Your Life is Not A Story
If you’ve watched even a handful of Food Network’s 500+ Chopped episodes, you may have noticed a trend: While the show is ostensibly about cooking with weird ingredients, many contestants come with a dramatic backstory. Of course, this is not unique to Chopped. Whether it’s Queer Eye, America’s Got Talent, or The Voice, trauma seems like a requirement for appearing on reality TV. For Chopped, it could be a life-defining memory of escaping Communist Vietnam on a raft at a young age, or being bullied as a child, or maybe their mother fought cancer 18 years ago — she’s fine, by the way.
You may rightfully ask: What does any of this have to do with a cooking competition?
These stories aren’t just incidental to high-stress, high-stakes competition, they’re brought out intentionally. Contestant testimony confirms they are coached by producers to spill their deepest secrets. The logic being: the more the audience knows about a contestant’s life struggles, the more emotion they feel when said contestant wins or loses. Then, humbled and excited about their victory, the winner contextualizes their victory within the logic of their particular conflict, as if winning a reality TV show has validated their life-long struggle.
Of course, we know this is done because reality TV is just like narrative TV. It needs to be structured into a palatable story so that it provides the audience with emotional catharsis. Walter White and Tony Soprano need an arc, so too does a Chopped champion.
But are there hidden ramifications to narrativizing “reality?” Unlike fictional TV, reality TV presents itself to its audience as “real.” Every Breaking Bad fan knows there’s no real Walter White. But not every Chopped fan knows that contestants are coached to share their life stories, nor are they aware that editors work to craft a narrative. The problem arises when we start to consider the extent to which we look at our own lives through the lens of narrative.
To some extent, narrativizing our lives is inevitable. As scholar Ib Bondebjerg writes (summarizing the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio), “our sense of self and our ability to interpret the world are based on emotional and narrative structures… [Narrative structures] are part of the very fabric of our mind and imagination.”
What is a midlife crisis but the realization that your life’s story hasn’t reached the second act you wanted it to? As more and more people try to sell their personal brands, selling your story becomes interchangeable with selling yourself. The “about me” section of your personalized website is likely more valuable than the yawn-inducing sterility of your bulleted resume.
We’re all enchanted by the prospect of James Gandolfini’s son playing a young Tony Soprano in the new Sopranos spin-off film, not because he’s an accomplished actor, or even that he looks that much like him — the narrative of the son of a legendary actor honoring his deceased father by recreating his most memorable role is a story too good to pass up. Especially if he nails it.
Most troubling, however, is the notion that this narrativization of reality leads to people framing their struggles and life goals in warped ways. The world craves stories of people climbing up from poverty to attain wealth and success. The arc is attractive, dynamic. It also speaks to our own dreams: Wouldn’t it be amazing if your life-long challenge was capped off with a huge payday? But we can ask, conversely: Would it be unbearable to think that if you don’t have some Slumdog Millionaire moment, your suffering would be for naught? When we’re all preoccupied with the narrative of our lives, we’re all racing to have our suffering redeemed through some catharsis.
The narrativization of reality popularized by reality TV may lead people to invest too much in the value of specific events in their lives. Landing a job, getting accepted into a certain college, or having the perfect wedding is seen as an opportunity to reframe past suffering through a cheery, new lens. Essentially, “My suffering is an investment that will pay out dividends when I achieve a meaningful accomplishment.” Although this may be great for the people that do achieve those goals, for those who don’t, it’s not only a question of disappointment, but of profound existential dejection.
The thing is, real life is not structured like a story. There are no arcs. Life is messy, and things happen for no apparent reason. If we think of our lives as grand narratives that will end in heroic triumph or validating introspection, we’re bound to be more and more narcissistic, and more and more disappointed
Suffering is not the second act to your inevitable fairy tale resolution. Suffering is simply suffering. Your suffering does not ennoble you, nor does it make you a moral exemplar. It just hurts.
