Epics vs. Lore

All this made me think of Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a sentence that has found its way onto Pinterest boards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs, as though it were a consoling affirmation of The Power of Storytelling. It is not.

The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,” whi... See more

What makes us so good at remembering epic poems and long-running TV series is that long-term human memory is particularly adapted to retaining stories. As Kendall Haven writes in his 2007 book, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, “Human minds…rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understandin

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Then it hit me: lorecraft is a natural and adaptive intellectual response to the automation of vast swathes of managerial/leadership functions, and organizational processes. You end up doing more of what the machines don’t.