informaiton or data (facts).
Here he brings up an interesting point, which seems to offer a slight critique on the certainty (intelligence) he has confusingly prioritized earlier. Curiosity, he says, is at its weakest when we have no idea about the answers AND when we think we have the answers. Story, he says, plays in the zone where we think we have some idea but aren’t certain. (p19). Which seems to suggest that his version of intelligence is actually kind of self defeating. As he admits, mystery is necessary. (p20) Take that away and we cease have nothing but the meaningless world that his intelligence hands him. And yet he believes he already has the answer by way of his intelligence: all this mystery is actually just seeking a meaningless world. A curious cognitive dissonance at play there.
Pain is an illusion. Colour is a lie. Sound doesn’t actually exist. When it comes to our sense and perception of reality there is no difference between being awake and being asleep. (p25/26) The brain is modeling the world using electrical impulses to design an experience that doesn’t coreleate with reality but rather replicates it while turning it into an active experiential illusion, here nodding to the growing science of brains as spacial referencing points (see the book A Thousand Brains).
We are also social creatures of course, which means we’ve evolved with specifc traits that allow us to “read” other poeple whom are all acting in their own stories, effectively reshaping them as part of ours. He calls that “unpredicatable humans.” (p35) It’s the opposite though. It’s actually predictabilty that shapes this social function and our relationship to the material matter we are part of.
And then shock of all shocks, in comes his categorization of religion, which is a product of our minds, or as he puts it, “our minds ability to populate it with other minds.” (p 36) A position that of course relies on his pressumptions about this imposed dichotomy between the illusions of the mind and the factual world that exists outside of ourselves. The minute you have the possibility that a person is actually interacting with something true outside of ourselves we have to contend with the way the “facts” press back on our experience of reality. Which brings the whole theoretical exercise he is trying to uphold (where he can hold them seperate while also making them inseperable when convenient, crashing down on its own logical inconsistencies.
There’s a curious sentiment that sneaks its way into portions of this book as it goes along, which is a noted resistance to reducing the world he keeps reducing in order to sustain his position. Thus when he gets to the subject of metaphor (p46), there is a sense in which he now has a metaphor needing to find its power by rooting us in something that is not true. Which of course mutes any inherent power the metaphor might have. The opposite is the case. The reason why metaphor has power is because it is rooted in something true. Otherwise we would find it meaningless. But of course, if we are creating the illusion of meaning everything just becomes a manipulatve song and dance. He can call an illusioned life sacred (his theoretical appraoch that he calls “The Sacred Flaw Approach,” which is simply the assertation that we wrongly misplace story as people responding to something external as opposed to recognizing that story is the illusioned world that emerges from the self). The final word of this on the final page is the word “feeling.” All of it is manipultaion of feelings and emotions. How fitting then that when writing about endings he has this to say on p 212,
“The lesson of story is that we have no idea how wrong we are… The consolation of story is truth.“
The notion is that “story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone, in that dark bone vault, after all.” It’s not only us, as he says. That’s the needed revelation that story gives us. Not only us that what? Well, in his certain evaluation of the world (cold, meaningless, materialistic) our flawed minds created flawed illusions of warped perceptions of the world. Notice how he plays fast and lose here with external facts and internal fiction. I can already see my freshly inaugerated university students swooning over how this makes them feel. When the author has subtly slipped in the sentiment “good stories are exploraitons of the human condition,” (p58) readers will be manipulated into foregetting what just preceded this romanticized feeling based on illuionary emotions.: brains are making “the superabundance of information that surrounds it into a simplified story.” We are taking the meaningless chaos and turning it into an ordered illusion. That we can feel it is what allows it (or us) to be manipulated. All of this complexity is really just a reductionist POV where such complex realities are reduced to the facts. Manipulation is built on the fact that we “accept” the illusion of our reality to be true. (p65)
Which really brings him back to that crucial driving force of all narrative lives, which he is making sense of by mirroring it with creative fiction (see the end of the book): change. Cause and effect. He wants to think and believe that what makes this all matter is that for however much all of this is illuions sustained by manipulative feelings (emotions), it matters because one thing can bring about something different. That’s the dramatic question (see chapter 3) that makes life worth it. While stating that change is the driver, the author also says that the great discovery of science and storyelling is that “none of us know why we do what we do.” That’s the thing that sustains the necessary mystery (where of course he slips in that theoolgy somehow strips that away while science somehow doesn’t).
His entire thesis is built on knowing how it ends with certainty, of change being the driving force towards nowhere, of knowing the facts being the thing that hands us control over life’s direction which is ultimately a directionless reality. Which brings me all the way back to where I started. The logical inconsistencies inherent in his approach and his reasoning. The constant wanting “both-and” while crtiquing the both-and and then needing the both-and to sustain any sense of coherency. Only to reveal that sense as just a feeling. A gigantic exercise in emotional manipulation designed to make us feel as though there is mystery in a world reducible to scientific facts.
Forgive my cycnism, but when you sit with students for whom this kind of “course” (and this book is based on such a course) hands them a fresh liberated view of the world, it becomes abundantly clear that this liberation is not an embrace of mystery, its an embrace of enlightnemnet era type certainty. What they come into my office with is the facts, not the experience of being human. Facts that typically have made them angry about the notion that they had been handed an illusion in their old religious worldview. Control, in the science of storyelling, comes through certain facts, but facts that, and this is the hardest thing to break through on my end with these students, come with a particular interpretaation of reality, or beliefs about reality. The science is not the issue, nor is it the liberative force that frees us from wrong beliefs. That’s not what hands them control. What hands them control is their beliefs. What they have interpreted the facts to reveal about the true nature of this reality we percieve and experience. That’s the truth about science and storytelling. And courses like these are masterful at convincing people that these particular beliefs, these particular interpretations, can be conflated with the facts and thus made into superior intelligence. That’s the manipulative trick of the trade.
In truth, and this would be my central pushback, science hands us data, not intelligence or knowledge. Stories seek to interpret that reality and formulate them into true beliefs that bring coherency to our experience of this data. What we believe about reality is what ultimately informs our interaction. Rather than collapsing the internal and the external, we need to set that in proper relationshsip. Except where I differ most starkly with Storr is not on the science but rather o the shape of that interaction. Our interaction is with our bleifs, not the facts. That’s where we find the necessary mystery. That’s also where we find the gaps. We don’t seek to brtidge the gap between the science we know and the science we don’t yet know. That way of thinking actually represents a belief about what the world is (materialism). That’s the part that matters. If that belief is going to have power, it has power as a belief. The gaps we feel and experience and note and respond to are the tension between contrasting beliefs. That’s what it means to be human. That’s what stories illuminate: truth external to our selves.
The Stories of my Life 