“The view of London from Waterloo bridge is of a mess — an eccentric, unplanned, maddening, exhilarating mess.”1
Something about finishing my job, packing up our home, leaving our community, waving goodbye at Departures and moving to the other side of the world was mildly unsettling.
It’s exciting to move to a new city, but dispiriting to find oneself on the wrong end of London, having reached the other neighbourhood called ‘Hayes’. It’s beautiful to picnic in Hyde Park, but alarming to find oneself unprepared for the sudden downpour of rain. It’s exhilarating to embrace new opportunities, new adventures and new faces, but disorienting to be unemployed, inexperienced and disconnected.
What was instinctive becomes conscious, exhausting and confusing. How do I get to work? Which is my seat at the table? Who are my people in this community? Where do I fit in this story?
On a deeper level, I think this question haunts all of us. It encompasses all our deepest concerns: where we’ve come from, what the world is really like, why we’re here, how we should live, and where we’re going.
Where do I fit in The Story?
“This existential injury is the inheritance of both the modern Western person and the modern West itself.”
We’re obsessed with stories. Kids cry for bedtime stories; teenagers glue themselves to video games; adults binge Netflix or devour novels. The average TikTok user watches about a hundred short stories every day on that app alone.2 Even when we close our eyes at night and everything else ceases, we continue to imagine stories.
It’s hard to overstate how fundamental stories are. They are simply the best way we have to interpret and represent reality. You may think that you fundamentally navigate the world according to a list of propositions, like a computer processing zeros and ones. But if you are a human being, then that isn’t the case. And if that is the case, then I regret to inform you that you are not a human being. Telling stories is not optional, and nor is inhabiting them. The question, therefore, is in which story each of us will make his or her home.3
The story we inhabit determines a lot. Are empire and slavery natural or tyrannical? Was Jesus a legendary figure or the actual Son of God? Is sex casual or sacred? Is Trump heroic or destructive? Is that a baby or a clump of cells? Am I a divine image-bearer destined for immortality or just a really smart animal destined to be worm-food? (To give a few uncontroversial examples)4 There is an infinite number of important questions, and we are finite creatures. So we orient ourselves by inhabiting a story, not by ticking true or false on a never-ending list of propositions.5
Given these stakes, when the question arises of either (1) our place in The Story or (2) the nature of The Story itself, we are miserably disoriented. The experience twists our very souls, leaving us with a sort of existential dislocation — feeling out of joint with reality itself. We can ignore the question, pretending it is resolved by family, career, money, alcohol, or almost anything else; but only in the sense that one could ignore a physical dislocation: by remaining wounded, diminished, and fearful that re-injury is only a matter of time, until the cause (not merely the symptoms) is treated.
I don’t think it’s dramatic to say that, given the history and state of our culture, this existential injury is the inheritance of both the modern Western person and the modern West itself. The destructive pathologies of our culture (rampant tribalism, mental health disorder, the ‘meaning crisis’, etc.) are inextricably entangled with this fundamental disorientation. We have largely dismissed the story embraced by previous generations, and failed to replace it with one worth inhabiting.
Ultimately, there must be a comprehensive story. That’s no less obvious than saying there is a comprehensive reality. So what sort of story do you think it is? A tragedy? A comedy? A romance? Do you think it’s winding and nonsensical, or a masterpiece of poetry, symmetry and meaning? (Perhaps you don’t think much about it at all.)
I suspect most of us — including myself, regrettably — inhabit a story that is, on honest examination, incoherent; a story in which chapters alternate between existentialist tragedy and hopeful fairy tale. But that’s a topic for next time.
For now, what story do you inhabit? Have you ever been shaken out of it? Does it make sense of the mess of life? How sure are you that it’s true?
Thanks for being here. I want this to be helpful for people, and I think that’s more likely if it’s interactive. So if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, etc., please leave a comment.
This post is mostly an introduction to a new path for the next few posts on this Substack. Please share it with anyone you think would be interested in exploring the question of which ultimate story each of us ought to inhabit.
Simon Jenkins, A Short History of London, 2019, p.1
I don’t mean to disparage short stories, nor to pay undue respect to TikTok; only to point out that we continue (sometimes in shallow, inhumane ways) to crave stories.
By ‘story’, I essentially mean ‘worldview’, but with an intentional emphasis on the narrative-mediated, existentially-experienced way in which we encounter the world.
I choose these examples to emphasise the stakes. I don’t mean to imply that they are all equally difficult questions to answer well.
Don’t get me wrong: I like propositions as much as anyone.
It's like looking at a house from the back rather than the front. Instead of asking "what do I believe?" we might ask, "what is my story?" or "what story am I in?". It is that art form of story that best communicates what is transcendent - goodness, love, hope, and beauty - those attributes of God that we all crave, but find difficult to define. So it should be no surprise that God reveals himself to us in a collection of stories that form one coherent story from which we form our world view. We all want to be part of a good story, and we want our story to be a good one. While we all crave peace and serenity, the best stories are about conflict or struggle - we confront and overcome evil, or build something great; we want our story to be meaningful, but it can have no ultimate meaning unless its part of a bigger story.
Love this. I think it’s really interested (and maybe confronting?) to ask the next question: “What story am I living in?” And that may or may not be the *true* story; but the shape of my life probably tells me something about what story I think I’m living in—whether consciously or subconsciously.