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The most powerful thing I have learned in my adult life is this: "Don't cling to your narrative" Making narratives is a survival technique. We simplify and red
by blamestross 6y ago
The most powerful thing I have learned in my adult life is this: "Don't cling to your narrative"
Making narratives is a survival technique. We simplify and reduce the truth of our world to abstractions like "narrative" in order to be able to fit them into our brains and operate on them. Mostly it is a lossy compression.
When we observe facts that contradict a narrative, at best they cause us anxiety and doubt, for the narrative is a safe place who's shelter is now known to be a weaker place. At worst, our minds protect us from those facts by not even allowing our eyes to focus upon them.
If you do you best to admit at a gut level that every narrative you have is probably wrong, it gets easier to handle it when new facts emerge, and helps you update your new "working narrative" faster. Don't stop using the tool of narrative, but don't get attached to this one, they break easy and they are easy to replace.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoHmm. Your last paragraph sounds like an OODA loop. I think the "orient" phase of the loop can be viewed as either fitting the observations into your existing narrative, or else deciding that they don't fit and constructing a new one. The second option is more expensive, so people try to make the first one work even when the observations don't really fit.