Time to be Comfortable with Chaos

Image Source: https://www.ted.com/

Tyler Cowen (in his Ted Talk found here) tells his audience that he believes we as humans should be more comfortable with living in the chaos of our lives. He contends that we too easily fall back on the simple structure of a story to talk about something that happened or in order to justify ourselves. Mr. Cowen cites a book by Christopher Booker, which states that there are only seven types of stories: monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy. tragedy, and rebirth. Cowen claims that these seven story archetypes dominate are how we most commonly recall events, talk to others, and justify our decisions. The problem with this, Cowen claims, is that stories take a lot of information and proceed to leave some in and take some out. When stories act as these kinds of filters, they tend to leave the same things in and essentially boil down to the same aforementioned story archetypes. This means that we are, in a way, telling ourselves the same stories over and over in different contexts. In this way, we are no longer teaching ourselves about the complexity of human interaction and society, but are simply reinforcing the same motifs of good versus evil, conspiracy, and so on. Mr. Cowen expresses another concern that stories do not encompass spontaneous order or diversity of social interaction, and thus lose a sense of reality. Another problem with thinking too much in terms of stories is that we can only fit so many stories into our heads at any given time, so eventually, we begin to use the same stories for multiple purposes. This perpetuates a sort of mental laziness that leads us astray as we deceive ourselves into thinking that our lives fit these motifs perfectly. When this happens, we begin to perceive the importance of events differently, and no longer consider things as just the result of change or coincidence. Stories convince us that we know what we are talking about, and often times this leads us to make the worst mistakes. Fewer mistakes are made when we accept that we do not know anything. Also, because stories are such an easy way to gain information and we are naturally attracted to them, things like advertising or political campaigning can pull us in with a good story in order to manipulate us and use the story for their own purposes. 

In order to get his point across, Tyler Cowen (ironically) uses many anecdotes of people using stories too often in their lives and the consequences it has. For example, Cowen talks about how he tells himself the story of how important his job is in order to get out of bed in the morning, and how this is dangerous because this motif can be used even if the job is not important or necessary. However, the anecdotes are important because, as Mr. Cowen said, stories are a social connector and are an easy way to share information in a short amount of time. Mr. Cowen said that the use of stories will never go away, but we should try to live our lives a little more erratically, without tying it to stories. The strong use of anecdote to support Tyler Cowen's list of reasons also serves as a form of ethos. By using examples and stories of times when each of these reasons is appropriate, the entire argument that Cowen is presenting seems more credible as a result. This is because we as people will more readily accept information when we feel as though there is evidence to back it up and explain it. The use of logic in the talk was at times hard to follow, as Mr. Cowen would seem to, at times, trail off onto a different point before returning to his original point. Because of this, it is occasionally hard to determine what the point actually was. However, the examples used are logical and support his point when they can be correctly matched to the point they are referencing. Cowen's talk also is effective in making the audience believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that they think. The evidence is supported in such a way that a general audience would be able to connect to one of the points presented, and thus would be more inclined to believe the other points he was making. 

I personally connected to this talk because I often find myself processing memories and emotions in my mind as if they were a movie or story being played back to me. However, what I find is that by doing this, I am putting my entire experience into these default categories that a story can be instead of accepting how random and irregular the entire event was. This leads to over analyzing and overthinking and making something out of nothing. By making your memory into a story, you are also making yourself try to write an end to the story before it has even happened. Thus, you confine yourself to the end you set for yourself and are not as accepting of change and variability when the real thing unfolds. I picked this Ted Talk because I related to not being able to separate my own experience from those seven common themes, and wanted to see what Mr. Cowens suggested as an alternative.