Storytelling

Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back

Narratives are everywhere, and the need to construct and share them is almost inescapable. ‘A man is always a teller of tales,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel Nausea (1938), ‘he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.’ We rely on narratives because they help us understand the world. They make life more meaningful. According to Sartre, to turn the most banal series of events into an adventure, you simply ‘begin to recount it’. ….[READ]