Everybody’s life is 1/100 of a story that deserves to be told. You have to aggregate, anonymize, erase, stereotype, and distill about 100 stories on average to get one worth telling.
Very tired of the conceit that every life is a story worth telling out of the box. Very American. It’s an even more deep-rooted idea than the idea that you’re just not a billionaire yet. The fungibility of human stories is a taboo topic.
Once you see this, you learn to appreciate the few nuggets of storyworthiness you can find in a typical life if you can filter out the cliches with the right questions
my man, you don’t know what a cliche is. cliches arise WHEN people think people are interchangeable. the reality is people who can tell interesting stories can do so because they can see the things that make each life interesting.
Mathew Dicks’ Storyworthy at first glance appears to suggest that all lives are Storyworthy, but when you dig in to the techniques and examples you realize he’s expertly drilling for the 1% rather than elevating the 99%. And he’s had a particularly colorful life too.
People who are eager to individualize relationships often are flatteringly interested in the dullest of everybody’s stories but that’s a poor standard. They’re more like r/relationships nerds than story connoisseurs.
The US has a culture war aspect of this going. Every “diverse” story is automatically storyworthy by fiat for the left, and every rustbelt hillbilly story is automatically storyworthy by fiat on the right. The result is the dullest stories all around.
Reminds me of a Schankian story
I was an AI grad student at a DARPA workshop in FL
My hotel check-in line was long, because the guy at the head of the line was shouting "Do you know who I am?". I had never heard anyone do that for real
It was my advisor's advisor Roger Schank
My life so far has about 5 storyworthy days in it by own standards of interestingness. Assuming average competence at extracting and telling. I suspect I’m somewhat under par. Most people have more material to work with.
I actually unironically like stories that aggregate vast numbers of individual stories into mass streams. Very few stories fo that. Most pick out and center a special story.
About half way through the Decameron right now and 14th century Italy stories are as dull and interchangeable as ours. But interestingly it is the incidental now-historical details that were clearly casual for Boccaccio that make it worth the read for me in 2021.
I think social media produces conformity of affect. Among people I really know well I can't say I've met anyone who was very much like anyone else. People are quite unique once you really get to know them in my experience