The fear of challenging our stories

“People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their hearts, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anyone would take it seriously.”

Yuval Noah Harari

I’m reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari (who apparently meditates 2 hours a day and is in silent retreat for 3 months every year; which may explain his greatness). One thing he talks about is storytelling as a way to make sense of the world and create a sense of meaning.

I often think about the First World War and the incomprehensible horror of its trench warfare. According to http://www.theworldwar.org, during the first 5 months of this war, 4 million men died or were wounded. These numbers are unfathomable. At some point, you would think the military leaders would take a step back and conclude: this is complete and utter madness. Let’s press pause. Let’s find another way. So why didn’t they? Hariri puts forth one theory in his book: once we have made so many sacrifices due to an imaginary story, we cling to it even more. How could military leaders possibly go back to mothers, children and friends of the countless dead and tell them they died in the name of a horrible fiction? A story where the horrors of this warfare were justified; that somehow there was glory and sense to countless deaths just to gain inches of ground on a muddy field. That’s impossible. The fiction has to be sustained, to justify what has already been sacrificed. This is referred to as the “our boys did not die in vain syndrome.”

Leaving the horrors of the first world war aside, we can learn from this in our personal lives. Perhaps there is a relationship, or a career, that you have invested time and energy in—10, perhaps 20 years. You are unhappy. You feel depleted, dissatisfied. But you do nothing. Why? Because you are afraid. You are afraid to face the fact that you have spent many years buying into an imaginary story; making a lot of sacrifices to sustain the fiction that that particular career, or that one person, was worth it. Surely, all the time invested cannot have been in vain? Yes, it certainly can. And once we break free, and look back, we may think: “What the hell was I thinking?”