How Stories Last

Stories/memes use human to as the host to propagate, evolve and grow.

Do stories grow? Pretty obviously — anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow, they can change. Can stories reproduce? Well, yes. Not spontaneously, obviously — they tend to need people as vectors. We are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes… Stories grow, sometimes they shrink. And they reproduce — they inspire other stories. And, of course, if they do not change, stories die.

Compared to a statue of you, a story of you is the most enduring form of legacy.

But in the moment, it's the story that you tell of you to yourself (most often inside your head, not the Facebook variety) that's most delusional and hardest to get right.

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