Life Inside a Glass Box

How Stories Define Us, Trap Us, and Set Us Free

Imagine a box. It could be made of mesh, or cardboard, or metal. Useful. It keeps things together. Keeps them organized. It's very good for sorting and for helping you carry things around.

A good box isn't just a cat playground, or a good first-draft lunar rocket for an imaginative eight-year-old. It defines the space it occupies, sets it apart, and turns it into something you can understand.

Boxes are useful things, which is why you live in one.

I don't mean that your house or apartment is shaped like a box. I mean that your mind lives in a box.

The walls of that box define your mental space. It contains everything you can imagine, and excludes everything you can't—or won't. Beyond the north wall, you'll find concepts that are obscene or blasphemous. Beyond the south lurk ways of thinking about politics and economics that you find anathema. To the east lay sexual notions that shame or disgust you. To the west, ways of thinking about race, gender, parenting or other social concepts that repel you down to your toes.

And above and below, most dangerous of all, are the alien thoughts so orthogonal to your awareness that they don't even occur to you, except in your most speculative moments.

We all live in boxes that define our worldview. Our worldview tells us who we are, and where we fit. It allows us to operate in a complex world by giving us a shorthand for interpreting it. It gives us our range of available actions in any given situation. If we are angered, insulted, threatened, starving, betrayed, or faced with enormous problems (the boxes also define what those words mean to us), it doesn't just tell us what we may do, or what is ethical, it even limits what we might consider doing. Those things which lay beyond the box do not even appear, to us, as possible.

The Stories You Heard

Imagine if you lived your whole life on a space station in orbit, with no windows. Your only views of the world came through video feeds—news channels, for example, or webcams at airports. Your understanding of the world would be shaped by these video feeds. What they showed you would define the possible-worlds for you, and it is unlikely that parts of the world that they did not show you would occur to your imagination in any form which approximates reality.

Your box is like that. It is the place from which you view the world, and a place where you invent the stories that make sense out of what you see. And you care more about those stories—your worldview—than you do about what your senses actually tell you.

Don't believe me? I'll prove it to you:

When you look up in the sky during the day, you don't see a small, bright light moving across the sea of blue like a chariot of fire which will cycle round tomorrow for a repeat performance; you see an enormous fusion reactor, large enough to swallow the Earth hundreds of times over, that appears over the eastern horizon and disappears over the western horizon, every day, because the Earth itself is turning.

In other words, since you know better, not even your eyes can convince you that the things you plainly see are actually there. This uniquely human ability to fail to see what's right in front of your eyes because of overriding conviction, is one of the things that makes modern life possible.

The stories we tell about things are more important to us than the things themselves. Why would we expect differently? It is the stories we tell that form the bedrock of our cultures. It is story that creates our boxes.

These stories may be true or false—how you tell the difference is an epistemological question, which is beyond the scope of this article—but if they stick with you, they explain the world to you. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?

The Wrong Glasses

I once rented a basement apartment from a family with small children who were endlessly fascinated with the different accouterments of my living space.

Their family was British. They ate good solid English food—Yorkshire puddings, hot tea, sweet blackcurrant juice, scones, coffee, and fish'n'chips. They ate from the kinds of matched sets of dishes you expect from a middle-class household with roots in the British merchant class. They watched a lot of television, played a lot of board games.

My cultural heritage, on the other hand, is South American and a mishmash of European and American Colonial. I have a spice cabinet that makes Captain Ahab's fishing tackle box look underpopulated. I had dishes mostly bought from roadside souvenir stands from years of taking road trips all across the continent (I don't think there were two glasses that matched). I drank iced tea without sugar, coffee without cream, and carbonated fruit juices. And I owned thousands of books—so many that I was able to use the shelves to turn the 600sqft basement studio into a fully-partitioned four room apartment.

During the summers, when I helped teach the kids to read, it drove them to distraction that so many little things were wrong about my apartment. Every time the oldest would sit down at the table to practice Dr. Seuss, he would look at the souvenir drinking vessel I served his juice in, then fix me with very serious eyes and say “Dan, why don't you have real glasses?”

When you're four years old, this is the kind of thing that bothers you. The rightness of the world is set, in your mind, by the things you're familiar with. They create a story. They define your box. And here I was, with a set of drinking glasses that didn't fit in his box, making him aware that there were things in the world that did not fit in his box.

And it felt wrong to him. It actually hurt him (he never said so, but you couldn't mistake the look on his face). His brain—like yours—needed its box. It held onto it for dear life because, without that box, it did not know what kind of story to tell his mind, and that can cause real, genuine, physical pain.

Have you ever gotten a weird pressure behind the eyes when you're trying to learn something new? That's your brain resisting ideas that fall outside your box.

