Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening.
Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall.
Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This implies that, without stories, we would die—or perhaps devolve to a lower form of life, a pseudo-life. Whatever the actual effect, it’s worth worrying about as we switch from a primarily textual culture to a primarily screen-based culture.
Short-form video—the medium of TikTok, Instagram reels, and a not insignificant portion of Twitter/X and Youtube—does not lend itself to stories. (Ironically, Instagram “stories” aren’t stories at all; they’re little fragments of emotion, information, and image, blurted out sporadically). The closest these video platforms come to narrative is allowing someone to upload an AI slop video about anthropomorphic families of food being boiled alive together or permitting a narrator to retell an urban legend in brief. For the most part, scrolling and short-form video specialize in moments of sensation, divested of any narrative context. Their dominance sends us into uncharted territory as a civilization.
Things have changed so much that being able to focus on an entire movie for two hours seems like a sign of mental health, adjacent to being able to attentively read a novel. As the “attention economy” continues its inexorable shift toward short-form video, the ability to pay attention to anything longer than a blurt seems commendable. Meanwhile, Hollywood has experienced a massive decline, with the percentage of adults going to movies every month plummeting from 39 percent in 2019 to 17 percent in 2025.
The situation with reading isn’t any better. Daily reading for enjoyment has declined from 28 percent of the adult population in 2004 (not exactly worthy of a blue ribbon) to 16 percent in 2023. The average American adult reads at a seventh- to eighth-grade level—though it should be noted that 54 percent of the adult population reads below a sixth-grade level. More fundamentally, our ability to simply pay attention has drastically decreased: Today, 47 seconds is what we can manage on average on a screen before switching our focus to something else.
My fellow decline wallowers likely find none of this surprising. But how does it impact our ability to absorb and internalize narrative? And how, without the ability to share long-form narratives, can we relate to other people? Fritz Breithaupt of Indiana University, author of The Narrative Brain, has stressed how essential narrative is to sharing experience, building a sense of social cohesion, and processing difficult experiences. It seems that without narrative, or with only fragments of narrative, our ability to perform these essential cognitive tasks will collapse (if it hasn’t already).
Psychologists have long stressed that stories are fundamental to human cognition. When we walk into a room, we don’t see all the objects in the room laid out clearly and distinctly; we see what the stories we’re telling ourselves lead us to see. When a high school student walks into class, he or she doesn’t hone in on the scotch tape dispenser or start inspecting the paper clips for no particular reason. They see drama: personality clashes, friendships blooming and withering, fresh crushes and sworn arch-enemies. This might suggest that storytelling partially blinds us to aspects of reality—but, on the contrary, telling stories doesn’t merely reinforce this habitual mode of cognition. It helps make us aware of the stories that we’ve been telling and, potentially, change them. You become aware of a wider variety of potential narratives, moving beneath the unconscious surface of everyday life. You realize that you have this invisible organ, the imagination, that can operate either automatically and mechanically or consciously.
By engaging in storytelling, by learning to use our imaginations, we become aware of reality as a story enfolding us. Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University has gone so far as to liken us to characters trapped in a story (existence), unaware that we are secretly its authors. You may take Kripal literally or figuratively, but, either way, his notion has a curious savor of plausibility. The world is made of stories, and the quality and coherence of those stories reflect well or poorly on the world we’ve made.
Even before we had written narratives, we had storytellers (often in a priestly or shamanic role) who stored and recounted all the legends of the tribe. The storyteller was not only the imagination of the tribe, but its memory, since imagination is helpless without a store of memories to draw on. This primordial storyteller was crucial to building up a coherent and habitable picture of the cosmos. He or she was, in the words of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
But our technological society treats writers and storytellers with maximum disrespect. The tech stewards of our world see writers as strange and unserious—all while busily appropriating their work to train AI. (Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and others have publicly raged against copyright law.) Hence, more and more of the people who might’ve fulfilled the shamanic/priestly function of the storyteller are trapped in various purgatories and limbos. The advances publishers dispense have grown ever slimmer, and the vast majority of published titles fail to crack 5,000 copies in sales. In the worst case, would-be writers might be distracted and hypnotized by the same short-form content as the rest of us. In the near best case, they might be raving to a readership of three people on Substack.
The situation is dire. It resembles the 18th century, the so-called “Age of Reason,” when there was a mass epidemic of poets going mad. The poets Williams Collins, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, and John Clare all struggled with severe mental illness, the latter three being institutionalized at various points. One young poetic prodigy, Thomas Chatterton, committed suicide at only 17 years old. Most prominently, the great poet and visual artist William Blake was considered “mad” at around the same time. Blake was left to fulminate in his poetry against the demonization of imagination, which was widely contrasted with reason and considered a destabilizing force. But at least the names of the poets who went mad in the 18th century are still known to us, while those who succumb to the short-video haze today may well languish in a state of total obscurity, perhaps having never written a word.
Now, we’ve been flung far beyond the bounds of even the oral storytelling tradition, into something completely new in the annals of human history and even in human pre-history. Does short-form video, by denying us continuous and coherent narrative, cast us back into a state of being curiously reminiscent of the pre-Stone Age? Does our technology ultimately loop us back around to the australopithecus? Without storytelling, memory deteriorates. And without memory, without anything to anchor us to clear coordinates in time and space and explain how we’ve come to inhabit them, we go feral.
In Christopher Lasch’s 1979 work of social and cultural analysis, The Culture of Narcissism, he argued that this would happen. As narcissism became ever more the order of the day, our memories would evaporate, and we would cease to be anchored in a sense of history. Instead, we would engage in a constant struggle for psychological survival, trying to convince other people to see us the way we would like to be seen. All life would be reduced to a desperate performance. This would mirror the brute struggle for survival among animals, displaced into the realm of the psyche.
Short-form video content and social media scrolling fulfill Lasch’s prophecy in an excessively literal manner. We devolve to animal form, yet the jungle we inhabit is technological. We find ourselves in the position of a startled rabbit, caught in the middle of an open field, locked in a state of hot panic and abject misery, constantly conscious of potential predators lurking nearby. Marshall McLuhan famously said that technology would unite the world into a “global village”—which sounds nice, until you read McLuhan’s appraisal of that village: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” This is a perfect description of the online ecosystems we inhabit. The panic mill continues to churn.
So, what is the antidote? I think we can turn to that dystopian American classic, Fahrenheit 451, for a hint of what could redeem us. At the end of the book, the former book-burner Guy Montag finds himself in a wandering community of people who all busy themselves with memorizing books. Essentially, they become the books.
Memorization and “rote learning” are generally demonized in modern education, often with good reason. But imagination is dependent on memory; it is the storyteller’s toolkit. It is easy for us to look at cultures in which memorization still thrives as a practice (for instance, Quran memorization) and dismiss them as completely backward, lacking in freedom and opportunities for individual expression. But the truth is that we err excessively in the opposite direction; without memory, we lack material on which to exercise our imaginations. Memorizing poems and stories is, in the end, the ultimate antidote to all TikTok-induced brainrot. It helps us not only absorb narratives, but live them.
You need to become the book.