Your world has no story
Story once told you what the world was and where you stood in it, and nobody told you when that stopped.
Happy Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary!
Years ago when I was lying in bed at half post one, thumb moving between three apps and a paused series, I kept asking myself: What is the world, actually, and where do I stand in it? I tried to find the answer on YouTube, blogs, etc. A literal question, that a catechism could answer on the first page. I had consumed hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of self-help, lectures and opinion. But I could not have told you, in one sentence, what I believed the world was for.
That is an actual condition, and it is much worse than distraction. See, when you are distracted there still is somewhere you can try to get back to. But this condition is closer to you moving through his days animated but unmoored, going to work, coming home, consuming, sleeping, without any account of reality underneath the motion, because nobody taught him one. And the noise never stopped long enough for him to notice the gap.
Most men go through life as complete zombies, always finding distractions in music, video’s, social media, or worse: adult content… All of it deliberately engineered to keep you from having an inner dialogue or thoughts of your own.
An old beekeeper handed me a story, once, without meaning to. He was 92 years old at the time, and has kept bees his whole working life.
He was standing beside the hives with me in a light rain. He told his story in a way you would state a fact about weather: Never work a hive rushed, they will notice you are stressed or scared.
It might seems like a very obvious thing, but what he telling me was a warning for reality: A colony of bees that reads my mental state before I opened the hive, or said a word, and punishes my wrong state accordingly, every time, without malice and without exception.
Since he told me that story I have not opened a hive without first making myself completely calm. The story was not a fiction, or metaphor, but a report on how reality behaves, delivered by a man with 70 years of experience and no reason to lie to me about it.
That is what story did before it became monetised content. It was never primarily entertainment. It was the mechanism by which a people told its young what the world was, who made it, what happens in it, what happens after it, and where the listener himself stood inside that account.
Holy Scripture read aloud in a house that believed it was true did this. The Holy Mass, older than any nation now standing, does this every single day, placing the man in the pew inside the actual narrative of a creation, a fall and a rescue, not as metaphor but as the report of what is real.
A grandfather’s 10 minute rant did it at a kitchen table. A parish feast day did it several times a year, tying the calendar itself to the account, so that a boy learned the shape of reality from the shape of his own village’s year without ever being sat down and taught it directly.
None of these were trying to distract your attention. They were trying to tell you the truth about where you are, and a man who has been told that, even once, carries an orientation a man who has only been entertained will never have, no matter how many hours he logs.
Take that account away and you do not just become a man who simply lacks entertainment. You become something closer to what the old stories themselves warned against, a body still moving through the motions of a life with nothing behind the eyes directing it toward anything in particular.
You wake, consume, produce, consume again, and none of it accumulates into a life you could describe as heading somewhere, because heading somewhere requires a fixed point behind you and one ahead of you.
And both of those come from a story, not a busy schedule. A man in that condition is not lazy and he is not weak. He has simply never been handed the things that used to be handed to every man before him as a matter of course, an account of the world he could stand inside.
I know one place that still tells a true story every day of the week, and even those who attend it often fail to grasp the mechanism that guides them through reality.
