I’ve in the past gone to some lengths to try to convince people that stories are the fundamental unit of human thought, but there are certain people who seem to never want to buy that idea. But I finally came across a tactic for explaining to people firsthand what I’m trying to say. The trick would be to simply ask them, “What would your life be like if there were no stories?”

It seems very clever in its simplicity. Partly because the very act of imagining, of asking “what if” forces you to enter into a story. You then start doing one of the fundamental processes of relating to stories, you try to project yourself into a situation. Even if you can picture some kind of scenario where there were no stories in your life, you would still be creating a story while you were doing this. And if you wanted to describe what it was like to somebody else, you’d have to use a story to do so. It’s a neat little trap.