Whenever anybody ever tells me a story, I know right away I’m being lied to, at least a little bit. It’s not that the person speaking to me is intentionally misrepresenting the truth or conveying a falsehood: it’s that all stories are lies. Stories want us to believe that human lives follow graceful character arcs; that new truths are slowly revealed, actions taken in response to those truths, conflicts encountered, and new insight either gained or not in response to those conflicts. That isn’t, I’m sure you’ll agree, what a lived life is like. Stories (mis)represent lives in idealized, smoothed-out forms. Most stories, anyway. Life is a great deal more impenetrable and rough than stories are. The one thing stories get right is that characters in stories have no free will. They have to do the same thing, over and over again, every time, or it’s not the same story. Characters have no free will, and as science is continually suggesting, neither d
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