How Do Your Stories Transform You?
RealityLab puts the secret meaning of your favorite myths, histories, and popular cultures to good use.
Stories change lives.
Tyler Cowen talks about books that shake you to your core. Ryan Holiday has a whole list of them. Even those of us who think we are too old to be affected by fairy tales and mere entertainment fall victim to the narratives in our own heads. In fact, if cognitive scientist Joscha Bach is correct, our very identities may be nothing more than stories our brains tell themselves. Given how big of a role stories play in all of our lives, and how uniquely human the ability to process them seems to be, why wouldn’t we want to learn how to harness them?
Welcome to Reality Labs.
We’re dedicated to distilling our myths, histories, and pop culture down to their core messages for easier application in our lives.
Here we will put all manner of interesting stories spanning a wide array of genres, narratives, times, and cultures under the microscope. No meme too small, no epic too long. Our aim is to uncover the keys that make them resonate so strongly that they get repeated countless times by millions of people. From there we’ll describe ways to use these keys to overcome our own obstacles, reverse engineer them to help us create resonant stories of our own, and innoculate us to the false stories and rhetoric of manipulation.
In short: you love the media you consume for a reason, and we’re here to help you understand it. The ultimate goal of this project is for our readers to become more conscious of the role stories play in our lives and more capable of using this knowledge to help us unlock our own potential.
Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.
In the meantime, tell your friends!