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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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The Story of Stories summary
Kevin Ashton
The Million Year History of a Uniquely Human Art
20 mins
Brief summary
The Story of Stories by Kevin Ashton delves into the universal power of storytelling, examining how humans have crafted narratives across history to understand the world, shaping cultures and influencing the course of societies.
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The Story of Stories
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Stories gave us language
From the rattle that gives the snake its name to the trilling of bluebirds through a scale of grunts, cackles, caws, and barks, there are many ways for animals to make deliberate sounds.
Humans talk. More precisely, we vocalise, modulating and vibrating the air leaving our lungs. This complicated physiological apparatus was at first a means of sending simple messages during primal pursuits: hunting, gathering, playing, grooming, and mating.
The development of language began a million years ago, after our ancestors learned to make and then control fire. Fire unlocked calories and extended the day. Its warmth brought tribes together. The urgency of the hunt receded in the soft light of glowing embers and humans began making sounds that conjured imagined and remembered scenes. As language grew more complex, the stories told with these sounds became more vivid: moods, tenses, and cases allow us to talk more precisely about character, chronology, and consequence.
There are around 7,000 languages. All make use of sentences containing a subject, a verb, and an object. Standard conversations string these sentences together to narrate sequences of events in which characters perform actions that have some kind of consequence. That was precisely how Aristotle defined storytelling in one of the most influential works ever produced on the subject, the Poetics, written just under 2,400 years ago.
Aristotle also pointed out that our stories almost always have human-like characters. If there are aliens, gods, or toasters, they are anthropomorphised aliens, gods, and toasters. (The Greek philosopher didn’t use these examples, of course.) As Dr. Seuss said, “none of my animals are animals; they’re all people.” Lewis Carroll put a rabbit in a top hat and folk tales dwell on porridge-eating bears for the same reason: we can’t stop talking about ourselves.
When we talk about ourselves, we’re talking about our experience of an apparently random – and mostly unjust – universe. Stories impose a pattern on otherwise patternless experiences, allowing us to discover meaning and design in them. A cast of colorful gods is a sense-making tool, but so are concepts like evolution and the economy. When we say that our brains “trick” us or that algorithms “know” us or that markets are “nervous,” we’re telling Aristotelian tales populated by distinctively humanlike characters.
Early stories were limited by transience: they were spoken and then they were gone. With the exception of a literate elite, that was how it was for most people across history. Print changed everything. As we’ll see in a moment, this was the first great storytelling revolution.
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What is The Story of Stories about?
The Story of Stories (2026) traces the history of storytelling from primordial fireplaces into the blue glare of our own digital age. We’ve always used stories to make sense of the world, it suggests, but under shifting technological conditions. From folktales to the age of print, radio, and now AI, the medium in which stories are told is as important as the messages they contain.
Who should read The Story of Stories?
- Readers interested in storytelling and human psychology
- Futurologists with an eye on AI’s social impact
- History fans and anyone who loves big ideas
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