a quick note: This essay is the third installment of a quarterly series, a deeper dive into loneliness, polarization, and the need to belong. I’ve made this particular essay free for all. To access the entire series, I invite you to upgrade your subscription by becoming a paid supporter of the work I do here (complimentary subscriptions also available, upon request1 ).
We pulled into the school parking lot with time to spare. The radio clock beamed with admiration, revealing we had a solid ten minutes before drop-off began. A satisfaction rose in my chest.
But as I eased my way into the two-lane line that had already begun (seriously . . . what time do people actually leave in the morning to snag those first few spots?), a silver sedan zoomed around me with urgency. The driver proceeded to dart in front of us and put his car in park. WHERE WE WAITED FOR TEN MINUTES.
All the pleasure I felt from arriving early popped like Bubble Yum. I stared down the back of the man’s head, watching for some possible explanation for why getting in front of us was so gosh-darn important.
What emergency merited such ridiculous behavior? I seethed, and any shred of charitable thought stopped there. By the time drop-off actually began, my jaw was clenched tight, and my mind was convinced of the driver’s complete lack of character.
What a jerk…
I waved goodbye to our boys as they exited the truck and yelled, “I love you!” out the window—all the while keeping one eye on the car in front of me.
It took most of the drive home for my insides to settle down. My anger waned from bright red to fleshy pink, as I began to realize all the stories I had been playing in my mind about the man. I had not even seen his face, but one moment, one situation, one decision had painted my entire lens of his personhood. And the tale I told was anything but good.
The thing about being human is that we are always telling ourselves stories, aren’t we? Even when we do not realize it, stories make up the fabric of our days as we weave tales between us that may or may not be true. As Jonathan Gottschall writes, “human beings can no more give up narrative than we can breathing or sleeping.”2
Story is part of who we are.
But the tricky bit about stories is that we can get them wrong. Perspective is limited. Each of us has only one set of eyes, of ears, of experiences we have collected along the way. And while all these story-tracking devices are helpful in our desire to make sense of the world, too often we do not acknowledge where our storytelling falls short. As Geoffrey Cohen observes, we do not allow “room in our minds to imagine the complexities and contradictions of people.”3
Instead, we oversimplify the story. We reduce people to equations that say, “If person A did X, then he is Y.” We jump straight from a singular situation to matters of personhood and character.
If he cut me off in the parking lot, then he is an entitled jerk.
If she did not clean up her mess, then she is a selfish slob.
If she did not say “hi,” then she is rude.
If he was stoic at the funeral, then he is hardhearted.
While our sense of justice can be a good thing (and we should not ignore any cause for concern), when we let these little stories we tell about each other become reasons for why we pull away or elevate ourselves above one another, these incomplete narratives increase the distance between us. Story by story, we lose sight of what is shared. We forget how, in any given situation, each of us are at the mercy of many complexities, and no person can be reduced to a singular moment.
Because here’s what scientists have learned about predicting or interpreting human behavior: not much.
As Stanford professor Geoffrey Cohen confesses4,
“We don’t like to admit it, especially we scientists of human behavior, but we don’t know why people do what they do most of the time. Every situation is a unique and complex convergence of many forces.”
He adds,
“...assuming we know more than we do often does more harm than good not just in science but in life.”
Our storytelling always comes up short, to varying degrees, because every person is a unique web of personality, family, culture, experiences, beliefs, ideas, questions, health, wealth, wounds, geography, biology, and community—not to mention what we had for breakfast or what happened on the way to school. Without all the details, our internal storytelling is prone to error. It’s part of being human.
And before we let shame take even a toenail of space here, let me pause to say: We all do it. All of us are prone to what social scientists call fundamental attribution error (FAE), that split-second tendency to assume a person’s actions are indicative of his/her character rather than a product of a situation.5 Call it an assumption, a snap judgment, a bias—what we label the story matters less than our awareness of it.
We are all telling stories about each other.
Here’s the upside: while we may never know why the waitress gave us that look or what in the world caused the man to cut in line, we can begin to recognize the stories we are telling within ourselves and lean toward a posture of generosity. We can pay attention to the narratives that rise to the surface of our lives.
While these stories may not always be pretty, revealing things we didn’t want to know about ourselves, we can look at them with honesty and a posture of confession, trusting that humility invites us to be even more human. And as we look intently at the stories that surface, we can also learn to tell a gentler tale that does not excuse poor behavior but leaves room for the larger situation at play.
Since that day in the school parking lot, I’ve tried to re-imagine the story. Maybe the man thought he was later than he was. Maybe his boss was calling him, wondering why in the world he was not yet in the office so he did his best to get to the front of the line knowing he could not afford to lose another job. Maybe his kid was saying, “Beat 'em, Daddy!” from the backseat, and he decided to indulge his daughter and have a bit of fun.
I’ll never know. But what I do know is that leaving room for a wider version of the story has softened spaces within me that wanted to turn hard. It has helped me remain open to a more generous story that begs me to remember how God’s image inhabits the deepest, most sacred parts of us. All of us. Even in the school parking lot.
Imagining a more generous story helps us remain tender, especially amidst difficult situations and differences. It peels back the observed layers to consider what we have in common, the human experiences and emotions we share. Because in the narratives between us, commonality makes space for compassion, as we begin to catch glimpses of ourselves in each other.
Reflect
At the end of each essay in this series, I pass along a few question that are helpful to me as I process these concepts in real time and place. Here are a few follow-up questions you might want to ask yourself or discuss with a trusted friend:
What stories have surfaced within you today, as you’ve interacted with others?
How did those stories impact the way you viewed or related with particular people?
What might it look like to imagine some of the complexities that person might be carrying? How do the possibilities affect your posture?
Go Deeper
A quick note: In the latest Human Together episode (S1, E9), Brandy Wallner shares how stories have been instrumental in how she embraces curiosity and compassion—with herself and others. That conversation holds hands well with today’s essay.
Complimentary subscriptions are available to anyone who wants to engage with Human Together more deeply and more often. All you have to do is email sarah@sarahewestfall.com to request an upgrade—no questions asked.
I snagged this quote from page 7 of Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Up Societies and Tears Them Down (Basic Books, 2021). However, I will note that I liked his previous book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Mariner Books, 2013) a bit better.
Geoffrey Cohen’s book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connections and Bridging Divides (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024) was an incredibly heady but helpful book in understanding the social science research that relates to the topic of belonging. You can find particular quote on page 109.
Geoffrey Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connections and Bridging Divides (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024), pp. 129-130.
Fundamental attribution error (FAE) is a common term within social psychology, but I first learned of it through Geoffrey Cohen’s work (see above notes). However, you can find a simple definition and history through a quick Google search, if you want to learn more.
I try to remember life is one big play production so to speak everyone has a part to play. Some one has to play the jerk another the ungrateful someone has the sick part someone else is given the happy role another impatient but what does it matter there is only one part I’m responsible for and that’s me! My part is to be a child of God! I’ve only come to realize it this over the last couple of years as I’ve gotten older up until then the article you just wrote pictured me all too well! Always find your writings refreshing and very timely pretty soon I’m going to have to upgrade! God bless you!
I love this. Why empathy matters so much, I like how you essentially call this, "generous with our stories."
An author I gained a lot from gave us five questions to ask when telling ourselves a story:
1) what are the facts? 2.) what is our perception? 3.) what are our feelings about what happened? 4.) what does the gospel say about it? 5) what action (even if challenging or counterintuitive) does he want to help us take about it?
Definitely helped me a time or twenty!