It’s all a story – even the one you tell yourself

If you went up to someone in the street and asked them to sum up human existence, you would get a lot of different answers. But you’d rarely be told: “We are the creature that lives on stories.”

Yet that is how more and more philosophers regard our species. They point out that homo-sapiens is the only life-form which filters almost every mood and action through an endless series of narratives. Whether the stories we believe and adhere to are accurate or not doesn’t seem to matter. We are programmed to react to narrative rather than, say, numbers or statistics.

You only have to look at the millions who believe in the utterances of Donald Trump to know it is true. When, for example, he blames poor forest management for the spate of wildfires and not climate change, every expert scientist in the field has come out to say he is wrong.

But that doesn’t change the way in which Trump supporters think because they have bought into his bigger narrative about fake news and dodgy leftie scientific claims.

For them, there’s a story that says: “We are honest decent hard-working people, and our lives are constantly being eroded by selfinterested politicians, lying leftie journos and scientists who work for greedy multinational companies.”

That story is far more appealing than a concept which says Americans are (just like the rest of us) a bunch of hapless individuals who’ll forever be at the mercy of global winds of change.

This is narrative writ large, but the story we all know best is the one we tell ourselves, about ourselves.

So, for example, it is well known (to me) that M Hesp is that tall, lean, rather handsome, well-spoken, cheerful bloke with a ready smile and a friendly word for one and all. A quiet intellectual who, to an almost James Bond degree, is able to keep his cool when all around is in disarray. The guy who only has to smile at a pretty woman to make her wonder just how exciting life would be if only she knew this legend better.

I’ve exaggerated this selfself-narrative in order to make a point. I do not actually believe the Bond bit or a single atom of the last sentence. As for the rest… We’ll get onto that in a mo’.

Anyway, you get the sort of thing I mean. If you are selfconfident you’ve probably developed a story about who you are and how well and positively you appear to the rest of the world. If you are a nervous wreck, you probably have an altogether different tale that you tell yourself and consequently live by.

The problem for those who walk tall in the belief that their glowing self-story is true, is that there is only one way to go if that narrative is ever punctured. And while he or she is plummeting as their self-written novel lies in tatters, the wretch who suddenly is convinced their bad self-narrative is wrong might be ascending happily in the other direction.

In reality, the lift-shafts of life are not often used. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is usually so strong a massive upheaval would be required to overturn it.

Or maybe I’m wrong about that. Because I just received an email that has caused me to doubt my story. You’ll laugh when I explain why. I won’t bore you with the details but I am about to go somewhere exotic for a brief period. It will be hot and for some mysterious reason I will be the only man with four young women.

One of them emailed: “The island is sandy, so you won’t need shoes. Just pack a pair of shorts and a T-shirt for when we dine together – the rest of the time you’ll be in your swimming cozzie…”

Now, I am not a vain man. Indeed, WMN readers have been known to write in complaining how scruffy I am. I rarely look in a mirror. But that is all through some self-confidence trick that my self-story has sold to me.

One that says: “You’re cool and jolly. Remember how people used to say how handsome you were. You can get away with being relaxed about your appearance.”

And of course there are things called clothes, which can hide all manner of inconvenient truths.

But now I’ve got to come to terms with the fact that I will be stuck on a tropical island with four young women – waddling about in my trunks, conscious of my beer belly and the scars from my heart operation. Then there’s my newly fitted single false tooth. I hate it so much I take it out when dining in the privacy of my home.

If I do that on this islet I’ll look like a kind of Robinson Crusoe who fell through a wardrobe in a Salvation Army hostel and found himself on a tropical shore. In cartoon terms: a beached whale with a kind of Worzel Gummidge face.

I’ll be naked to the world and the terrible truth will be known. So I either need a whole new self-story, or I must borrow Donald Trump’s inner scriptwriter and discover a bit of his famous beached-whale chutzpah.

‘A beached whale with a kind of Worzel Gummidge face...’