Why You Should Start Living in the Past

Without these narratives—without developing a clear vision of the future we desire, of the values we want to adopt, of the identities we want to shed or step into—we are forever doomed to repeat the failures of our past pain. The stories of our past define our identity. The stories of our future define our hopes. And our ability to step into those

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We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more