We Need a Bigger Story
We Need a Bigger Story
Self-narrative can provide certainty amid turbulence
When I was a kid, I thought the adults generally had it all figured out.
I didn’t know how businesses or hospitals or schools or microwave ovens worked, but some adults somewhere did. I didn’t know how to buy a home or why we had consistent electric power or how to calculate taxes, but some adults somewhere did.
Amid the uncertainty, I had stability. I didn’t have to worry about those things I didn’t know because I trusted that the grown-ups had it all under control. They knew what to do and how to do it; my ignorance wasn’t a major source of alarm.
Then I became an adult.
As I progressed in my adulthood, I came to realize that many adults (including me) don’t have it all figured out. Some of the things I took for granted became a bit more fragile in my mind, simply because I became aware of the fact that adults too are flawed.
Things do still seem to work most of the time, which perhaps is a testament to our ability to build and deploy expertise at a level that’s typically good enough. Experience can also bring wisdom, and that’s helpful. We also generally figure out ways to organize and solve problems and that’s great.
Yet the veneer of stability that I enjoyed as a child—that comfort coming from trust in the adults around me—has transformed. I’ve become fully aware that some aspects of life and society aren’t guaranteed and that some important aspects of what we often take for granted perpetuate largely due to consistent efforts by people who care. If they stop caring, or if enough of them stop caring, some things would fall apart.
Sometimes that happens. When that happens, we’re left with things ranging from bad customer service to faulty products to weak institutions and more.
But what hasn’t changed for me since I was a child is the strong sense that I’m part of a bigger story.
The angle from which I view that story has changed—I don’t see myself as the star of my own show nearly as much as I did when I was young—but the presence of the story itself has remained. It’s a story that I’ve recently come to see as an important source of resilience in a turbulent world.
A Resilient Worldview
There’s something about how I see the world and the unfolding story I’m in that gives me peace and stability—even though I know flawed adults like me are at the helm. It’s a worldview that for an embarrassingly long time I didn’t think about, much less name and explore.
It’s what some refer to as a Catholic worldview. The poet Dana Gioia articulated some of what this means in an essay that he wrote about a Catholic approach toward art in general and literature specifically (hence his reference to the “literati” and “Catholic writers” in the quote below). Regardless, Gioia’s description generalizes broadly. He wrote:
There is no singular and uniform Catholic worldview, but nevertheless it is possible to describe some general characteristics that encompass both the faithful and the renegade among the literati. Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things. Indeed, all reality is mysteriously charged with the invisible presence of God. Catholics perceive suffering as redemptive, at least when borne in emulation of Christ’s passion and death. Catholics also generally take the long view of things—looking back to the time of Christ and the Caesars while also gazing forward toward eternity … Catholicism is also intrinsically communal, a notion that goes far beyond sitting at Mass with the local congregation, extending to a mystical sense of continuity between the living and the dead. Finally, there is a habit of spiritual self-scrutiny and moral examination of conscience—one source of soi-disant Catholic guilt.
(Dana Gioia, by the way, is the older brother of Ted Gioia, who consistently writes excellent articles at The Honest Broker.)
What makes such a worldview resilient? A few things stand out to me:
It’s not naïve. It fully acknowledges that human existence is difficult and that suffering is part of the deal of being alive; it’s part of the story.
It provides a vehicle through which suffering can be purposeful. If nothing else, our suffering can sanctify us and if we strive to bear our suffering well, we can provide an example and source of strength to others. Therefore, we can always find purpose and meaning.
It orients one toward something bigger, something that matters more than what you’re doing, what you’re facing, or even who you are. When everything else is falling apart, there’s something solid to still grip tightly.
It embraces community and reinforces connections through rituals, norms, and values. Resilience requires inner strength, but it’s also a team sport. We need each other to help make sense of things, and we need each other to help us through basic acts of kindness.
The stories we tell ourselves matter.
I once worked on a research project in which we analyzed a couple hundred letters that executives wrote to themselves as part of a leader development program. We analyzed the letters primarily in terms of the content of the executives’ “self-talk.” Namely, we were curious about how these executives talked to themselves in these letters and whether the degree to which their tone was positive or negative connected with how other people perceived them.
We found that some executives engaged in self-talk that was constructive and encouraging in nature. Others were harsh and negative toward themselves. And those who were constructive in their self-talk tended to have more favorable ratings of their leadership by others. Given the design of the study, we couldn’t say for sure that the ways in which the executives talked to themselves definitively caused them to be more effective, but there are reasons to suggest such a link might exist (for example, experimental studies have demonstrated causal links between types of self-talk and changes in attitudes and behaviors).
In a sense, self-talk is a type of story that we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Does one need to be Catholic or religious or even a theist to have constructive self-talk? No.
People with all types of beliefs about those matters can certainly find ways to preserve their sanity and bounce back from hardship in part through how they engage in sensemaking, which includes the stories we tell ourselves about what it all means.
And yet it’s compelling to notice the holistic way in which the Catholic worldview provides a perspective that’s built to withstand the very worst of what life can bring. At the very least, it seems that we can all benefit from seeing ourselves as playing a meaningful part in the big story of humanity.
It’s a story that includes both joy and pain, intelligible choices and vexing mysteries, but it’s one in which all of it matters—and one that balances both our agency with our helplessness. We must continually write the story of our lives while trusting that it will all come together in the end.
In the words of Saint John Henry Newman:
God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.
I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.
Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.
Still, He knows what He is about.