Storytelling is fundamental to humans. Some say we exist because of our stories. Take the stories away and something essential goes missing. The world might still be here in some physical sense, but the human world—meaning, memory, identity—starts to thin out.
What pushed me down this line of thought is a book I’m currently reading, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. He’s often described as a great American writer. I picked up the book to see for myself.
There’s a scene where an old man lives like a hermit in a broken-down church, surrounded by cats, telling what may or may not be his own story. And then, almost casually, he veers into something much larger—storytelling itself.
He says, in essence, that the world we think of as solid—stone, flower, blood—is not a thing at all but a tale. That every story contains all other stories. That the tale has no fixed home except in the telling, and so it can never end. “All tales are one,” he insists, “rightly heard.”
Later, he goes further. The narrator’s job, he says, isn’t to pick a single path but to make many out of one—to keep the story alive against the listener’s suspicion that they’ve heard it all before. Because storytelling isn’t just another category of human activity. It’s the category that contains everything else. “All is telling. Do not doubt it.”
It’s a striking idea. Not just that humans tell stories, but that we live inside them.
And he’s not alone in thinking this way. Philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Alasdair MacIntyre have argued that we make sense of our lives through narrative—that identity itself is stitched together as a kind of ongoing story. Others, like Friedrich Nietzsche, pushed the idea that what we call “truth” is often just an interpretation that’s hardened into habit.
You don’t have to buy the whole philosophical package to see the point. Take history. Consider something like the Lighthouse of Alexandria. We know it existed. We’ve pieced together fragments. But the lived reality—the voices, the arguments, the pride in building it—that’s largely gone unless it was told and retold. What survives is a mix of stone and story, and mostly the latter.
So yes, storytelling is more than a nice-to-have human trait. It’s how meaning gets made and passed on.
But here’s where it gets a bit more grounded.
Look at the stories we’re fed daily. Social media is full of them—success stories, “secrets” from athletes, entrepreneurs, celebrities. From tennis stars to Formula One drivers to business gurus, each with a neat narrative arc: struggle, breakthrough, triumph. They’re designed to pull you in. And they do. But most of them are a bit like candy floss—impressive at first glance, not much substance once you get into them.
They don’t really tell you how your story works.
Because your life already has a narrative running through it. The problem is, many of us don’t choose it—we inherit it or drift into it.
You see it everywhere. Someone who keeps telling himself he’s getting old, running out of time, unsure what to do with his money. That becomes his story. And like any good story, it starts to organise his decisions.
Zoom out and you see the same thing at a national level. In South Africa, one dominant storyline is about oppression and aftermath—what came before, what followed, and what still hasn’t been resolved. It’s not that it’s untrue. It’s that it becomes the story, the one everything else gets filtered through.
And it’s not unique. Every culture carries some version of a heavy narrative—struggle, suffering, uncertainty. Go back to ancient myths and you’ll find the same themes on repeat. Humans don’t just tell stories—we tend to tell difficult ones.
So where does that leave you?
If McCarthy’s old man is even half right, you don’t get to opt out of storytelling. You’re already in it. The only real choice is whether you shape the story or let it shape you.
That applies whether you’re writing for a market, posting something online, or just running the quiet narrative in your own head.
Because the story you tell—about your work, your limits, your future—doesn’t just describe your life.
It starts to become it.
