Everyone loves a good story. Whether it’s a funny story from your crazy Cousin Larry at Christmas or an awe-inspiring account on podcasts like This American Life, Radiolab, or the like, we enjoy telling and hearing stories.

In American culture today, “story,” dominates, especially among young people. It seems that many find value in whether or not others validate their personal narrative or “story.” One example of our fascination with individual personal narratives is the popularity of the Humans of New York platform. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s a bit from the about page to explain:

My name is Brandon and I began Humans of New York in the summer of 2010. I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive catalogue of New York City’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. I worked for several months with this goal in mind, but somewhere along the way, HONY began to take on a much different character. I started collecting quotes and short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets alongside the photographs. Taken together, these portraits and captions became the subject of a vibrant blog. 

Before we go any further, I should say: I love Humans of New York, This American Life, and plenty of other outlets sharing the stories of people around the world. I listen to This American Life weekly, and I keep track of Humans of New York on Facebook. I am a fan of hearing others’ stories of triumph, toil, and tragedy. It is good to be reminded of the humanness of the faces we pass on the street.

We See the Exception as the Norm

But our obsession with others’ (and our own) stories is not without its problems, including one in particular:

“Story” distorts reality by making the exceptional seem normative.

As you read the stories of people on Humans of New York, or as you listen to a podcast like This American Life, there’s a sort of unintentional, subliminal message saying, “Hear this story and allow it to shape your worldview, even though it’s only a story worth telling because it’s an exception to the norm.”

Ira Glass, who leads This American Life, whether or not he intends to, shapes the worldview of his listeners with exceptional stories in such a way that it makes the exception appear to be the norm. If podcasts like This American Life or projects such as Humans of New York depicted the ho-hum normality of many peoples’ lives, nobody would listen or pay attention to them.

But, when Ira Glass shares the fascinating tales of American life, or when the crew at Humans of New York read the harsh stories of New Yorkers, listeners and readers are prone to project the stories they read and hear onto the whole of life, coming to understand the exceptional stories as normative and perhaps more pervasive than they really are. This is no fault of the Ira’s, or any other storyteller’s for that matter.

Take, for instance, my favorite episode of This American Life, “129 Cars.” It’s a dramatic story about a Jeep dealership on Long Island striving to make its 129 car threshold so it can make it into the black and get a huge bonus from the manufacturer. The dealership makes its goal at the buzzer, like you’d write it into a movie if you could. Hail Mary play right at the last second.

It’s an incredible story, my favorite from This American Life. I don’t know much of anything about car dealerships and how they sell cars, but this podcast taught me a lot about how it can work. However, I would be mistaken if I were to take this one story and read it as the “norm” for the entire car dealership industry. It’s not always that intense. It’s not always that dramatic. It doesn’t always work that way. But if I listened with immature ears, I would just assume that’s how it is.

In our love of story, we need to be careful we don’t assume stories reflect normalcy. Religion News Service today, for example, published a story on how a married gay couple lives out their Catholic faith. The untrained reader may read this and understand such a phenomenon as the “new normal,” when, in fact, the story is only a story because it’s exceptional. Religion News Service doesn’t do stories on how married straight couples live out their Catholic faith because those stories aren’t interesting. Why aren’t they interesting? Because they’re normal—or not exceptional.

So What?

You may read and wonder, “So what’s the big deal if we read the implications of a simple narrative as a picture of reality?” Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, explains why we must be suspicious of stories, and what happens when we aren’t:

Story makes life seem more simple than it is.

Story makes us feel like our life is always most important.

Life is rarely simple, and our daily lives rarely feel important. And that’s OK, but our obsession with story tells us that’s not OK.

Tags:  Millennials Personal Narrative Stories TED Talks