A few weeks ago Will Storr launched his Substack, You Are a Story with Will Storr, and it immediately resonated with me.
Because of the way your brain has evolved, you live in a narrative reality.
How To Be a Story
The facts of our evolution as homo narrans, the storytelling animal, have deep and often poorly understood ramifications for our well-being.
Live your life as multiple characters in multiple stories
We don’t live one story, but many. The more identities we have, the more stable our psychological life becomes… The self is a mystery we’ll never fully unravel.
I have lived many stories… John Stokdijk, the cult member. John, the career accountant. Currently, John the Canadian retiree living in Mexico.
I have tried, with little success, to encourage others to share their stories in writing. And I tell a story of why I think this is important work to do. We need to harvest the collective wisdom of average and ordinary people in order to solve the metacrisis.
The story of John Stokdijk as a Metamodern Wannabe seems to be shifting to something different. In a sense, metamodernism is a story, a grand narrative, that has had a hold on me. But a new story has captured my attention in 2025.
Rather unexpectedly, the story is now John, a member of the Canadian Elbows Up Resistance to Donald Trump, (but this is not the whole story, far from it).
And Trump 47 is himself a story, one that I hope to tell soon in my own way.
I am interested in Storytelling for influence and persuasion but I am unlikely to take the course offered by Will Storr because I lack the time and financial resources. However, I may buy his book, A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of storytelling to lead, motivate and persuade. I probably will not have time to read it but I could quickly extract key ideas using ai.
And for anyone interested in my story, it is being told on my website, The Life of John Stokdijk - an average and ordinary life. You are invited to try the Random Post feature on the Home page. And you are invited to Ask Me Anything.
A requirement for all counseling students in my graduate program was to write our stories up to that point in our lives and then share them with each other. I remember the assignment being particularly fruitfull in several ways: 1) it added clarity to my family of origin dynamic and my part in it; 2) it provided an avenue to assess my life as I had lived it and make meaning out of my experiences; 3) the sharing of the stories required the practices of expressing vulnerability and building trust; 4) it enriched our understanding of the uniqueness of all of us. It was a fair bit of work and well worth the effort.