Your life is not uninteresting, it just lacks storytelling
“You’re good at storytelling”, a friend said to me today.
2021, South Korea
Sitting across the lunch table in Korea, Mayank and I quipped that nothing ever really happens to us. Our life is utterly boring. Adding to the injury were main character stories others recited with grandeour. How lucky / happening their life was, filled us with angst.
That year, I started to write a post (which I never finished), titled “Your life is not uninteresting, it just lacks storytelling”.
The group at Samsung had a birthday tradition. For every birthday, all of us cramped on the floor of the apartment, sat as eager audience while the birthday boy recited interesting stories of their life.
Given that this was an all boys group with hardly a few poeple in relationship, the most interesting stories always were around girls or drinking. You could correlate the attendance in the party to how much a person was outgoing. For a senior happily reciting their encounters, the room was full and rowdy. For someone who didn’t indulge in relationships, the room was smaller and talked quietly about gaming or trips.
10 birthday in, one could tell that a dynamic had been set. Having stories of girls was a necessary requirement for others to believe you have an interesting life. The tradition made people feel worse than better on their birthdays. You could see the birthday boy excited to tell a story of a work conflict, or a college trip, lose his enthusiasm seeing the response.
The pressure of youth and not fitting the storyline didn’t allow us the time to stop and wonder if that’s what an interesting life is.
This experience started a search. A search for more interesting stories, so that our lunch talks and birthday get togethers are not full of despair. Interesting stories could only come about from an interesting life, I hypothesised. It must be impossible to feel good about life if interesting things weren’t happening. For how can could one change how they feel about their life without changing their life itself?
3 years later, attempts to live an interesting life has led to a more boring one. But I’ve learnt one thing - perhaps it’s possible to have interesting stories, without having an interesting life. It’s possible to re-arrange the words of what has happened to you and make it sound hopeful, or hilarious, or tragic however you wish to interpret them. You don’t need stories of sky diving, or travelling the world, or clubbing, or going on multiple dates. You could still tell stories of work, or food or a conversation. And as long as the words follow a rhythm and there are not too many filler words, the story would sound compelling.
So what did I do? I filled pages of google docs with small everyday incidents and conversations, sometimes going a bit beyond to make them funnier or tragic. I wrote and re-wrote small stories of my life. The time I misheard a song’s lyrics, the time I had a slip of the tongue in public, the time I sent my salary back to my company. The time I couldn’t do a sum sitting in an auto, or the time I got a gold medal for being a substitute in a chess match.
Over time, something changed—I started feeling better about my life. I began to see that plenty of fun and exciting things happened to me. And "fun" took on a broader meaning, no longer confined to the myopic view of the birthday group.
I recently came across a line that takes the pressure off living an interesting life and instead shifts the focus to simply becoming a better storyteller
तेरी जीत से ज़्यादा किस्से तो मेरे हार के हैं।