It’s a human thing: we tell stories.
We create narrative frameworks for ourselves as we look out at the world from within our own heads.
Why this, and why that, and how could that possible make sense.
Sometimes, the stories we tell ourselves are true. (Or mostly true.) When this happens, it’s just the best.
But, a lot of the time, the stories we tell ourselves about the big world out there are…well, they’re not quite right.
There are plenty of reasons for this—some of the internal, such as the biases we have that prevent us from seeing the world more like it actually is—but some of the reasons are external to us.
For instance: sometimes we just don’t have all the information.
It’s hard to build an accurate story based on incomplete information.
(Consider how impressed we all are with fictional detectives.)
You see, I’m working up to an admission here:
The past week, I built a bad narrative.
Information is powerful. Having or not having it is the difference between insight and obliviousness. And I was oblivious.
I realize this is vague. That’s because the story in question is a little too sensitive to share in what is (despite the insignificant readership) a public space.
But the specifics don’t matter much: it’s the structure of the experience.
And that structure goes beyond just having a single missing piece to the puzzle: it’s recognizing that other pieces are also missing.
This is what’s so shocking about the wrong stories we tell ourselves. It’s not surprising to be missing a single piece. It’s everything else that you realize is missing or poorly composed.
In a few words:
I didn’t see that coming.
Taylor Coe 