We see and think about our entire lives in terms of stories.

That's because the way that our lines construct our realities are in the form of narratives.

The reason that's really useful is because otherwise our waking everyday experience

would just be us confused kind of waking up in one moment and then another moment

without any real context to our own lives and having a flow and a feeling of continuity to our lives

in the shape of story is really what helps us build purpose, understand ourselves,

track how we've changed from the past into the future, build meaning and all these type of things.

If our brain did not think in terms of stories, then what would happen

is we would just be at one moment, for example, an event would be having tea or coffee in the morning.

That's an experience.

If you look at it, then later, let's say you go to work after that, then you're there at work,

doing your work in an office somewhere.

If you look at those two individual experiences, they're not connected in any way.

They're just slices of moments in time and you're existing in one moment in time doing one thing.

And then at another moment in time, you're doing a totally separate thing.

They have no relation to each other really.

But the story in your mind is that I got up and went to work today.

It makes those two things plus the travel of getting to your office.

It makes those things feel connected. It puts them into a narrative so that you have that sense of flow

and forward movement and context.

What's interesting is that if you zoom out even further, you can see that all of our experiences

are just those little slices of moments in time.

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