Stories We Tell
*last updated on January 14, 2026
"Our human capacity for self-deception is almost as vast as our capacity for awakening." This line comes from After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield, a book about what spiritual practice looks like when it is brought into ordinary life. In that context, Kornfield returns to a practical problem: the mind can notice reality with clarity, but it can also generate convincing distortions. One of its main tools is storytelling—creating explanations and interpretations that feel true enough to live by.
What interests me is the paradox built into storytelling. Stories are one of our main tools for making sense of life, but they are also one of the easiest ways to lose contact with what is actually happening. We may think we are describing reality when we are really describing an interpretation that our minds produced quickly and confidently. That is why the key question is not whether stories are good or bad, but whether we can tell the difference between an event and the narrative we have wrapped around it.
The stories I mean here are not only big cultural narratives. They are also the small, everyday stories we build from limited data: what someone “really meant” by a short message, what a reaction “reveals” about a person, what a single decision “proves” about someone’s character, what a disagreement “says” about a relationship, what an action “shows” about intentions, what an event “means” about who we are. These stories help us organize experience quickly. They can also harden into certainty, even when they rest on partial information and emotional momentum.
It is easy to treat storytelling as something people always do deliberately: writers crafting narratives, advertisers shaping campaigns, politicians building frames, journalists selecting angles. That is real, but it is not the whole picture. Story is also a default mode of perception. A classic demonstration is the 1944 Heider–Simmel animation: when people watch simple geometric shapes moving around, they tend to describe what they saw as a social drama, attributing intention, emotion, and conflict to triangles and circles. This tendency makes social life possible because we often have to act without complete information. But it also makes us vulnerable to confident interpretation where caution would be more accurate.
Because stories are memorable, they are also practical. We use them to teach, to make complex ideas easier to grasp, and even to remember ordinary information by turning it into sequence and imagery. This is one reason so many writers on communication and persuasion emphasize storytelling. For example, Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick treats story as a major mechanism behind “sticky” ideas—ideas people remember, repeat, and act on. A story can compress a complicated reality into a form the mind can hold. It can also make that compressed version feel more complete than it is.
The risk appears when storytelling becomes a substitute for reality rather than one way of representing it. A clean plot can feel satisfying precisely because it removes ambiguity. It offers resolution, moral clarity, and coherence. It often implies that everything happens for a reason, that every detail matters, that villains and heroes are distinct categories, and that the “right” ending is identifiable. In everyday life, those assumptions can become a shortcut to judgment: if events feel coherent, we assume the explanation is true; if a person fits a role in the story, we assume we understand them; if the narrative is emotionally compelling, we treat it as evidence.
This is where self-deception becomes more than a personal flaw. It becomes a normal byproduct of how human understanding works. The mind does not only create stories to entertain or persuade. It also creates stories to regulate emotion, protect identity, reduce uncertainty, and preserve a sense of control. That means even inaccurate stories can feel psychologically useful. They can reduce anxiety, justify anger, preserve a preferred self-image, or keep a relationship story intact even when evidence points to change. And because these stories serve functions, we may defend them, repeat them, and build further interpretations on top of them.
This matters socially as well as personally. Stories do not only guide individual reactions; they also shape how groups explain events and assign blame. When narratives erase complexity, they make it easier to dehumanize others. When narratives promise total coherence, they make it harder to admit uncertainty. When narratives divide the world into moral categories, they make it harder to recognize mixed motives and shared vulnerability. The most persuasive stories are often the least tolerant of “in-betweens,” because ambiguity weakens the emotional force of the plot.
At the same time, rejecting stories altogether is neither possible nor desirable. Humans need narrative to communicate, to teach, and to hold meaning across time. The problem is not storytelling. The problem is unexamined storytelling—when a narrative becomes invisible to us, and therefore unquestionable. Kornfield provides a useful comparison: “It is like the Zen painter who finished a life-sized portrait of a tiger on the wall of his dwelling. Returning home lost in thought some days later, he was frightened upon suddenly seeing the tiger there, having forgotten it was his own creation.” The problem is not painting the tiger; the problem is believing that it is real.