The Vanishing Box

Of course, no adult in their right mind would attach moral value to the choice of drinking glasses the way that four-year-old did. Your bar glass doesn't threaten my reality. Both you and I are far beyond that. We've grown up, and to grow up is (partly) to push the walls of your box outward. A four-year-old finds it disturbing when someone has different drinking glasses from the ones he knows in his house. A ten year old doesn't think twice about differences in dishes, but might get profoundly uncomfortable when confronted with music that's too highfalutin or too crass or too loud compared to the standards he's accustomed to. A sixteen-year-old can't believe that other people don't understand or believe the religion he knows is true. A twenty-year-old can go red-faced with rage that someone he knows to be a good person votes for the wrong party.

Each one of them asks “How could anyone be so blind?” And, then, a few years later, they look back at their younger selves and wonder the same thing.

However it happens, at some point, most of us realize we live in a box. We run into enough people, with worldviews different enough from ourselves, that we learn a little humility. We start to prize the state where our growth drive (the drive to seek novelty) is in balance with our drive for self-protection (which pushes us defend our box), and we call a more settled approach to balancing these drives “maturity.”

And a mature person understands his box, and knows how to decorate it, and use it as a base of operations. Right?

What You Don't Know

You might like your box. You might think it suits you just fine. The invisible walls may not feel like limits at all. You may not even see them, or recognize them when you do. Instead of a structure, they are a prison, containing you within the bounds of the acceptable.

That may not be such a bad thing. In theory, your box may be exactly right. It might have the exact perfect vantage on the world. Your understanding of human nature is correct, and in accord with reality. Your morality might be properly optimized for human flourishing, or aligned with the will of God.

But what if it's not? What if you're standing on the edge of an ocean, and there are hills you can climb to see farther? What if taking a boat beyond the sunset might show you something different?

What if you're curious? Or bored?

Well...that's what stories are for, right?

The Illusions of Decadence

Today, we are have more stories, told better, than at any time in history. Take a book off the shelf today, take a glance through a few pages. Notice the quality of the writing, the competence of the craft, the vividness of the metaphors. Watch a movie today, notice the flawless camera technique, the intimate acting styles, the sophistication and self-awareness of the dialogue, the dramatic push that propels the story.

The luxuries of prosperity and the pressures of commerce have delivered us access to the whole world's stories. Even more importantly, they've delivered us permission to dive into those stories. It's almost our duty.

The most fantastic thing about stories is their ability to show us new worlds, give us new experiences, and introduce us to new ways of thinking. Sometime early in our history, perhaps even before we were homo sapiens, we entertained each other with stories around a campfire. We drew pictures on the walls to show each other what to hunt, and to seek the gods’ blessing to help us find the animals. We drew pictures in the sky and gave the constellations names, and made each one a character in an epic struggle between the day and the night, and the endless chase of the zodiac.

And with new stories, new civilizations rise. The stories and the civilizations chase each other. A culture will coalesce around a storytelling tradition, and then that culture's history will solidify that same tradition. The stories become the chronicle of the people, whether the stories are true, legendary, mythical, fictional, or a blend of all of these.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Exodus, The Odyssey and The Illiad, The Aneid—each of them the mythology of the founding of one of the world's great cultures. All of them windows into the minds and concerns of people as alien to us as the most remote uncontacted tribe on the planet today. And yet, each of them are ancestors of our language, literature, and patterns of thought.

Stories can expand your glass box—or they can shatter its walls entirely. They can let you live in other boxes for a while, and see the universe from a whole different angle.

They can. But sometimes they don't.

Prosperity is a three-edged sword.

Edge one opens the world in front of it. Less poverty and more variety means more time to enjoy the options on offer.

Edge two is sophistication. When choice proliferates to the point where taste becomes an issue, taste becomes the thing people compete on for social status. Judgments of taste form communities, and these communities set their own standards. Over time, these taste profiles acquire a tinge of morality.

Edge three is social flattening. When prosperity comes to a culture, the meat that formed culture begins to fall from its bones. Traditions that used to ensure survival now feel quaint, or comforting, but they no longer carry meaning that governs the way people think. The people begin to share more and more of their worldview—and consensus strengthens and polishes the walls of glass.

One possible result is what we see around us today: the blockbuster mentality. It's not so much an appeal to the lowest common denominator as it is a philosophy that looks to entertain everyone and offend no one. Maximal appeal is its directive—safety its watchword. A good blockbuster delivers thrills, danger, suspense, escapes, romance, and dazzle...but it does not offend. It does not upset, except in ways that are acceptable within the box. It will never threaten the box. It avoids, at all costs, anything that might scratch the glass walls.

