Long ago and far away, at a power plant in North Dakota, there was a lunchroom where the union men gathered. Lunch wasn’t just sandwiches and thermoses of coffee — it was storytelling time. The same tales circled around again and again, each version gaining new details, losing old ones, and stretching just a little further with every telling.
One afternoon, in the middle of yet another recycled yarn, someone interrupted to challenge the accuracy. Before the storyteller could sputter a defense, another man leaned back in his chair, grinned, and said: “It’s your story — tell it any way you want.”
Those eight words were more than comic relief. They were life boiled down into a single sentence. Truth became optional. Narrative became everything.
And here we are today, living inside that lunchroom logic. Science, logic, and reason have quietly slipped off the stage. Reality itself is negotiable. The new mantra is simple: it’s your story, tell it however you want — and people will nod along if it fits the version of the world they’d rather believe.
The troubling part is how comforting that feels. A neatly polished lie or a tailor-made fantasy is so much easier to swallow than the jagged edges of fact. We’ve bought into the soothing version, because who wants to wrestle with the hard stuff when a story is so much easier?
What began as a throwaway line in a union lunchroom has become the philosophy of a culture. Stories are free to float unmoored from truth, and too many of us are content to let them drift.
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