Interview

I would love to correct the completely understandable (but dead wrong) myth that stories are just for entertainment, and thus serve no genuine purpose other than offering us a delicious reward after having spent a hard day doing real things in the real world. Which has led to the belief that sure, life would be far duller without stories, but we’d have survived just fine.

That could not be less true. Story is built into the architecture of the brain: we think in story, and we make sense of everything thorough narrative.

And because we’re wired for story, we decode every fact that’s thrown at us through our own subjective narrative, our own personal story – always tacitly asking, How will this fact affect me? Will it help me, or will it hurt me? This is not a choice, nor is it a failing. It’s biology, and it’s how we got here.

Turns out that story was more crucial to our evolution than our much touted (and beloved) opposable thumbs. All our thumbs do is let us hang on – story tells us what to hang on to. The takeaway is: we don’t turn to story to escape reality, we turn to story to navigate reality.

https://gretchenrubin.com/2021/03/lisa-cron-author-interview