AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Really have to admire the forthrightness and plain language used here. That doesn't make it any less wrong. I don't think I'm being very fancy when I say that it's pretty obvious that an assertion like "life is pointless" does not have such a plain answer; people give their lives points, or not, in a rich and varied way. This is in the sense Telling the American Story, that is, people construct fictional narratives for themselves and their lives; and to that extent their life has a point, in exactly this fictional/narrative sense.
Note in passing: Telling the American Story was a kind of step towards nihilism for me, since it highlighted the fact that the ordinary stories we tell in conversation about our own actions and motives are social constructions which vary considerably across different cultures. Not nihilism exactly, but fictionalization of agency, making it seem less real.
The ethnographic (real) view of stories: people employ narratives to make sense of their lives, both pre- and post- action. Not only narratives, those are sort of just one tool in the toolbox. "I struggled to become a doctor because I wanted to help people" – there's a narrative, obviously not a complete story of a persons experience and also probably hiding other motives, but its a way of making sense. Note: I'm basing this primarily on Telling the American Story, which I found really eye-opening.
This is a sociolinguistic study of people's self-narration. I can't say I've absorbed the details, but I remember encountering it and being hit hard by the realization that these personal stories exist and can be studied, and they constitute some component of our real self and mind, despite being essentially fictional. I suppose this is a commonplace today.
The title is a bit of a pun, because it is both about specific, everyday stories told by Americans, and The American Story as a thing in itself, that is, the cultural narrative structure common to all Americans.
More specifically, the book first tells a meta-story from the author's own experience. She took some kind of academic position in the Netherlands and was surprised by several awkward conversations she'd have with her hosts. They would ask her, by way of small talk, why she was there, a visitor in a foreign land.
She'd respond with what seemed to her perfectly honest and ordinary reason – she had a career opportunity, and wanted to travel – but the Dutch would simply not accept this as an explanation. It seemed too crass, not the kind of thing a good person would say about themselves. Only a terrible grind would yank themselves away from their friends and family for something as unimportant as work, and if they did, they would at least be ashamed about it.
The point of this was not "the Dutch don't think work is important", but that they have rules for discourse that are quite different from those of Americans; different standards about what counts as good behavior, good motivations, and a good story.
It's not that big a revelation that the character of the self might vary widely from culture to culture; but the idea that these differences manifest in everyday narrative is kind of cool; because while character and the qualities of the soul are hard to observe, stories are right out there.