Stories We Tell

PAGE IN PROGRESS
What you see here is a page of my hypertext book Me, Looking for Meaning. Initially empty, it will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. See this post to better understand my creative process. Thank you for your interest and patience! 

• story I tell myself: either I am making progress, developing interest important ideas or it’s never ending, it’s a mess, I am stuck, nobody cares 

​media

media representations

​first create stories and then believe on them

we can simultaneously understand that story is made up and let ourselves believe in it; danger comes when lines become particularly blurry (for some individuals) but there is a more insidious problem - assumptions hidden in media representations guide our lives
difficUlt to pinpoint the problem
e.g. representations of romantic relationships
criticidm of Beaty and the beast
fifty shades of grey
Difficult to pinpoint because it can be a matter of interpretation: victimhood or empowerment for the female protagonist?
Also film “secretary”
a harsh way to describe this: in stories we create unicorns that we want to believe, beautiful magical creatures
but if we take a closer look at the inconsistencies, as what is left out of not properly explained, we see that these unicorns are feud that we took a dead horse body and stitched to it a horn and what we are looking at is not a beautiful magical creature but a stinking reeking cadaver
it’s unreal, when we see it as real we are deceiving ourselves, it’s falling apart (illogical story, consistency issues), it’s misleading, it’s not pretty if you take a really close critical look, it’s actually disturbing, but we want to believe in it, so we keep hugging this decomposing horse. And to make it even more complicated: it’s nobody’s fault but it’s everybody’s responsibility to recognize what us going on here

even though most people will not use this movie as a permission to inflict harm (like Armie Hammer) if reflects unrealistic expectations about relationships and perpetuates these expectations
this is not the same as blaming people who created this film, they are chahelling ideas that exist already in society (see macropower)


stories that draw attention are about extraordinary things. They distract us from appreciation of the ordinary, or rather of seeing extraordinary in the ordinary (Wabi Sabi)

Problems with stories we tell: perfection, closure (problems get resolved, understanding is reached), everything has a purpose that can be understood, bad guys vs good guys