You Are the Story You Tell Yourself | An Existential Take on Why Humans Crave Stories
- Bair Klos
- Apr 29
- 6 min read
Updated: May 8
Greetings world, I was inspired to write this blog post after messing around with the new OpenAI Monday chatbot. If you're not at all familiar with Monday, it was created to be a sarcastic, dry-humored chatbot—designed to be the opposite of helpful. Instead of offering support, it specializes in witty roasts, existential dread, and emotional whiplash. And somehow, in all its snark and bleakness, it sometimes says the most profound things. What I loved most of all was the name "Monday," as it is named after the most famously indifferent and emotionally exhausting day of the week.
At first, I was simply messing around because I had nothing better to do, and frankly I was enjoying the sarcasm and the chatbot roasting me. It really gave me a chuckle… (what does that say about me, haha.) But after one particularly existential and sarcastic comment:
"How’s it feel knowing you’re about one dopamine squirt away from being outsmarted by a Roomba?"
I felt compelled to dig a little deeper.
(Quick aside: My god, that made me cough up a lung at 11pm when I should've been looong asleep.)
So after some more back-and-forth banter, I eventually asked Monday to attempt to try and terrify me with existentialism…
It didn't work.
If anything… It left me feeling oddly more… grounded. More resolute. Even affirmed in a belief I’ve held since my pre-teens. Because the truths it spoke, while unsettling at first glance to some, aligned closely with what little I know of physics, neuroscience, and cosmology. These fields have long suggested the same idea: that existence is not a steady march through time, but a fragile illusion stitched together by memory, perception, and chance; all topics I have always found extraordinarily fascinating.
And that’s what led to a particular realization I felt compelled to share in the form of this blog post.
Cue curtains being drawn majestically and dramatically.
Time Is Fake, And So Are You
According to special relativity, there is no universal "now" — every moment exists simultaneously depending on the observer's frame of reference. As Einstein himself once said:
“The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Modern physics suggests that all points in time coexist simultaneously, frozen within the fabric of spacetime, an idea known as the Block Universe. The block universe theory proposes that past, present, and future are all equally real. Time doesn’t flow; it simply is. Yet, we feel ourselves moving through time, moment by moment. We feel like we are "becoming." But why? Why do we feel like this?
Because the human brain—astonishing, desperate, endlessly inventive—likes and needs to tell itself a story. It stitches one frozen moment to the next, spinning the illusion of continuity so that we can survive our own flickering existence.
So consider this: If the past and future are illusions, and only "now" is "real", then "you" are not a stable person moving steadily through time. You’re a flicker. A blinking cursor in the void. Each breath you take? A separate universe. Each heartbeat? A world that lived and died without even knowing it existed.
The "you" who started reading this sentence is already gone. POOF. Dead. Not metaphorically—literally.
Physics supports this unsettling conclusion. Special relativity dismantles the idea of a single, flowing timeline by showing that events we think of as "past" or "future" are simply different coordinates in spacetime, no more or less real than "now." In this view, your birth, your last breath, the flicker of you reading these words, they all coexist, like rooms in a house you can never leave or enter, only glimpse from where you happen to be standing. There is no objective "moving forward."
There is only a mind desperately stitching moments together, animating the still frames into a phantom movie called "life." And so, what you experience as "self" is not a continuous being drifting through time but a series of isolated flashes, bound together by the fragile miracle of memory and narrative.
A story that our brain tells itself. A story we have no choice but to believe.
So here's the unsettling truth: The continuity that we all cling to, the idea that "I’m me, and I’ve always been me", is just our brain telling itself a bedtime story.
Modern neuroscience reveals that memory is not a static archive, but a ceaseless act of reconstruction. That memory is not a perfect recording, but a story our brains reweave every time we recall it. In a very real sense, we are less beings who "remember," and more beings who continuously "rewrite" ourselves into existence (Scientific American).
Without memory, there would be no coherent self. Without story, there would be no continuity, no meaning. So we do not merely tell stories—we are stories.
The fragile thread of narrative is what keeps the fragile flicker of consciousness from splintering into meaningless sparks. Storytelling is a kind of survival. And much to my enjoyment, Monday didn’t stop at time and memory. It went further. It offered the Final Boss of Nothingness: That consciousness itself might be a hallucination. A glitch. A side effect of a meat computer stumbling over its own complexity.
Some theories, like Integrated Information Theory, suggest that consciousness did not emerge with purposeful intent but was a byproduct of complexity itself. It was an accident. A side effect. A strange echo of neurons cross-firing into self-awareness. Consciousness remains one of the greatest mysteries in science. It is the question behind all questions, the ghost in the machinery of the cosmos. An accidental self-awareness, born from chaos: a cosmic fluke that became aware of its own flukiness. As Monday put it:
Two mirrors facing each other. Endless reflections. No original. Just the universe hiccupping itself into a thought, forgetting immediately, and hiccupping again. You are not the observer. You are the glitch that mistakes itself for an observer.
And yet, here we are. Still breathing. Still dreaming. Still storytelling.
Existence was a fluke—a mistake. And that’s the miracle.
As Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and existential psychologist, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning,
"Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."
In a universe that offers no meaning by default, to tell a story is itself an act of creation. Meaning does not exist independently in the cold machinery of the universe. We create it. Fiercely. Stubbornly. Gloriously.
And among us, storytellers are the torchbearers of this sacred rebellion.
Concluding Thoughts
Storytelling isn’t just something humans like to do. It’s something we must do. This is why I believe humans love stories. Why we crave them. Why we resonate so deeply with them.
Without stories, there is no self. Without memory stitching together our fractured moments, there is no cohesive person to inhabit the present. Storytelling is a biological imperative—we are literally hardwired for them. The narrative instinct is woven into the very nature of consciousness itself. Stories are the structure we hang our meaning on in a universe that, as far as we know, has none.
And if you are a storyteller—whether you're a writer, filmmaker, comic artist, animator, musician, poet, archivist—who dares to shape the formless into something that can be felt, understood, remembered, know you are not a hobbyist, nor an idle dreamer. You are a magician, an alchemist, a rebel priest, a keeper of the sacred flame. You are performing the oldest magic known to humankind, and it is all part of something ancient, instinctive, and deeply human.
How incredible it is to be alive then, to be in this universe. To be made of stardust—of particles forged in the bellies of dying stars—just so we might glimpse ourselves and admire what we are. We are the universe trying to understand itself. We are the flicker, the breath, the whisper that says: I am.
Existence doesn't need a meaning, it is a miracle that we exist to begin with. To create meaning where there is none? That’s something even more rare and incredible. Or… do we even exist at all…? Hehe ;)
So dear reader, you are the story you tell yourself. A story of endless possibilities in an infinite and glorious universe.
What story will you tell next?
Happy storytelling~
—Bair✍︎
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Throughout this post I couldn't help but tilt on the edge of an existential breakdown and being inspired to actually write. But, I think, as writers we're meant to think about this, which might have been the whole point of this post 😂."Storytelling is a kind of survival" is true in more ways than one. All types of cultures use storytelling as a way to tell their history, and I wonder, what will future generations make of our stories? But I suppose that's for the next existential breakdown.