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Why Do We Tell Stories?
And what do the stories we tell say about us?
Although it’s tempting to answer the question of why we humans tell each other stories by saying they’re a mechanism to convey social norms or impart aspirations, we need to delve beneath these superficial reasons in order to truly understand the purpose of the stories we fabricate. And in order to do that, we need to look at the way in which the human brain has been hardwired by evolution.
For 99.9% of all human history, our ancestors lived in relatively static environments that presented relatively simple challenges. Nearly all of our problems arise not from predators or disease or natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, but from the actions of other human beings. And as human behavior is remarkably simple, most of our limited cognitive apparatus is therefore devoted to attempting to guess what those around us are likely to do. We’re not very good at this task — hence the reference to our limited cognitive apparatus — but most people do it adequately enough most of the time to get by in daily life, albeit with inevitable mishaps and setbacks.
For nearly all of our evolutionary history, calories were scarce and uncertain. That may be difficult to believe in our modern world of mass-produced toxic slop laden with sugars and fats and salts, purpose-designed to induce…
