Your Life Is a Story, but Who’s Writing It?

Advertising, Entertainment & the Power of American Myths

Your imagination is one of your mind’s most powerful and active tools, but frequently when the topic of imagination comes up, people limit their thinking to stories like The Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter, artists who create huge beautiful messes, or we think about little kids pretending that they’re superheroes. But our imaginations are so much more than that.

The human capacity for imagination has created a nearly endless expanse of incredible beauty and technological marvels, but when it’s not wielded with care, it can also turn our world into a nightmare. Imagination isn’t something that just evaporates once we leave childhood behind, it simply changes focus and contains a different cast of characters.

American Myths

It wasn’t until I moved away from where I grew up near Hollywood California that I began to see how profoundly the entertainment industry there had influenced my view of the world. Movies were a huge part of my youth, and even though I knew full well that the people on screen were actors, I was still deeply impacted, and elements of the stories influenced how I thought about my life, myself, women, men, and all of the world around me.

The power of a well-told story is astounding, and movies are one of the most engrossing and effective vehicles for conveying that form of information. When they’re done well, they contain beautiful dialogue, exquisitely moving music, beautiful imagery and people, and powerfully effective story arcs. These tools can be used to teach, influence, inspire, and move people to tears, laughter, or anger. They are one of the most immersive and impacting forms of storytelling.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater. –Roman Polanski

But even at their best, movies can only present a small sliver of the truth. Even if a movie is “based on a true story,” very little of what we see reflects the reality of what occurred. There’s no context. It’s just a highlight reel, and there’s a reason for that. Movies are products, and products are designed to sell. The Hollywood products that attract the most money are the ones that are the most entertaining, not the ones that are the most honest.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. -Mark Twain

I think that quote sounds clever, but when that notion is put into practice, it frequently produces troubling effects. It’s easy to brush this off as “come on, they’re just movies,” but that right there is part of the problem. We absorb them without really paying attention to what they’re teaching us and how we’re being influenced.

Even fiction influences reality

Just to be clear about that heading, fiction can influence our perception of what is objectively real, but it cannot alter what’s real. And that might be a “yeah, duh!” statement, but that’s generally not how people are oriented. We tend to think that what we see and feel is a reflection of what’s actual, but it’s well documented that our impressions can be an absolute departure from what is objectively true, and they frequently are. Because of this, it’s so important to be mindful of what we’re allowing into our awareness — and it’s not just the topics that movies and the media are presenting, it’s how they’re presenting them.

Something that always stands out in movies for me is the compression of time in a story. We’ll watch months or years pass by in 90-minutes only seeing the most interesting and memorable highlights. We watch Daniel LaRusso or Elle Woods go from being a beginner to having all they need to become a celebrated success in just a few minutes. Montages are a great tool for storytelling, but the compression of time and the elimination of context they impart is found outside of movies as well.

It’s always comical to me how award ceremonies have a “Best New Band” category where a band that’s been around for a decade or more wins, and all the hoopla makes it sound like they just formed a few weeks ago. And we this distortion of time and effort dozens of times a day on social media where everyone’s lives look like a non-stop love-fest of awesomeness where young, beautiful, and healthy people never stop hiking to remote locations just as the sun is going down.

When “harmless stories” turn violent

In 2014, a disturbed young man made a video in his car before going on a murdering spree the following day in Santa Barbara, California. I’m not including a link to it here because it’s disturbing, but in it, he declared that the action he was about to carry out was his righteous retribution for the insult others had enacted against his manhood.

In the video he said:

“For the last eight years of my life… ever since I hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desire… all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection… and sex… and love to other men, but never to me. I’m twenty-two years old and I’m still a virgin—I’ve never even kissed a girl.

You denied me a happy life, and in return, I will deny all of you life. It’s only fair.”

What Elliot Rodger did in Santa Barbara was dark, ugly, and tragic. But where did he get the idea that he was entitled to such a specific type of experience? How did he come to the conclusion that the absence of this apparent entitlement was evidence that he had been cuckolded by life?

I’m using Elliot as an extreme example because looking at extremes helps us to more easily orient ourselves to the range of what’s possible. Movies, social media, and advertisements didn’t make Elliot do anything, but the cultural myths that they promote and help spread contributed to what happened.

The story of you

You might’ve heard the idea that who you are is the sum of the 5 people you hang out with the most, and while I think there’s truth to that, it’s also true regarding the stories and cultural narratives that we hang out with. For this reason, it’s so important that we take care regarding what we allow into our circle of informational influence.

Your life is a story that you get to write, but if you don’t navigate that awesome opportunity with mindfulness and intention, the world around you will do all that it can to write it for you. For its benefit, not yours.

Whether it’s the news, social media, or entertainment, we are profoundly impacted by the stories that we are surrounded by. They influence how we perceive the content of our lives, which influences what we choose, and what we choose is then given shape in the world through the actions that we take.

The story of your life matters. Profoundly. And the kind of story that it is today and that it can become in the future depends entirely on how you're defining what you're choosing to focus on. Something that precious deserves the utmost care and attention, so be mindful of who and what you let influence your story. 🙂

Until next time, be kind to yourself, to each other, and venture fearlessly into the awesomeness that is your life.

A question for you...

In your own life, have you noticed yourself being impacted by the sort of reality-distorting influences I mentioned above? If so, what do you do to reduce their negative effects? I’d love to hear about it in a comment below. 👇🏻