Humans are storytellers by nature, it has often been said, and we tell stories not only to other people but to ourselves. Without any qualms, I would assert that these stories are more common, frequent, and elaborate than the gather-around-the-campfire stories that have the appearance of innocent entertainment, revealed over the course of an hour to a group of attentive listeners observing the smoke pluming upward into a night that seems something other than eternal.
Very often the stories we tell ourselves so convincingly about ourselves are not only wrong but actively misleading, the hand dashing the pellucid image on the surface of a pond because it failed to live up to an appealing external standard that we had elevated to objectivity. We try thereafter to extrapolate a cogent narrative from the long series of events, moments, and incidents that make up the hurly-burly of our lives. We arrive only at a half-convincing set of ideas that never rise to the level of coherence.
Everything remains confusing; we try again, valiantly weaving for ourselves the tales that have never been more than thinly credible. Others doubt us, and we doubt ourselves—they have an angle on us that eludes the internal machinery of all our tireless, unending self-definition. We become actors to ourselves and to others, pallid versions that nonetheless contain the essence of what we continue to be underneath all this striving to make something coherent of our identities.
This is only to describe what many people understand about themselves: that their lives are often confusion, emptiness, and striving, a kaleidoscope of moments ad infinitum. But the more we contort ourselves to satisfy ideals that were merely contrived ex post facto, in the middle of an existence that long preceded our own attempts to make something of ourselves like puppets bouncing on the strings of time, the more we explode in ghastly combinations. The stories we tell ourselves are lies; our own self-created narratives are utterly absurd; and our attempts to be something other than what we are whenever we’re not trying to contort ourselves are not only pathetic—they can be self-abusive.
Those who suffer from this self-contorting tend to be victims of a society overrun by a litany of false values, the autophagous bonfire of the human species, ones that evaluate us according to our own outward performance, class, rank, title, appearance, and financial status. These are only ever under our partial control, and they have no actual importance beyond their own limited contexts. This is because human beings deal with an existence that has entirely preceded their own so-called achievement and self-actualization, the worldly success that is our de facto summum bonum. This is all circumscribed, of course, not only by our material circumstances but by our genetic inheritance and the temporal fortuity of our birth. Nietzsche was more than prescient when he asserted that deifying success is truly mean and lowly (and probably absurd); for today, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, we are dominated by a society that deifies success, slaves after it, basks in its ephemeral and sun-scattered glory.
We would do better to forgive ourselves, be gentle with ourselves, accept ourselves for what we are, avoid setting upon ourselves like feisty little jackals upon a piece of meat—if only because we haven’t had any choice in the matter. The lowliest kind of human bottom-feeder and the handsome and wealthy celebrity showered in the media with attention, validation, and status are two poles of the same human phenomenon.
Both are equally blameless, and neither can self-attribute anything worthy of mention beyond the wonder of a life bestowed upon them a priori, without their choosing, without their oversight—without any legitimate toehold from which they can pompously assert, “that was my doing from the beginning. I am the one responsible.” Extreme ownership and the fiction of our own excessive agency as individuals, the just-world phenomenon and a slavish egotism that needs that kind of sickly fiction for its self-validation, lead to the self-comparison and self-flagellation endemic to a twenty-first century that has often driven us to misery.
It all sounds terrible and unjust, and human life is in many senses terrible and unjust. But we are lucky in that life would be even more unjust, and humans even more envious and embittered, if the values that we generally ascribe to success were actual values rather than illusory ones, destined to dissolve, to be forgotten in the most complete kind of oblivion that we call infinity. Breaking free from all this ego-driven and self-inflicted misery and negativism, in fact, might be easier than it appears. After all, it requires only a measure of reason—the reason requisite to a kind of freedom. The question is, of course, whether that freedom is for the taking, or whether the free are themselves unfree in their freedom—bound to their freedom by the same laws that immiserate our society and keep people enslaved by their own unreason, entranced by the endless succession of illusions. True equality has always had its own brand of disturbing comeuppance.