In this context, growth does not mean living without stories; it means relating to them differently: noticing when an interpretation is forming, pausing before treating it as fact, and staying willing to revise it in light of new information and empathy.
This kind of awareness has a practical ethical edge. If we recognize that we are always narrating, we become more careful about what we do with that power. We become less certain that our first interpretation is the whole truth. We become more attentive to the emotional rewards a story offers—especially the reward of feeling right. We can still use stories to teach and connect, but we can also notice when a story is being used to simplify, manipulate, or justify harm.
I want to share a poem that I wrote about stories. I created it with “media” stories in mind, but it can describe any narratives that capture imagination and connect with deep human needs for beauty, order, and meaning. The voice is intentionally lulling, ironic, and bleak. But the point is not that stories are inherently false, or that we should stop telling them, or that believing in them makes people foolish. The point is that the desire for a perfectly coherent story can become a demand we impose on life and on other people. When life does not meet that demand, we may conclude that life is the problem—rather than recognizing that our preferred narrative has limits.
Getting lost in stories is not what “other people” do. It is what humans do. If there is any stance that helps, it is not contempt for those who believe the “wrong” stories. It is humility about how easily any of us can mistake a constructed meaning for reality. It asks for more care with the stories we tell, more restraint in the stories we trust, and more compassion when we notice that we, too, have been lulled.
LULLABY
Tell me a story, tell me a lie
Make it as sweet as a lullaby
I won’t wake up even if I try
Make it something special
‘Cause life is a bore
Fill your story with beauty
That’s hard to ignore
Fill it with perfection
That’s hard to resist
Turn villains to heroes to give it a twist
But no in-betweens, ‘cause they do not exist
Make it as sweet as a lullaby
I won’t wake up, I won’t even try
There should be problems
And puzzles to solve
But right all the wrongs
With some love and resolve
Give meaning to everything
Make it make sense
Your story should be like an intricate dance
With logic and purpose in each single step
So that in the end I will know when to clap
Make it as sweet as a lullaby
If life isn’t like that
Then life is a lie
About this project: Start page
What interests me is the paradox built into storytelling. Stories are one of our main tools for making sense of life, but they are also one of the easiest ways to lose contact with what is actually happening. We may think we are describing reality when we are really describing an interpretation that our minds produced quickly and confidently. That is why the key question is not whether stories are good or bad, but whether we can tell the difference between an event and the narrative we have wrapped around it.
The stories I mean here are not only big cultural narratives. They are also the small, everyday stories we build from limited data: what someone “really meant” by a short message, what a reaction “reveals” about a person, what a single decision “proves” about someone’s character, what a disagreement “says” about a relationship, what an action “shows” about intentions, what an event “means” about who we are. These stories help us organize experience quickly. They can also harden into certainty, even when they rest on partial information and emotional momentum.
It is easy to treat storytelling as something people always do deliberately: writers crafting narratives, advertisers shaping campaigns, politicians building frames, journalists selecting angles. That is real, but it is not the whole picture. Story is also a default mode of perception. A classic demonstration is the 1944 Heider–Simmel animation: when people watch simple geometric shapes moving around, they tend to describe what they saw as a social drama, attributing intention, emotion, and conflict to triangles and circles. This tendency makes social life possible because we often have to act without complete information. But it also makes us vulnerable to confident interpretation where caution would be more accurate.
Because stories are memorable, they are also practical. We use them to teach, to make complex ideas easier to grasp, and even to remember ordinary information by turning it into sequence and imagery. This is one reason so many writers on communication and persuasion emphasize storytelling. For example, Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick treats story as a major mechanism behind “sticky” ideas—ideas people remember, repeat, and act on. A story can compress a complicated reality into a form the mind can hold. It can also make that compressed version feel more complete than it is.
