Crisis and Covenant

by Hayden Nesbit

The information age has, in many ways, brought about a deep slumber. With eyes transfixed on devices and ears filled with endless streams of content, many are effectively sleepwalking and can no longer hear the world around them.

Martin Shaw, a well known writer, storyteller, and mythologist, sees stories as the antidote to this digital drowsiness:

The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

We need stories to open our eyes. However, our storytelling abilities are weighed down by a technological sleep paralysis. Our myth making muscles have atrophied under the burden of modern life. We have lost the capacity to tell the stories we need to wake up.

Crisis of Narration

In his 2024 book, The Crisis of Narration, Byung-Chul Han argues that we are living in a post-narrative world. We no longer know how to do storytelling apart from storyselling––monetization has replaced meaning as the goal of stories.

But the true purp…