We wake up inside a narrative that is already running. Before the first conscious thought, the brain has quietly begun its ancient work: stitching the raw chaos of sensation into something that feels coherent. Light through the window becomes “morning,” the ache in the shoulder becomes “I slept wrong again,” the smell of coffee becomes “another day has mercifully arrived.” None of these interpretations are strictly true or false; they are simply the stories we need in order to stand up, walk to the kitchen, and believe—against all evidence—that the yogurt in the refrigerator will still belong to us tomorrow.
Consciousness is not a spotlight that illuminates reality. It is a storyteller that invents reality fast enough to keep despair from walking through the door. Consider how fragile the arrangement is. At every moment the universe branches into an uncountable number of futures: the car could crash, the phone could ring with terrible news, the heart could stutter and stop.
Ten billion neurons firing in patterns no two mornings ever repeat exactly. Yet we do not collapse into paralysis. We survive by telling ourselves stories, the simpler the better: “I will drink this coffee, answer those emails, and tonight I will watch a football game and see if “my team” wins.
The story does not have to be accurate. It only has to be portable. Civilization itself is a collective agreement to pretend that tomorrow will resemble today closely enough that planning is not insane. This is why arguments about “objective truth” so often miss the point.
The Mona Lisa is not the greatest painting ever made; it is the painting we have jointly decided to call the greatest so that museums have something to put velvet ropes around and art experts have something to gawk about.
The sentence “The universe began with the Big Bang” is not a fact in the same way that “this apple will fall if I drop it” is a fact. It is a creation with differential equations attached, a story so gorgeous and useful that we teach it to children before they have ever seen a night sky without light pollution. We do not know what happened before Planck’s story time any more than the ancient Babylonians knew what happened before Marduk split Tiamat in two.
We have merely replaced one dragon-slaying tale with another that wears a lab coat. Most of the autobiography playing in your head right now is equally provisional. Try to remember your tenth birthday party. Unless you are very unusual, what surfaces is not a film reel but a handful of still images—cake, balloons, a feeling of heat in the cheeks—around which the rest has been quietly fabricated.
Memory is less an archive than a perpetual motion machine of self-creation. You do not retrieve the past; you rewrite it in real time, sanding off or polishing up embarrassments, heightening triumphs, until the protagonist (you) emerges tolerable, maybe even admirable.
Entire years vanish. First kisses are upgraded or downgraded depending on how later relationships turned out. We are not lying, exactly. We are surviving.
Zoom out far enough and the same principle governs every supposedly hard domain. The stock market is not a machine for pricing companies; it is the world’s largest collaborative novel, written in real time by millions of authors who never meet. Each ticker symbol is a character. Earnings reports are plot twists. A CEO’s offhand comment at a conference becomes foreshadowing. Trillions of dollars move because someone, somewhere, convinced enough other people that a certain story about the future was the one worth betting on. Most of these stories will be wrong.
Some of the companies we anoint as immortal will be chapter eleven footnotes in a decade. That is not a flaw in the system; it is the system. Narrative outruns reality, always. Reality merely arrives later to see which stories it will bother confirming.
The terror and the liberation lie in noticing this. Once you see that everything is a story—the nation, the self, the science, the love affair, the cancer diagnosis—you are no longer obligated to treat any of them as immovable scripture. Using the mute button becomes a useful and viable option.
You can hold your cosmology lightly, the way a good storyteller holds a draft before the final revision. The universe might have begun with a bang, or a bounce, or the dream of a sleeping god, or the collision of higher-dimensional membranes. Pick the metaphor that gets you out of bed. Change it next Tuesday if the old one starts to creak.
This is not an invitation to nihilism. Stories are how mammals with oversize prefrontal cortices avoid being crushed by uncertainty.
The trick is to become a conscious author instead of a character who believes he has no choice in the dialogue. When the news feed erupts with fresh panic, you can remind yourself: this too is a story, still being edited, still missing half its chapters.
When your own mind begins narrating a tragedy—“I am the sort of person to whom bad things always happen”—you can interrupt like a director on set: Cut. Let’s try that scene again with different lighting. The people we call happy, resilient, alive, are almost always master storytellers. Not in the sense of being liars, but in the sense of being fluent in hope. They do not deny pain; they refuse to let pain have the final word.
Their inner monologues run toward courage and connection rather than catastrophe and isolation. The clinically depressed, by contrast, are often trapped in narratives of airtight despair—stories so rigid and totalizing that no counterfactual can get a foothold. Medication can sometimes soften the prison walls, but the long cure is almost always a new story, one that leaves room for the possibility that tomorrow will be brighter than today.
So choose your stories the way you would choose traveling companions for a journey that will outlast your pulse. Choose the ones that make you generous rather than small, curious rather than certain, kind rather than righteous.
When the world feels too heavy with its own fictions, do something undeniably real: call someone whose voice you have not heard in years and ask for their version of the time you both thought the night would never end. Sit on the floor and run your hand along the warm flank of your pet who has no stock portfolio, no cosmology, no past to revise—only the eternal, un-storied present of a body that trusts the next stroke will come.
In the end your life will itself become a story, probably a short one. A paragraph in a newspaper, a few lines carved into stone, a handful of anecdotes traded at a wake once the sandwiches are gone. Someone will summarize you—“She / he was the sort of person who…”—and that summary will be comically incomplete, inevitably partisan, and still the only afterlife most of us get.
The mercy is that you are writing the rough draft right now, sentence by sentence, with every choice and refusal, every act of kindness, every criticism, every act of bravery or cowardice. Laugh at the stories that once gave you despair. Use the mute button. Tell a courageous story. Tell a hopeful one. Tell a story that makes strangers lean in and want to be the friend of the story teller.
Warmest Regards Your Friend, Brian
Stand tall, look forward, be brave
About the Author
