The Power of Meaning: The true route to happiness

by Emily Esfahani Smith

Our storytelling impulse emerges from a deep-seated need all humans share: the need to make sense of the world.6 We have a primal desire to impose order on disorder—to find the signal in the noise. We see faces in the clouds, hear footsteps in the rustling of leaves, and detect conspiracies in unrelated events. We are constantly taking pieces of information and adding a layer of meaning to them; we couldn’t function otherwise. Stories help us make sense of the world and our place in it, and understand why things happen the way they do. “Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning, whether we tell tales of the creation of the earth or of our own early choices,”7 writes Bateson.