Storyteller

What is your purpose in life?

When you wake up in the morning, what got you out of bed?

What is humanity's purpose? What do we do? What is it that we do best?

We do many things for many reasons, but in a lot of ways, we find ways to tell stories. It's what sets us apart, right? The ability to pass on knowledge from one generation to another. And knowledge is really just distillations of stories. I think telling stories is just about the only thing we do.

What is a story? You might say a story is a recollection of events, like a video. A story has a beginning, middle, and end, with characters that experience events and respond to them. Right? But what counts as a story? A book is a story. A movie is a story. Someone telling you about their life is obviously also a story. Is a painting a story? Paintings can certainly tell stories. It's pretty straightforward to see stories in most art. Besides, the best art are the ones that tell a story, regardless of your medium. If it doesn't tell a story, why should someone spend their time looking at it?

What about everything else? Is math a story? Is science a story? Maybe not the numbers themselves, but their mere existence is arguably a story. After all, we created math right? The grains of sand on the beach will always be just grains of sand on a beach, but we are the ones counting them and ascribing things like mass and density to them. Why do we do these things? Why do we care? We're telling stories. We are just inventing stories for the things we see around us. That's the only thing we do, at the end of the day. And then we pass them on.

We hope that our stories will be helpful in some way to the next generation. Parting words, graduation speeches, onboarding documents, textbooks. All stories. All made up. All hopeful that they will be helpful to whomever picks them up and decides to learn from it. We don't ever know what will or will not be helpful. We just hope.

What stories are you writing? Literally, like this blog post, or less literally like your daily job. What do you hope will be useful to whoever decides to look at it?

My primary skill tree unlocks have been in software development and other related technology fields. How will I leave behind a story? What is the purpose of a tool? Is it to help people write their own stories, or does it carry meaning on its own? Maybe a tool is a story of the pain points that motivated its creation. A hope that you'll be able to solve problems better and faster than the storyteller did.

Digital art can tell stories more literally. But what do I even have to say? What stories can I tell? Something from my life? Something I learned? Something I felt? That one's gonna be a hard one. When should I tell my stories? Who should I tell them to?

I'll take my time finding my story to tell. But we're all storytellers. It's stories all the way down.