[Disclaimer: What follows is written by my shit bucket junkie alter ego not by me but yeah who is me.]

We’re not in love with narrative—we’re in cold sweat of narrative withdrawal. The same cold grip you feel when six faces turn to you at dinner and you realize you’ve got absolutely nothing to say.

Here’s my theory: We frantically engineer experiences specifically to tell stories about them later. We curate our lives for the plot. Why? Because the person without stories has no place around the campfire. No stories means no status. No status means genetic death.

SHIT BUCKETS AND MASSAGE CHAIRS

I shit in a bucket every day. I squat while shitting in a bucket. That makes the path more straight and the experience smoother. This isn’t luxury. My massage chair when working—that’s luxury.

The contrast makes the story. Massage chair alone? Nobody gives a fuck. Massage chair versus shit bucket? Now strangers stop me at parties.

We’re drawn to contrast like addicts to fresh needles because contrast is the raw material of storytelling currency.

THE DESPERATE PERFORMATIVE SELF

When I was a teenager, I brushed my teeth on the dancefloor. Squeezed paste onto my brush in the middle of a sweaty club, foam dripping down my chin while maintaining eye contact with disturbed onlookers. Why? Not dental hygiene. Pure story desperation.

It worked. People still mention it years later. What they don’t mention is how transparent my need for attention was—the same need that drives us all to document our lives continuously. We’re all collectors of moments that might earn currency in conversation.

The Tinder profile gallery is our modern cave painting. We carefully arrange evidence of our “spontaneous” adventures and “candid” moments into those squares. Look at me cliff-diving! Look at me with exotic food! The unspoken caption: I promise I’m not boring in bed or conversation. I have STORIES.

THE TWO-PART FREEDIVING SUIT THEORY

Modern freediving has revolutionized wetsuit design. Instead of one piece, you now wear two: awkward baby-slip bottoms that close under your crotch, plus separate pants you dance into. Seemingly absurd, but it lets you dive deeper into the cold darkness.

Storytelling works the same way:

1. The Experience Part: Living the raw contrast
2. The Telling Part: Our desperate need to transform experience into social capital

When I was younger, I played a game with my little brother: “make pizza” on my back. Except it wasn’t pizza-making—it was amateur percussion. My back turned to raw prosciutto under his fist-drumming. Pizza makers are just frustrated drummers who couldn’t land gigs. My little brother was both.

The pain was worth it because now I have a story about how I endured my brother’s sadism. Story value exceeds experience cost. Simple economics.

THE NAKEDNESS OF BEING STORY-LESS

Have you ever seen Germans at an FKK beach? Naked middle-class families strolling comfortably without shame. That’s what we fear—not physical nakedness but narrative nakedness.

What does this say about Germans versus everyone else? Maybe we’re not all human in the same way. Maybe my own German identity struggles with this contradiction—how can the same culture that produces meticulous documentation and status-conscious BMWs also be comfortable exposing everything? Perhaps the physical nakedness is precisely what generates the story worth telling. “We went to a nude beach” is itself status currency.

The status-detecting part of our brain—the lobe that instantly knows who’s the alpha at every party—formed before the first human grunted a warning about predators. Denying our status hunger is like pretending we don’t need food.

Without our story-clothes, we stand exposed. Who are you once you strip away all your interesting experiences? Just another forgettable mammal waiting for death.

That’s why we have students who deliberately arrive late to class, marching through the door with manufactured urgency, thirsting for the collective gaze of classmates. Those brief seconds of attention feed the story: I’m the kind of person who breaks rules and gets away with it.

That’s all any of us want—to establish character.

FOR THE PLOT: STORIES AS SURVIVAL STRATEGY

World-making is what humans do. Anthropologists discovered approximately one-third of all conversation across every human culture consists of sharing personal experiences. Stories aren’t cultural accessories—they’re etched into our fucking bones, found in remains of the first humans—a universal behavior more consistent than marriage or religious practices.

We stitch scattered moments into a tapestry we can show off.

Consider this: I was blessed to drive my mother’s shining white Audi for months. A status bump already—privileged kid in expensive German machinery. But what made for an even better story was my brilliant idea to start drifting.

Fake it till you make it, they said, and hell I did. My first perfect 90-degree “the car is parked better than my non-drifting self would do” drift happened with five witnesses in the car, against the backdrop of breezy German North Sea air.

Would I ever drift alone? Fuck no. The witnesses transform experience into story. Without witnesses, it’s just a sad kid playing with a car.

