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The Oldest Human Habit

Long before writing existed, human beings gathered in the flickering light of fires and turned the raw events of their lives into stories. Across every continent and century, anthropologists have found no culture, however isolated, that lacks myths, legends, or the simple habit of recounting what happened. Consider how naturally a traveler, returning home, is asked not for data but for the tale of what befell him along the road. The question we pose to one another is rarely 'What are the facts?' but almost always 'So, what happened next?' This universality suggests that storytelling is not a cultural accident but something woven deeply into the architecture of the human mind itself. To be human is, in large measure, to be the animal that narrates, ceaselessly converting the flux of experience into meaningful sequence.