In 1988, PBS released a series of interviews by Bill Moyers called The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell. In the six-part series, Campbell explores the evolution of the myth and its role in society over millennia. Leaning on his decades-long investigation of Eastern and Western philosophies, religions, and mythologies, we learn about the meaning of various symbols, the commonalities between traditions, and why myths are crucial for understanding our nature.
In the final episode, Campbell paraphrases the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, saying life, as it is lived, seems a chaotic collection of events. But in retrospect, appears to have an order, a consistent plot.
Retrospective Coherence
From philosophy (phenomenology, epistemology) and psychology to branches of behavioural economics, retrospective coherence has been a fundamental tool to help us make sense of the past. We tend to project logical order on past events, creating a coherent narrative out of chaos and randomness. Like myths, it helps us learn from experiences and find meaning, but at a cost.
Our memories have a high degree of fallibility; they are only ever reconstructed. In the process, consciously or not, elements of a given event are edited out; incongruous details are blurred or omitted to form a more fitting narrative. As anyone who has dabbled in therapy knows, the more we explore an individual memory, the more imprecise it becomes—like trying to focus on a single water vapour in a cloud of fog, the closer we get, the more dizzying and challenging it is to see. And while we can consider this post-hoc moulding an evolutionary gift, it sets a tantalizing trap: distinguishing between the composer and the composition.
In his book The Black Swan1, Nassim Taleb refers to this as the Narrative Fallacy—our tendency to create stories to explain randomness. Innate in us is a desire to find patterns where few, if any, exist. While this cognitive bias functions for past, present, and future events, it’s yet another one of our meaning-making machines.
We are desperate to find order in chaos, and we rely on two approaches to transform the events of our lives into something resembling a melody.
The Composer’s Mind
We’re all just versions of Charlie Puth, taking the knock on the door, the ring of the phone, the breaking of the glass, and the bark of the neighbour’s dog, subconsciously recording those noises and piecing them together to create the song of our life. Without hesitation, our brains connect independent events to establish a narrative.
What’s paramount is acknowledging that, while we may not be the maker of a given note (event), we can control whether it’s included in our final composition. Not simply included, but also its quality and relationship to the other notes of our song. This comes down to two compositional paths.
We can throw on auto-tune, manipulating the pitch of the disparate events to fit a particular key, a quality that establishes a feeling. It’s probably the option that’s most natural for us. You’re 60, and you look back on your life and think, “Of course, I had to get fired from that job, move cities, and go out for coffee with the person who would become my co-founder and introduce me to my wife…” It’s passive and second nature.
Or we can contextualize. The musician Jacob Collier points out that there are no wrong notes. Instead, we have strong and weak choices. Composing in this way is much more present-focused. It’s recognizing what it is that stands before you. And whether or not you can grasp the degree to which the given event will affect your life (we often can’t), you play your way through it, consciously navigating those strong and weak choice, until, at the end of our life, you arrive at the final measure of music. And only when the composition concludes can it get played back.
Whether auto-tuning our past or consciously composing our present, what is integral is understanding that we remain the artists of our mythology. And the art rests not simply in our path of choice but also in recognizing that we’re always composing.