We tell ourselves stories. We tell others stories. We love to watch and to read stories of others. We like to think of our lives as narratives. We think it helps us make sense of all the sensory impulses we receive.
We sum up the events of our lives in some kind of grand narrative. We do this for others too. We look at human beings and we see this story of beings; from humble beginnings, sitting in caves, huddled around fires, to the now, where we think of ourselves as some kind of sophisticated and advanced species.
Still you can't help wonder if the story has a happy ending. Or any kind of ending at all. And you wonder if human beings really know what they are doing. Sometimes the story has these weird detours and dead-ends. And it seems the only way to construct a narrative is to leave lots of stuff out of the story.
And there's this nagging intuition that maybe we leave the most important stuff out of the narrative, either because we don't really know what's important, or it's not convenient, or it doesn't add the the narrative through-line.
And you wonder if maybe this narrative type facility is an elaborate mental construction that misses the point. Or obscures the point of life. If there's a point. And you wonder what is a human being: this collection of feelings, impulses, thoughts, desires, emotions. And you wonder what is the world: this amazing sensory overload of things and things and things.
And you wonder. How do you wrap all that up in a story without painting just a grand, misguided and elaborate lie.