I have always been in awe of the power that storytelling has to shape the direction of our lives. I don’t mean the gather-round-little-children kind of storytelling. I mean the everyday stories we tell about ourselves and our surroundings, the stories that accumulate and come to define our realities. These stories aren’t always told deliberately. They accrete through gossip and observation and reputation, and in the past twenty years, they have coalesced in people’s telling of their lives on social media.
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I love social media. Not only is it a welcome distraction during life’s many dull hours, but it’s also a world-historically essential archive of our recent past. Whether we prefer to admit it or not, social media is where our history lives now, and the platforms have shaped how that history is told.
Of course, the impact of storytelling on us humans and our identities predates the age of Facebook and Instagram. Thousands of years ago, we told our stories through epic poems. Today, our attention spans are short, and our stories reflect that, as do the types of events that we consider worth sharing and the aspects of our lives that we think hold lesser importance. As we’ve racked up our years on social media, we’ve started, without necessarily realizing it, to allow these online forums to shape the ways we talk about ourselves, our relationships, and our communities.
I began to really notice the change around 2013, when people I knew increasingly referred to themselves as though they, their partners, and their kids were public figures or perhaps owners of small companies. There were ups and downs in the stories I saw people telling, but the trajectory I observed most frequently was an upward one. Growth, expansion, improvement, overcoming. Vacations as burnishments to the image. Illnesses as stress tests, ways of ultimately proving fitness.
The profile-building games of the early years had given way to an era in which the logic of personal branding was simply how we talked about ourselves publicly. Progress, stability, the lure of the new and shiny—these are the narrative tropes of consumer capitalism, the way brands seek to inspire confidence and loyalty among their shareholders. I began to wonder if sharing our stories on social media was becoming a bit like communicating to our shareholders: “You can believe in us.”
How, exactly, has social media changed our stories? And how might we remake them yet again into something new and different?
Stories are everything, really. This has always been true, but it’s only getting truer, as the arts of persuasion and attention grabbing have come to take up such a huge part of our cultures and economies.
Before we share, we anticipate how our friends will react to the stories we plan to tell and, as if tuning stereo dials, adjust the emphasis to achieve the reactions we’re hoping for. As psychologist Dan McAdams has written, “Selves create stories, which create new selves.” Put another way: when we tell stories, we are metabolizing culture and constructing our own identities over time.
McAdams’s work belongs to a field of psychology called narrative identity, dedicated to studying the stories we craft about ourselves. According to theorists of narrative identity, the way we live our lives is inseparable from the stories we tell about them. In this field, the important thing isn’t so much what happens but how what happens is interpreted through stories.
What lessons are we learning from our feeds about what makes a good story? Or even, what makes a good life? Is the good life the ability to gather the family for a photo in which everyone looks, if not perfectly posed, at least convincingly happy to be there? Is the good life a quiet moment while sipping coffee and looking out the window at a peaceful snow-covered meadow?
These tranquil scenes are ones I’ve scrolled across on Instagram over the past decade and coveted for myself. “I want that,” I say to myself. It’s not quite envy, but it’s adjacent. That’s what’s beautiful to me, I think. That’s what constitutes a good time. If I could, I would do and be exactly that. With time, these images aggregate in my mind and form a composite of what a good life looks like to me.
Plenty has been written about the dangers of the “comparison trap”—how social media tricks us into a futile game where we pit ourselves against others. What concerns me are the stories on which the comparison is based. They’re what narrative psychologists call the “master narratives” of a culture: the stories that form the scaffolding on which all (or at least most) other stories are built. Master narratives are considered to be culturally determined; North American master narratives, for instance, differ from those found in other parts of the world.
I spoke with the narrative psychologist Kate McLean about what is perhaps the most ubiquitous master narrative in all of Western culture: redemption. “Master narratives are really helpful because they give us a guide: ‘Here’s what you’re supposed to do when you experience a trauma, or when you experience a setback,’” she said.
The redemption narrative is foundational to Western identity. It’s the very basis for the idea of the American dream and for the ideal of a meritocratic society: if you work hard, you can achieve anything.
