A technique used by metaconscious beings to process experience.
For non-metaconscious beings (that is, those whose awareness is not self-reflective), experience simply comes and goes. The mark of a positive or negative experience remains only in the feelings and behaviours that similar experiences trigger in the future. For metaconscious beings, experience requires processing — especially negative experience.
To process experience is to make it mean something. Meaning is never inherent in experience — it is added, like clothing. Once meaning is made, we often speak of “understanding” the experience, but this is a casual, inaccurate way of speaking. When it comes to raw experience, there is nothing to understand; it’s all right there. The understanding is the meaning, the story.
This is not to say that meaning is disconnected from facts. That is a degenerate way to think about storytelling. It’s to say that stories are living tissue that, if healthy, connects emotions to facts. However, like all techniques, storytelling is amoral. It can be used to manipulate emotions and disconnect them from the facts, whether on purpose or by spontaneous breakdown. The difference is that this makes the living tissue unhealthy and the stories themselves unstable. People will still invest in unhealthy stories if none other are on offer.
Being “connected to the facts” is not just something for journalists. The stories told by a given culture are all one living thing, the fiction and the non-fiction, the humble and the elevated, the mundane and the rarefied, the sacred and the profane. And all of them make meaning of experience, make a group of people more (or less) able to roll with the punches of a universe that is larger than them.