Finding Meaning Through New Longstories

Welcome,

Though this site is still under construction, I am adding this first post to get the juices flowing. I have added background to the About Author page, and I’m in the process of writing an introduction on the About page, to introduce the field of topics I intend to discuss on this blog.

I’m beginning with Longstories due to its broad scope and potential for priming the pump. It’s a bit like starting somewhere in the middle. I enjoy starting books by reading from the middle to see where they might go.

I believe longstories have the potential to frame our experiences on multiple levels. I hope you enjoy this story of stories.

Warm Welcome,
David

Finding Meaning Through New Longstories

We live through stories and our stories animate us.  Our stories are our relationships with each other, with ourselves and with our life, and we relate only with those who are included in our stories. We need broadly scoped stories, broadly scoped in time, space and significance, to provide context and meaning for our more immediate story driven lives. In the spirit of Stuart Brand’s Long Now Foundation, in their effort to encourage long term thinking on the scale of ten thousand years, I will call these broadly scoped stories longstories. Not all longstories are on a thousand year time scale, and longstories need not be long to tell. By longstories I mean future stories that contextualize, nurture, and guide the development of other stories, the stories by which we live our daily lives. Meaning is derived from our longstories.

Our longstories’ role in providing meaning and purpose is recapitulated at several scales of time and interrelationship. For example we have longstories that provide context for our entire lives in a broader narrative, such as many religious stories. We also have longstories that provide context for nations and cultures captured in constitutional narratives, and in the explicit and implicit narratives behind our mores. Some longstories contextualize phases within our personal lives, though while we’re living them they feel like our entire lives. Many parental aspirations have been framed by a longstory narrative along the lines of:

I will work to provide my family loving environments and opportunities so they can flourish. My efforts will be rewarded with appreciation from my children and their children, and my life will be fulfilled.

This narrative has provided meaning for career paths, home choices, and income and status aspirations. This type of story is likely related to midlife crisis, a form of personal longstory crisis. When our longstory has been achieved, or disabused, we need to find a new one to regain direction, meaning and purpose.

Though I’m not a historian, and ten thousand years is hard to grasp, a few classes of longstories appear to have had sticking power on such extended historical scale. Core religious stories have been guiding, organizing and contextualizing human behavior over much of human history. These stories provide life context through a relationship with a transcendent entity and an after-life, and through ideas about how our behavior during life influences our after-life. Religious stories offer guidance and insights to nurture our relationships with other living humans, and have strongly influenced human behavior over thousands of years. However, standard religious stories tend to be relatively static. Religious stories lack significant guidance regarding our relationship with, and our responsibility to, future life on Earth. I believe it would be a natural and important growth path for standard religious stories to deliberately extend their compassionate and empathic storied relationship to future terrestrial life.

Competition stories are another example of a longstory enduring on a human history scale. A version of the competition narrative, though rarely directly articulated, says:

I will work to become the best, I will conquer my opponents. When I win I will be loved, admired and respected by all, including my opponents, and I will have lasting security and a form of immortality.

Competition stories are viscerally motivating, they’re about survival, they often raise survival to a level of moral imperative, and they set dominance and survival as ends in themselves. Competition stories have served an important role in guiding us to improve our capabilities, by pushing us to become the best, or at least good enough. The classic hero stories, including Homer’s Odyssey, are competition stories at their heart, and most of our global economic systems, and many legal justice systems, are built on the competition story. Competition stories are effective in stimulating growth and development; however they’re also examples of self consuming finite stories. The object of competition is to end the game in a win. After winning, the story is complete and the winner is left in a state of story crisis. Competition stories lack guidance about what to do next. The winner usually continues competing to remain at the top, or seeks yet another competition.

Humans have won in our Earthly competition. Now we need an infinite story built on intentions to perpetuate the game, to perpetuate growth in the richness of all life. Competition is about individuation. For a child to mature, the child’s stories first need to individuate, then they need to mature into stories that integrate their own needs with needs of others. Similarly, to mature as individuals, as nations, and as a race, our guiding stories first need to individuate us, then they need to mature to include the needs of other humans and other life, and then they need to evolve to include empathic connection with future life.

Would you be willing to share a longstory narrative that provides meaning and direction in your current life?