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A lot of what I write is story-based, a flow of thought intertwined with experiences and observations from my own life. One of the reasons I do it this way as for me it is personal and therefore uniquely mine, but another is that we learn through stories and we build our own narrative about the world that we act upon. 

![OI000150 3.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/xM1D5MWh-OI000150203.jpg)

We seem to want the "truth" but we are not very good at following the factual information we may have access to, until it builds a picture in our mind - this is why most people do not have an intuition for the affects of compound interest, it just doesn't have a good visual we can hold onto. A lot of the numbers in our lives start to blur in our imagination once we can no longer cut them into slices of oranges and pizzas. 

Truth is an interesting topic as while there might be the truth in the numbers or even the words that are said, it doesn't mean we are going to be shifted to act upon that truth - yet, when the same concepts are presented in a narrative we can hold onto, we learn. We might remember the headlines, but it is the story we build in our imagination around those words that moves us. This is why *controlling the narrative* is so effective in controlling behavior. 

But, I think the art of the story that can become the truth, through a fictional story. I think that the Shakespearean works have this quality, where the insights into human nature are incisive to the bone, yet there is no study or scientific report in sight - it is all observational, all through the eyes of a person listening in to the world around them, dissecting it to understand the mechanics and then presenting it to the audience in a way that is entertaining and memorable.

I think in a world where we have created a system that rewards the continual spinning of content into a thousand different forms, all the same - getting views on the world from people who aren't just repeating the views of others they have consumed is refreshing. I like reading the personal stories, I like having *real-life* experience weaved into the fabric of the content, there is an honesty in it, a vulnerability. 

Perhaps this is why so few do it and so many regurgitate the news of the day with nothing more added than a retelling of the same tale in their own words, often in far lesser form than where they were originally sourced - *Romeo and Juliet* spun into some guy and girl who boned, to the disapproval of their parents. 

The art of story telling seems to have disappeared as some kind of lesser skill, when it is the way we have managed to survive as a species for thousands of years - by being able to pass down information across generations. There is a reason that we did it this way, because it is through the stories we hold that we make our decisions, whether the story favors left or right, fiat or Bitcoin.

We like to think that we act on good information, but instead, we mostly act on experience and living it doesn't mean that the story we hold about it is accurate or factual. The memory is very poor at remembering life lived accurately and, it the imagination keeps formulating the story , adding and subtracting to remove the cognitive barriers, to make it make sense to us - even if that means it never happened that way at all. *Being there* is no guarantee of fidelity of information stored about the event.

But, perhaps if we learned to tell more stories of our lives we would learn to also pay attention to the lives we actually live, to see details that we normally miss due to our habits, to take part in conversations that we would otherwise miss while we stare at our phones consuming the mass-produced content aimed at holding our attention a little longer each time. there are stories everywhere, interesting people with experiences that are incredible - if only we listened or perhaps, if only they knew how to tell them so we would - is it a chicken or egg problem?

I don't know, but what I understand about my own preferences is, I am not interested in the numbers until they are  in a form that I can visualize them and if I do not have the ability to do it myself, I need someone to tell the story for me until I can. The best way to do that is through demonstration, not theory. A lot of people write like they understand a lot about life, but have they ever lived? 

Maybe from behind the screens it is easy to believe that what we know we can apply, because we know that we will never have to have our skills tested, since to do so, we'd have to get up out of our chair. Until tested, our belief in our skill is just another story. 

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]


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