My friend told me afterward that my drift would have seemed smooth and confident if she hadn’t checked the rearview mirror and seen my terrified wide eyes and open mouth. I would have happily maintained my heroic narrative had she not exposed the truth. Not because I wanted to lie, but because of memory plastisurgery—the brain’s remarkable ability to reshape experiences into coherent narratives that serve our self-image. We literally rewrite our memories to cast ourselves as more competent, more intentional, and more in control than we actually were. It’s not dishonesty; it’s survival.

THE OVERCONFIDENT STORYTELLER

I had the luxury to travel to Egypt. I am a trained weed smoker. I am disciplined. As maybe can be seen in the dissociative style in which I’m writing this blog.

So naturally, when offered Egyptian hybrid weed, I scoffed. “I can handle anything,” I told my buddy, taking a massive hit.

Fifteen minutes later I was unconscious on a dusty outside Beduinin cushion. The next five hours dissolved into nothing.

But here’s the real terror: those five hours are an unstory. Like dreams, they became unstories once I woke up—wasted story budget. This is precisely why we forget our dreams: they’re experiences we can’t successfully narrate to others. Without social transmission, they evaporate like morning dew. Stories are meant to be spent generously, making people’s lives more exciting. Five hours without narrative might as well have never happened.

THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE PLOT HUNGER

One night in Frankfurt, I tried to rip a jaguar emblem off someone’s car. Just for the thrill of the trophy. Just for the plot.

The owner caught me. I ran through dark streets, heart exploding, certain I would either be beaten senseless or arrested.

I escaped. And immediately began crafting the story in my head before I’d even caught my breath. The danger wasn’t the point—the story was the point. I risked physical harm for narrative reward.

This is the dark underbelly of being a “story being”—we sometimes venture into self-destruction purely for narrative value. The more desperate we feel about being forgettable, the more reckless the story-seeking becomes.

STARTUP STRATEGY AS STORYTELLING

Today I’m trying to understand what strategy means for a startup. Why it matters. The revelation: strategy is just giving people a good story. Strategy is the pimped-up, boring business plan—a narrative that transforms “we sell shit” into “we’re disrupting an industry.”

The “Significant Objects” experiment proved this quantitatively: worthless thrift store items sold for 2,700% more on eBay when paired with fictional stories. Narrative literally creates financial value from nothing.

The most successful products don’t just solve problems—they give people new stories to tell about themselves. They let the nervous overthinker become “someone who takes action.” They transform the frugal minimalist into “someone who invests in quality.”

Here’s the thing: you’re giving users stories anyway, whether you’re conscious of it or not. Every product creates a narrative in the user’s life. The question is whether you’ll spend time deliberately crafting that narrative or let it develop haphazardly. Those who intentionally design the story their users can tell gain massive competitive advantage.

Why are people so resistant to changing products? Because narrative identity is a loadbearing wall—knock it down without proper support, and the entire structure collapses.

THE PIONEER PERSONALITY: SHIT BUCKET JUNKIES

This brings us to product pioneers and early adopters. Ever notice how irrationally passionate early fans are? They don’t just like your thing—they’ll fight strangers on Twitter defending your half-baked prototype.

That’s because early adopters are shit bucket junkies—addicted to the story high. They’re story junkies living in a massage chair world. They crave the contrast. They want to tell friends: “I discovered this when no one knew about it.” Their identity depends on standing apart.

Some people have this pioneer trait prominently in the foreground. Others keep it tucked in the background. But we all possess it—the drive to occasionally do uncomfortable, novel things specifically to generate stories. To squat over metaphorical shit buckets when comfortable chairs exist.

THE LIBERATION OF ADMITTING THE FEAR

Here’s the paradox: openly admitting we’re afraid of being non-story beings actually releases the pressure. By confessing my desperate story-seeking, I’m freed from pretending I don’t care about your attention.

This realization has been transformative for my startup approach. When I stopped trying to pretend our product was about pure utility and admitted it was also about giving users a better story to tell about themselves, everything unlocked. Our messaging clarified. Our user research questions improved. We stopped asking “Is this useful?” and started asking “Does this make you feel like a different kind of person?”

The most shameful secret isn’t the outrageous things we’ve done—it’s why we did them. Not for the experience, but for the telling. For the validation that comes after.

Of course, there are exceptions. Monks find freedom in storylessness—their rejection of worldly narrative becomes their most powerful story. The deliberate embrace of a non-story becomes, paradoxically, the ultimate tale.

Next time you feel restless, unable to settle, ask yourself: What story am I afraid I’m not creating right now? What contrast am I missing?

Either embrace the shit bucket, or admit you’re terrified of being a non-story being.

Either way, you’ve got another story to tell.