Are We All Just Narrators of Our Own Nonexistent Stories?

There are moments – usually in the quiet hours amidst my monkey mind – when the scaffolding of my identity collapses. The roles, the memories, the ambitions – all dissolve, and what remains is a strange observer in me asking : Was there ever truly a story here at all?

I sometimes suspect that what I call my life is not a coherent narrative but an improvisation – stitched together by a narrator who keeps speaking so the silence doesn’t expose the emptiness underneath. Perhaps we are not protagonists of our own stories, but narrators trying to convince ourselves that there is a story – that the scattered fragments of being can be woven into something resembling meaning.

Every story requires continuity – a thread of causality, a “before” and “after.” Yet, biology and neuroscience reveal how illusory this continuity is.

Neurons fire in discrete bursts; consciousness itself flickers in frames like a film reel – roughly forty frames per second, stitched by the brain into a seamless illusion of flow. Our sense of self, then, is not continuous; it’s a reconstruction. At every instant, the mind assembles scattered perceptions into a story, and in the next instant, it forgets and rebuilds again.

The philosopher Derek Parfit once wrote, “The self is not what matters.” He meant that identity over time is not a substance but a psychological pattern – like a melody that can be interrupted, replayed, or rearranged, yet still feels familiar. The self is a story told in the first person – but told after the fact. If so, what we call memory is not a record but an act of storytelling – a self-narrative revised every time it is recalled. The hippocampus, acting less like an archive and more like an editor, rewrites the past to fit the emotional and cognitive coherence of the present. The narrative continuity of “me” is thus the brain’s most elegant fiction.

To confront the question of whether our stories are “nonexistent” is to brush against the edge of Being itself. What does it mean to be something rather than nothing? Heidegger called this the fundamental question of metaphysics : Why is there something rather than nothing? But perhaps this question is inverted in our time. Maybe we are too full of stories – too saturated with narratives that pretend to give form to our existence. The tragedy of the modern mind is not the absence of meaning but its surplus.

Non-being, then, is not a void but a truth : the recognition that the story was never necessary for existence to unfold. The stars burn, the rivers flow, the neurons fire – all without a narrator. Existence precedes narrative. Being does not need a story to be real. Yet we cling to narrative because it shelters us from the terror of non-being. To say “I am” is to resist the silence of the universe. To narrate is to exist, even if the story is false.

The brain is a prediction machine – it survives by anticipating patterns. Without a narrative, the self disintegrates into incoherence. Psychologists call this narrative identity : the ability to weave our experiences into a coherent arc gives us stability, agency, and a sense of continuity. In one of the most haunting clinical studies, patients with severe amnesia, unable to recall past experiences, were also unable to imagine the future. Their internal narrator had gone silent; without memory, even imagination collapses. The self needs its fiction to project itself forward in time. Thus, the story we tell ourselves – even if false – becomes biologically necessary. The lie of continuity becomes the condition for sanity.

But here lies the paradox, as I see : the story is needed for survival, yet the story also imprisons us. We become trapped in our own narration – defending the script rather than the truth. We cling to coherence even if it costs us authenticity. We fear silence more than deceit.

Modern physics offers metaphors that are strangely congruent with our existential condition. For e.g. Quantum theory tells us that particles do not have definite properties until observed. They exist in superposition – possibilities rather than actualities. The act of measurement collapses the wave function, forcing a probabilistic universe into a single outcome. So too with the self. We exist as a cloud of potential selves – the father, the husband, the friend, the leader, the thinker, the child – all in superposition. The moment we narrate, we collapse this wave function into a single version of “me,” and the rest of our possible selves fade into non-being. Isn't it? The story, then, is not the expression of who we are; it is the act that limits who we could be. Every “I am” eliminates countless “I could be.” Narrative becomes the collapse of infinite possibility into finite identity. Can it called as Exformation?

Then the question is : If the story is an illusion, why not renounce it? Maybe, because silence is unbearable. The Buddhist and Vedantic traditions teach that the self is Maya – an illusion projected upon the formless reality of consciousness. The enlightened path is not to perfect the story but to dissolve it – to witness without narration. Perhaps the goal is not to eradicate the narrator but to recognize its nature – to see the story as a play within consciousness, not as the truth of it. Like the characters in a dream realizing they are dreamed, we too might awaken not by denying the story, but by seeing through its necessity. Silence, then, is not the absence of narration but its transcendence – the moment when the story continues, but we no longer believe it as the only truth.

In the modern world, the self has become not just a narrator but a performer. Social media is a global stage for curated fictions. We now edit our lives like filmmakers, deleting the mundane, color-grading the despair. The algorithm rewards continuity, coherence, and brand consistency – virtues of a narrator, not of a being. We have externalized our inner storyteller into a digital avatar. The “story” now seeks validation, not truth.

Philosophically, this is not new — Nietzsche foresaw it. He warned that when God died, man would fill the void with idols of the self. “Become who you are,” he wrote – not as affirmation but as accusation. For Nietzsche, most people never become who they are because they remain trapped in borrowed stories. In a culture obsessed with personal brands and life arcs, we risk becoming curators of personas, not explorers of existence. The narrator replaces the witness; the performance replaces the presence.

This raises a radical question : if the most profound experiences of meaning arise when the narrator is silent, is the story of self merely a distortion – a necessary lie for social and biological survival but a barrier to truth?

To realize that the self is fiction is both liberation and terror. Isn't it? Camus described the absurd as the conflict between our need for meaning and the world’s indifference to it. The story of self is our rebellion against absurdity – our refusal to accept that life “just is.” But if one looks deeply enough, even rebellion is part of the story. The very question “Who am I?” presupposes a narrator asking it. To seek the truth of being through language is like trying to see your own eyes without a mirror. And yet, to abandon the question is to descend into nihilism. Thus we live suspended – aware that the story is false but unable to stop telling it.

The self, after all, is not merely a deception but a tool – a way for consciousness to explore itself in finite form. Like an artist aware of the illusion yet painting with devotion, we can inhabit our stories without being enslaved by them. The goal is not to live without narrative, but to live with awareness that it is a narrative – a temporary scaffolding for something vaster.

We might learn from literature itself. Great novels often contain unreliable narrators – voices that deceive, distort, and contradict themselves – yet through them, we glimpse deeper truths. Perhaps authenticity lies not in constructing a perfect story, but in acknowledging that all stories are partial, fragile, and haunted by silence.

So, are we all just narrators of our own nonexistent stories? Perhaps yes – but that does not make the story meaningless. It only means the meaning is not in the story but through it. The narrative self is both mask and mirror. It conceals the void, yet reflects the light that falls upon it. We are narrators – but narrators of a silence that needs to be spoken, even if imperfectly. Every word, every memory, every identity is an echo of the unspeakable fact that we are. The story is false, but it points toward something real – the ineffable awareness that tells it.

And maybe, in the end, this is all that consciousness ever wanted : not to exist as a story, but to awaken within one, knowing it was never real – and still, somehow, to love it.

Thus : We are, all of us, narrators of stories that do not exist – and yet, it is through these stories that Being finds its voice. To live is to narrate, to awaken is to see through the narration, and to be free is to know that both – the story and the silence – are the same act of creation, endlessly retold in the theater of consciousness.

Thanks for dropping by !

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Disclaimer : Everything written above, I owe to the great minds I’ve encountered and the voices I’ve heard along the way.