Brutal honesty is highly underrated in online dating, but you have to be confident about it. Women (and men for that matter) can smell desperation from 3000 miles away over a 56k modem. Sounds like you've figured it out :).
A mind must seem divided to its owner (since we're parallel processors and consider many things at once) but unified to most observers (so they can model us and our behavior without immense time and effort). Stories about ourselves, that we believe, give us a self-knowledge that can be imparted. The quality of these knowledge-nuggets varies wildly, as does our belief in them.
Anyway, saying that we're natural story tellers isn't saying much. What's a story? Wikipedia:
"A narrative or story is any report of connected events"
i.e. a story (in this context) is some carefully curated data about the past, featuring us, and a pattern imposed on that data.
Obviously life isn't (just) a story. I imagine though, that someone who thinks they're very good at curating and connecting data about themselves, would place a high value on their stories, and those stories' predictive power. In the limit, the storyteller might disregard the gestalt data of their senses once the narrative is formed, which might give the impression that life is a story. This may work very well for the storyteller, but it's not the whole... story... the raw material remains in our minds, and has its own value. The best story misses much, adds much. Life is a process, stories are one product.
Another thing to notice: many of us here are assuming that 'story' means '..like in a book or movie!' I submit to y'all that the vast majority of told stories are vastly vastly different from such, to the point that we can often tell when someone's fictionalizing even when they're trying hard to disguise it. Stories about real life often have a meaningless or fractal bent that reveals the structure of their basis-memories, which is beautiful, I think.
tl;dr -- because we've been inadvertently terraforming Earth for much of our history, the semantics of words like 'nature' are really dubious. The essay expends much energy proving this point, which I thought was a long-settled one.
I thought it was understood that words like 'nature' are a banner under which people and organizations with different values come together. The methods and consequences of maximizing these values are what's interesting. Values like:
- Earth's genetic history
- the wonder and romance of living on a planet with ancient and uncontrolled forces
- maintenance of the biosphere for continued human habitation
"Perhaps the fact that people are stunned whenever organisms become simpler says more about how the human mind organizes the world than about evolutionary processes. People are more comfortable envisioning increasing complexity through time instead of reversals or stasis. "
This essay makes a point that's new to me-- obvious in retrospect, a simple extension of Orwell: art is propaganda, technology is art, so technology is propaganda-- and technology companies must be propaganda machines. What kind of propaganda are they producing? The thesis of his essay is 'technology critics don't care', which I don't believe.
So can anyone direct me towards socio-political analysis of contemporary technology? We have whole university departments banging their heads on old books and that's great, but has the person yet been born who can deconstruct an app? And I mean deconstruct it vertically, not just on UI design or whatever. Technology company as text... a guy can dream.