The risk appears when storytelling becomes a substitute for reality rather than one way of representing it. A clean plot can feel satisfying precisely because it removes ambiguity. It offers resolution, moral clarity, and coherence. It often implies that everything happens for a reason, that every detail matters, that villains and heroes are distinct categories, and that the “right” ending is identifiable. In everyday life, those assumptions can become a shortcut to judgment: if events feel coherent, we assume the explanation is true; if a person fits a role in the story, we assume we understand them; if the narrative is emotionally compelling, we treat it as evidence.
This is where self-deception becomes more than a personal flaw. It becomes a normal byproduct of how human understanding works. The mind does not only create stories to entertain or persuade. It also creates stories to regulate emotion, protect identity, reduce uncertainty, and preserve a sense of control. That means even inaccurate stories can feel psychologically useful. They can reduce anxiety, justify anger, preserve a preferred self-image, or keep a relationship story intact even when evidence points to change. And because these stories serve functions, we may defend them, repeat them, and build further interpretations on top of them.
This matters socially as well as personally. Stories do not only guide individual reactions; they also shape how groups explain events and assign blame. When narratives erase complexity, they make it easier to dehumanize others. When narratives promise total coherence, they make it harder to admit uncertainty. When narratives divide the world into moral categories, they make it harder to recognize mixed motives and shared vulnerability. The most persuasive stories are often the least tolerant of “in-betweens,” because ambiguity weakens the emotional force of the plot.
At the same time, rejecting stories altogether is neither possible nor desirable. Humans need narrative to communicate, to teach, and to hold meaning across time. The problem is not storytelling. The problem is unexamined storytelling—when a narrative becomes invisible to us, and therefore unquestionable. Kornfield provides a useful comparison: “It is like the Zen painter who finished a life-sized portrait of a tiger on the wall of his dwelling. Returning home lost in thought some days later, he was frightened upon suddenly seeing the tiger there, having forgotten it was his own creation.” The problem is not painting the tiger; the problem is believing that it is real.
In this context, growth does not mean living without stories; it means relating to them differently: noticing when an interpretation is forming, pausing before treating it as fact, and staying willing to revise it in light of new information and empathy.
This kind of awareness has a practical ethical edge. If we recognize that we are always narrating, we become more careful about what we do with that power. We become less certain that our first interpretation is the whole truth. We become more attentive to the emotional rewards a story offers—especially the reward of feeling right. We can still use stories to teach and connect, but we can also notice when a story is being used to simplify, manipulate, or justify harm.
I want to share a poem that I wrote about stories. I created it with “media” stories in mind, but it can describe any narratives that capture imagination and connect with deep human needs for beauty, order, and meaning. The voice is intentionally lulling, ironic, and bleak. But the point is not that stories are inherently false, or that we should stop telling them, or that believing in them makes people foolish. The point is that the desire for a perfectly coherent story can become a demand we impose on life and on other people. When life does not meet that demand, we may conclude that life is the problem—rather than recognizing that our preferred narrative has limits.
Getting lost in stories is not what “other people” do. It is what humans do. If there is any stance that helps, it is not contempt for those who believe the “wrong” stories. It is humility about how easily any of us can mistake a constructed meaning for reality. It asks for more care with the stories we tell, more restraint in the stories we trust, and more compassion when we notice that we, too, have been lulled.
LULLABY
Tell me a story, tell me a lie
Make it as sweet as a lullaby
I won’t wake up even if I try
Make it something special
‘Cause life is a bore
Fill your story with beauty
That’s hard to ignore
Fill it with perfection
That’s hard to resist
Turn villains to heroes to give it a twist
But no in-betweens, ‘cause they do not exist
Make it as sweet as a lullaby
I won’t wake up, I won’t even try
There should be problems
And puzzles to solve
But right all the wrongs
With some love and resolve
Give meaning to everything
Make it make sense
Your story should be like an intricate dance
With logic and purpose in each single step
So that in the end I will know when to clap
Make it as sweet as a lullaby
If life isn’t like that
Then life is a lie
About this project: Start page
