We are our stories
Philippe Beaudoin · June 28, 2026
“I hurt.” “I am happy.” “I want to visit Paris.” When the character of your favorite novel says something like that you either believe him or you don’t. It depends on what you read before.
If the character just spent an hour crying about his lost girlfriend and then calls his parents to say “Yes, mom, I am happy,” you don’t believe him. In your heart you feel: “He’s lying to his mom. He’s performing happiness. In reality he is sad.”
You are using the words of the novel to write a story about the character. “In reality, he is sad.” Is the story of his inner life, invented by you.
Why do you do that?
Because that’s what we, humans, do all the time with each other. We observe the people around us, invent stories about their inner lives, and confirm or correct these stories repeatedly. Often by watching people act in a way that matches our invented stories. Sometimes by validating these stories with common friends:
— “X is still sad about the breakup isn’t he?” — “Yes, yes he is. He hasn’t eaten a proper meal in a week.”
We do this when we read a novel because we do it in real life. But why do we do it in real life?
Because if we weren’t doing it we would fail at social life. These stories are true in a very important way: they are predictive. Because we imagine X to be sad we can predict how they will react if we mention their ex-girlfriend. We can predict that they may welcome a hug, or a space to cry and reminisce without being judged.
These stories about the inner lives of people around us have another important characteristics: they are parsimonious. They explain a lot in a few words. Instead of imagining “X is sad” we could keep the full record of the events that led to him being sad:
“X’s girlfriend went to visit her friend in Japan. She had a long talk with her friend’s mom and realized she wanted more from life. Late one night she called X and cried over the phone. She told him that he was a good person but sometimes two souls were not meant to be together.”
All of this is true too, but it’s too much. There’s a simpler story that seems to be almost as predictive. A story that seems to be almost universally applicable to any person that would live through these events: “X is sad”.
A mathematician would call “X is sad” a model of X’s inner state. There’s another image I prefer:
The map is not the territory.
I find this expression beautiful. Haunting even. The map, this thing that can turn a trip from a chaotic exploration to an intentional journey. The territory, the landscape one is actually walking on. Both real, both important. But the map only ever capturing an approximation of the territory.
The stories we tell about each other’s inner lives are the maps that allow us to journey intentionally through the landscape of society. But they are not the territory.
So what is the territory? What makes up our inner lives? The nerd that I am used to have two answers. Intellectually I said: “I am just a machine, bound to follow the chemistry of my biology, the electric signals of my neurons.” But I was holding another story. A more mystical map of myself that I dared not talk about at parties:
“I carry a special inner light.”
It felt unlike me to hold on to this. Too mystical, too unobservable, too unsatisfying. Yet I held on to it because I had nothing to replace it with. Because without it there was a big hole in my story-of-myself. And if stories hate anything it’s plot holes. So I filled mine with “inner light” the way others fill it with “soul”, or “God” or “the hard problem of consciousness”.
Today I think I may have broken “inner light” down to something simpler. I feel what’s special inside of me is not an unexplainable and unsatisfying mystical thing. It’s an ability to write a continuously unfolding story in my head. An ability to feel each word in that story. If the word feels right I’m satisfied, I can pause for a while. If the word feels wrong I can keep going and try to fix the story, or I can accept a little pang of insatisfaction.
In this story of who I am, I replace the mystical inner-light with an ability to write stories that feel right.
It sounds surprisingly mundane. Simple. Too simple almost. As if I was denying the realness of my feelings and, by extension, of the people around me. But I’m not. The map is as real as the territory. My feelings — the story that maps myself — are real. So are yours. I respect them as much as I ever did. More precisely, maybe, than I ever did. It’s just that the mystery I rely on is smaller than it used to be.