Everyday Life, Stories, and the Podcast “Beyond Stories”

Everyday Life, Stories, and the Podcast “Beyond Stories”

Amir Saemi

I remember a period in my life when I was completely bewildered about an important decision. I was afraid of changing circumstances, and the current situation was not to my liking either. Around those days, I was reading a story. When I saw how the story’s hero, Raha, rebuilt her life from scratch, I was able to overcome my fear of changing circumstances. In my view, to live well, it is necessary to read stories.

Our everyday life places us in specific and relatively static conditions. We are born in a particular country, a particular culture, a particular religion, and a particular family; these conditions greatly limit our choices and our lives. When we reach relative stability in life, we live in a specific place, belong to a specific class, and associate with specific friends who are more or less close to us intellectually and socially. All of this causes us to form specific and relatively firm beliefs about what kind of life a good life is and what the state of the world is like. Our ideals and values take shape, harden, and change little. Our everyday life decisions are mostly about what to do to get closer to what we conceive in our minds as the good life. We become so caught up in this means-end thinking that there is no room left to ask ourselves whether our conception of the good life is correct or not, whether our goals are rightly chosen or not, whether the best possible life for us is the very thing that is considered good for us in our class or not. Our entanglement in everyday matters and, more importantly, the general beliefs that have formed around us usually severely limit our vision and the scope of our decisions. We do not see beyond our everyday life, and most of the decisions we make are merely about things that lie within this limited view.

Stories open our eyes. They help us to be drawn out of our familiar and accustomed life for a while and imagine how we could have lived, and what our surroundings could have been like. Imagining completely different conditions and entirely different lives allows us to think about what it would be like if we had or were to have other values, if we were or were to go elsewhere, if we did or were to do other things. Stories teach us to think about how our life could have been if our values and circumstances were different. Stories also teach us what life is like for those who live in completely different conditions from ours, what problems they grapple with that we do not, and what possibilities they have that we lack. All of this enables us to change and refine our conception of how the good life is to be lived.

In fact, we face two types of decision-making in life. The first type of decision-making is about what to do to achieve what we want; this decision-making is purely instrumental or means-end decision-making. The second type of decision-making is about what things we ought to want, what things are important in life, and what kind of living is good. Things like economics and our everyday economic knowledge help us with the first type of decision-making. But the second type of decision-making, if not more important than the first, is at least equally important. Stories greatly assist us in the second type of decision-making. An accurate and coherent imagination of what could have been or could become helps us to set aside our current values for a moment and contemplate different values that we could have had and can have. The help of stories in deciding the kind of living we favor is so important that it can be said that to live well, it is necessary to read stories.

The irreplaceable importance of stories in the moral understanding of life was the reason for me, with the help of my friend and colleague Telli Davoodi, to launch a podcast titled “Beyond Stories.” In fact, our goal was to select issues we grapple with daily and to look at those issues anew through the presentation of stories. Stories describe conditions that differ from the conditions of our everyday lives, and this helps us understand how we should comprehend our daily problems and how we should change our lives. We turned to contemporary Persian literature because the conditions imagined in these stories are largely familiar to Persian speakers. Contemporary Persian stories depict conditions that are both familiar to us and different from our everyday lives. We can easily and accurately imagine those conditions, relate ourselves to them, and place ourselves in the position of the heroes of those stories. These stories help us understand the conditions our neighbors are in and how we should change our lives so that both our situation and our neighbors' situation improve.

One can have abstract discussions about ethics, the good life, human psychology, and the social conditions in which we are trapped in university classes. These discussions are valuable. Perhaps philosophical and academic discussion can help us to some extent to get a little grasp of these subjects. But there is another solution for improving our understanding of these subjects. We can look at lives where these issues have been raised and have determined the fate of the story's heroes. Reflecting on these lives, reflecting on the fate of heroes who are grappling with these issues and are situated in a different place in life and society, helps us gain a better understanding of our everyday problems. In any case, our hope is that the “Beyond Stories” podcast will be a place where we draw on stories and academic knowledge to reflect on issues that are important to all of us. We shall see what comes of it.

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Beyond Stories Podcast

Beyond Stories Podcast on Telegram

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