Story

This past week, there was some kind of big football game. (Just kidding - I love football.) But this particular game is always surrounded by hype not just for the action on the field, but for a performance at halftime and all the little breaks in between. 

We can't wait to see the commercials. 

For the second year in a row, there's a company who got extremely high ratings for its commercial. Not because of the company - it doesn't really have any more market share than anyone else, I don't think. Not because of brand loyalty. Not because the commercials were especially well-done. 

But only because this company's commercials parade out a series of celebrities from mostly the 90s and 00s. And everyone loses their mind over it. 

I have actually seen comments - "I loved that commercial. Did you see all those stars in it? Did you see so-and-so? So good." 

So good except...absolutely no actual content at all. 

These ads don't tell stories. They don't create narratives. They don't offer anything substantial. They are literally just a parade of celebrities making appearances to music, and the culture applauds it. 

This is one of the troubles that we have in our current culture. 

We aren't invested in story any more. We aren't here for narratives. We don't want to get drawn into things. We want to just be shown shiny little snippets of things we already like and get a quick hit of dopamine and move on with our lives. 

That's why political division is so high. We don't think about things. We don't put anything in context. We have headlines and talking heads and they feed us what already agrees with our pre-existing persuasion and we clap and get fired up and say that of course, that's the best thing ever, but there's no content. There's no story. There's no connection to the lives we're actually living. 

It's why we're all on our phones even when we're in the company of others. Whole groups of us, together, but looking individually down. Craning our necks to see anything but the person right next to us. Because persons are multi-dimensional. They require context. 

You know we don't even say, confidently, that we like someone any more? Even a friend, even a close friend. We say we like someone and then someone else mentions something they don't like about that person, and we're like, "Well, I don't like them that much." Because we're afraid to like something that's not shiny enough for the person next to us, lest we find that we like something that's unlikable. Or lest we find that context is difficult. 

Friends, context is difficult, but we are not shiny people. We are characters in a grand story, and when you separate us from our story, we are all villains. Every one of us. 

We need context. We require narrative. Our lives are built toward something, toward telling something, and it can't just be as simple as, "Oh my gosh, that gets my dopamine running!" No, we have to learn to engage again...and to demand engagement. 

We have to stop telling companies their ads are good just because they show us the things we like. We have to demand better of them. 

We have to demand better of ourselves.