Story: In Silence and Strangeness

Story is a refuge in an increasingly fragmented tik-tok world.

I scroll past hundreds of words each day. Headlines. Captions. AI-spun fragments designed to be consumed in seconds. They land in my mind like static—loud, fleeting, gone.

Then I pick up a book I’ve read before. The spine cracked, pages softened by time. And suddenly the noise collapses into silence.

For a moment, I remember what it feels like to be inside a story instead of skimming one.

We live in an age where information arrives endlessly, instantly. Machines can spin language that looks like narrative, but resemblance isn’t the same as truth. A story isn’t efficient. It doesn’t compress neatly into bullet points. It breathes. It resists.

That’s the risk of our time—not that stories vanish, but that we forget how to linger with them. We start mistaking summaries for sagas. Snippets for wisdom. If everything must be scrollable, optimized, cut down to size, then story becomes just another unit of content, stripped of the silence and strangeness that make it matter.

But stories—real stories—are stubborn. They move at their own pace. They contradict themselves. They leave gaps. They meander in ways that don’t resolve neatly.

And maybe that’s why they matter more now than ever.

Because story is the opposite of optimization. It insists on time. It insists on stillness.

An algorithm can mimic a plot, but not the ache beneath it. The ache comes from memory, from the slow accumulation of experience, from the weight of being human.

I see this in my own writing. Some days I want to polish until every sentence gleams. Other days I want to throw words at the page as quickly as possible, to keep pace with the blur around me.

But the lines that stay—the ones that come back to me days or months later—are never the fast ones. They’re the ones I resisted moving past. The ones that forced me to pause, to circle back, to sit in a moment longer than felt comfortable.

Reading is the same. A single sentence can catch in your ribs and refuse to let go. A story told slowly—across a table, in a letter, at a bedside—can shift the air in a room.

There is nothing efficient about that.

And maybe that’s the point.

Choosing story is choosing depth over speed. Presence over distraction. It is choosing to sit with mystery instead of demanding explanation.

Sometimes resistance doesn’t look like shouting. Sometimes it looks like opening a book at midnight. Or listening to someone you love tell a story and letting it take the time it takes. Or carrying an inherited memory long after the details have blurred.

Machines can generate sentences that look convincing. What they can’t do is feel the silence between two spoken words. They can’t hold a story in their bones for decades, reshaping it each time it’s told.

That’s ours alone.

And so maybe the most radical act right now is the quietest one. To linger. To let story move at its own pace. To remember it’s not entertainment, or content, or data.

Story is how we make sense of being here at all.

Story is how truth endures.