Our Default Story Structure Is Literally Killing Us

Things get worse and worse until they become unbearable — at which point a great victory occurs, and then everything miraculously becomes wonderful.

At the start of the "third act," things reach a crisis in which everything appears to be headed for irreparable harm. Then, by some combination of luck and courage, the good guys win and the day is saved — and things often end up better than when they started, because we’ve come together or resolved some longstanding issues.

I'm just not sure if this structure is good for us — because we really seem to believe that making things worse and worse will somehow result in a dramatic improvement, via some fantastic reversal.

Hollywood and most authors have programmed us to think in terms of vanquishing evil, rather than the slow, unglamorous work of fixing messed-up systems — whereas the problems we’re facing right now are very clearly systemic.

In real life, it turns out, trauma often feels a lot like… stress. It feels like exhaustion, like having no spoons, like a form of depression. I keep thinking about descriptions of people who survived the Great Depression and World War II, and how uptight and drained they seemed to anyone who hadn’t lived through those things.

Put another way, when I say, “I’m stressed,” that makes me the hero of a story that could have a triumphant ending. Whereas being traumatized and freaked out feels less “thrilling” and requires more self-awareness.

Americans grew comfortable being an empire. Fixing any of this is going to require long, exhausting work.

If it's a culture war, then there has to be a winner and a loser. There must be battles and campaigns and an eventual crescendo, in which one side utterly crushes the other. And anyone who’s been watching the culture war over the past decade knows that’s not what’s going on — instead, it’s more like a war of attrition, in which endless fake controversies exhaust all of us.

So what if, while the shitheads fight a culture war, we have a culture movement? What if we throw a culture party? What if we joyfully create culture that strengthens our own hearts and and gives us courage while gradually changing how everyone sees the world? What if we make a world where art is indistinguishable for mutual aid and community-building? What if we imagine better structures to replace the terrible ones we want to tear down?