Our Lives are Post-Hoc Narratives

By Sebastian Vice

Our life isn’t a narrative or a set of narratives.

Our lives don’t follow narrative structures.

Our lives are a sequence of experiences cobbled together to make scenes where we superimpose a story uniting them.

It’s contentious to say we need to make our lives into a story to function at optimal levels. In my humble opinion, it sure does help.

In a way, we all live lies. Well, maybe not all. Maybe the enlightened Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist don’t (such folks are rare). But most of us labor under the illusion our lives make sense. They don’t.

If PTSD has taught me anything, it’s the breakdown of the internal narrative. A hallmark of PTSD is a collection of memories devoid of organization. If you have PTSD, you can probably remember some events with a beginning, middle, and end. Now consider a traumatic memory. Those don’t form a nice narrative structure, right?

This is all to say: our lives are post-hoc narratives. We don’t live in stories. We cobble a story to make sense of experiences. Events just are. Memories just are. The superimposition of narrative structure is how we make sense of something without inherent meaning.

This is kind of a rambling post. Just throwing some thoughts down on the screen.