Stories- a special backup

When I grew up in my hometown, I dedicated most of my me-time in listening to the epic stories like Ramayana and Mahabharata. Without my conscious awareness, these mythological stories I heard added up an old-school personality as one of several sides to my character which sometimes expressed amidst the conversations and makes me sound weird like an old grandma. And it is not only me, all of us grew up by getting influenced by the stories. By means of watching, hearing, telling, plotting and fantasizing stories in our lives, we are intertwined with the stories in a lot more way than we think.

The story of stories is a long journey and I'm trying to convey them with the series of articles. Here is an idea on how stories serve as a backup for our species.

Photo by Robyn Budlender on Unsplash

To begin the story of storytelling, we've to compare the lives of our human species with other species and have to travel several millennia back to the past. If we look at the lives of other species, they are born with the special instincts that guide them throughout their lives. For instance, we often come across this news- when an elephant calf gets stuck in a pit or mud, the entire elephant herd would involve in the rescue mission. The feeling of empathy is ingrained as instinct in the elephants. Similarly, the tactics used by wild animals to hunt their prey is their innate instinct and no professional trainers are teaching them. From the day when the other species come to earth to till date, their needs, habitat and behaviour haven't changed much. While for us, the case is different. The cognitive revolution has transformed human lives to advanced levels and has made our lives more complex. The ape-man wouldn't have become a space-man if his brain thought only about his basic needs- food,water,shelter. If we take the life of caveman into consideration, the sole worry he had would have been about food whereas nowadays, a common man's life is filled with constant existential dread. He's to make conscious decisions in career track and in personal life wisely to clear the inevitable stumbling blocks that comes in his way. We, the poor species are not endowed with the instincts to lead the complex lives we designed for ourselves. But we do created a backup with our own cognitive ability-fabrication of stories ,which guides every human being to lead his life in his way.

Let's further explore the part of stories in our lives in the upcoming series of articles