Surviving Together: A Brief Account of Living Vicariously Through The Next Guy

"What is it about stories—what are their particularities—that enable them to work as they do? More than mere curiosity is at stake in this question, because human life depends on the stories we tell: the sense of self that those stories impart, the relationships constructed around shared stories, and the sense of purpose that stories both propose and foreclose."   Arthur Frank

Storytelling is an ancient tradition, a practice that has been passed down from one generation to the next. It precedes spoken language. It cherishes custom and heritage. It provides windows into other realms. Most importantly, it exudes relativity and comfort. We tell stories in general for the same reason we write them: it allows us a lens with which to photograph the world one subject at a time. We've all heard people say stories are experiences, that they are meant to be read or heard so that we, as the reader or listener, can lose ourselves in them. Stories are much like the real life equivalent of Alice in Wonderland: we are able to fall down the rabbit hole and experience all the very real things without maybe actually experiencing them. Stories are like dreams.

It is very possible, in a sense, to get lost in a story; we do almost always want to know whats going to happen next. But perhaps more than getting lost in a story, we are getting found. Maybe we find ourselves in stories, and especially in other people's stories. There are always facets of someone else's life that will match your own; the whole thing will rarely be exact. The whole thing will even more rarely not divulge in its contents something that we, as readers or listeners, can relate to. Take the feature story about Joplin for example. It is likely that, besides the people who starred in it, no one has ever experienced this story quite exactly like it was told. Actually it is also fair, I think, to say that even the people who Dittrich profiled for the piece didnt picture things exactly like it was written down and not everyone there had the same perspective because we have to take into account that each individual in the cooler was understanding the situation in varying ways. That I think we can agree on. 

But I digress. 

How many people do you think read that feature that: have children that they care about and thought of them; had a dog, specifically a dachshund; have been through the toils of tornado season in the Alley; have been so terrified about something they werent able to move; have cerebral palsy; love beer; love Jesus; could imagine the one time they used their camera phone to take a video at a particularly inopportune moment and forgot it was filming; find themselves in situations where they feel like they can't breathe?  We tell other people's stories because we have a certain craving for figuring out our own unknowns through others' experiences. It helps us feel united. More than that, it provides a safety net for humankind. Relatable experiences make us prone to think if it turned out okay for that guy, it likely will for me too. We tell stories because they are applicable to our own lives in some form; this applicability makes them #relatable. It might be a particularly windy or rainy day. A tornado might hit. We might survive.