Another result is one we also see around us: homogenization. When every story is written (or edited) by someone with a college education, and a middle-class background, whose sophistication has allowed them to travel while still inside their glass box (either literally, or virtually), you get technically competent stories—but they never scratch the walls. They may carry compassion, or judgment, or commentary, but they never break beyond the box.

Homogenization and blockbusters work together to project a world on the walls of our boxes. It's a world filled with variety, with flash, with dazzle and novelty. But, underneath, it all feels...ordinary. There's a sameness about it. A lack of freshness that once we could easily find. To pick an exceedingly trivial example, consider the difference between Star Wars and The Force Awakens.

Star Wars is a story that can only be told by someone with a hunger to spin dreams of a larger world. It has stakes accessible to an average person. It has almost no intellectual or moral substance, no message to convey. It doesn't have “something to say.” It just wants you to live with its characters, to come into its world. It's desire and hunger and wonder strung together on a thin thread. It wants to connect with you. To take you on a journey. To show you worlds that you might not want to live in, but that you love to visit. And when you're done, there's something about you that's different. You carry pieces of it with you. It becomes part of your culture. Your box gets a little bit bigger.

The Force Awakens has “things to say.” Things everyone agrees with. Girls can be heroes too. Working for imperialists is bad. Fascism is bad. Underdogs are good. Powerful people are all damaged and petulant and empty. It has an adventure, it has great spectacle, it has a break-neck plot. But it takes no risks. It is all very, very safe. It spreads its adventure load across a diverse cast so that everyone will have someone to identify with. It takes you for a ride, but not for a journey. It shows you nothing you do not already know. It is big, and loud, and full of spectacle...and it is absolutely safe. It even has obvious flaws to keep the audience safe. It knows that these targets (like Starkiller Base) will give the audience a safe object for their irritation—or the audience won't notice them at all. Either way, the box wins.

Breaking Out of the Glass Box

Lifting weights and running every day are painful, arduous, irritating experiences. Life on the couch is a lot easier. It may not be healthier, but “healthy” doesn't get most people up in the morning; ambition does. The ambition to be seen as healthy. To be around to know your grandchildren. To live long enough to walk on the moon. To have a body that's powerful and fit and doesn't limit your options.

And, with a little bit of habit, and a little bit of courage, the pain and bother of working out can become a pleasure in itself. A challenge to rise to. A sport to engage in. A kind of fun that opens the world up in front of you. A treadmill will stop being enough—you'll want to run in the neighborhood, in the woods, on the beach. Weights will stop being enough—you'll want to climb that cliff face, scramble up that tree, haul in the rope lines for a sail boat.

The couch keeps you locked in its loving embrace, but at the cost of vitality.

The Glass Box is your mind's couch. Pleasant. Comfortable. Filled with certainty. Free from threats. It shows you the good guys and bad guys. It shows you justice and injustice. It reassures you that, no matter how good or bad the world is, you at least understand it.

But, like the couch, it lies. And—even worse—it's dreadfully, dreadfully dull.

Novelty—the kind that makes us grow—brings the world alive in our heads instead of just before our eyes. It entails discomfort. It requires discomfort. Passions, pains, exotic philosophies, unusual perspectives, and new ideas are the forest and beach, the cliffs and trees of your mind. Pain, challenge, upset, discomfort, they're part of the deal, just like they are when you get off the couch.

But they're more fun. And the stories are better.

So, next time you find yourself listless at the sameness of it all, irritated that you're bored, look around for a different story. Look for an older story, from an era where people didn't think the same way you do. Look for a foreign story, or a story out of genre. Look for an indie story that's had fewer fingers on it than something that came through a media conglomerate.

Dare to inhabit the worlds of people you don't know. People you could never be. Dare to understand, rather than just observe and judge, the murder feuds of the Yanomami, the catamite culture of the ancient Greeks, the titanic political machinations of the Padisha emperors, the ecstatic drugs of the visionaries of Karintera. Discover what it's like to really believe a religion, rather than just enjoy it. Indulge in every vice and perversion, from the decadence of Captain Bligh's Tahiti to the cannibal rituals of the Marquesas people.

The world has an astounding breadth, and it changes our minds as we walk through it and meet it on its own terms, just as it changes our bodies when we scale the cliffs ourselves, rather than bringing a ladder.

Your mind is in an invisible prison, but inside that prison are stories.

And stories are to prisons as a hammer is to glass walls.

Why not take a swing?

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If you’re looking for fresh stories, you can find my novels, short stories, visions, and dreams (along with some how-to books and literary studies) by clicking here.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out my Unfolding the World series, a history of the current geopolitical storm rocking our world, its roots, and its possible outcomes.

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