Before the Story
On the Seduction of Templates
We need narratives.
Without them, experience would remain a sequence of moments, difficult to hold together, impossible to understand in retrospect. Stories help us make sense of what has happened, how things unfolded, how we changed, what mattered in the end.
In this sense, narrative is something that follows life.
And yet, increasingly, it arrives before it.
We recognise this shift in small, familiar gestures: photographing food before tasting it, capturing a place before lingering in it, documenting a moment before fully inhabiting it. The act is not dishonest, nor especially superficial. It is anticipatory. Experience is already being shaped by how it will later be recalled, shared, or validated.
A part of attention is no longer fully inside the moment.
It is slightly ahead of it.
This is not a new mechanism. As early observers of photography such as Susan Sontag noted, representation does not merely record experience, it can displace it. What begins as an attempt to preserve a moment can quietly replace participation with capture. The image stands in for the encounter. The record becomes the thing.
What feels new today is not the presence of representation, but its timing.
Templates emerge here as a form of relief. They offer ready-made shapes for experience: how something should look, what it should mean, how it will be understood. They reduce uncertainty. They promise coherence before contradiction appears. In a world saturated with signals, templates help us feel oriented and legible.
There is comfort in that.
But templates also filter. They quietly suggest what counts as a meaningful experience and what does not. Moments that fit the template are extended, emphasised, repeated. Those that resist it (confusion, ambivalence, slow realisation) are rushed past or quietly dismissed. When something important happens but cannot yet be articulated, it can feel incomplete, even unsatisfying.
The issue is not artificiality. It is impatience.
When meaning is expected immediately, experiences that need time begin to feel wrong. We learn to distrust what we cannot yet explain. We look for narratives that arrive quickly, even if they arrive thin. What once unfolded gradually is now expected to present itself already formed.
Social life has always involved a degree of performance. Long before digital platforms, Erving Goffman described everyday interaction as a form of staging, a way of presenting oneself to others within shared social scripts. What has changed is not the existence of performance, but its permanence and anticipation. An imagined audience is now often present before the experience itself has fully taken place. We do not simply live moments anymore; we live them with their future narrative already in mind.
This shift is visible even in how we talk about thinking. Intelligence is increasingly associated with what can be formalised, predicted, optimised. Ways of knowing that resist this framing (intuition, imagination, relational understanding) are tolerated, but rarely trusted. Not because they lack depth, but because they lack a clear template. The language of machine learning (A.I.) has quietly reinforced this: if intelligence means just pattern recognition and efficiency, then thinking that wanders, contradicts itself, or changes course begins to seem erratic, useless.
Yet much of human life unfolds precisely in those untemplated spaces.
Some of the most meaningful changes happen before we know how to describe them. A hesitation that later becomes a decision. A discomfort that slowly clarifies. An attraction or resistance that cannot be justified at the time. These experiences do not announce themselves clearly. They change us first, and only later become intelligible.
Consider falling out of love, or into a vocation. These are not events with clear edges. They are processes recognised in retrospect. For months, perhaps years, something shifts beneath articulation. You cannot yet say what is happening, but you feel its weight. Only later, when the change has already occurred, does language catch up. The narrative arrives after the transformation, not before it.
Or consider grief. It does not follow a template, despite how often we try to impose one. It circles, returns, transforms, refuses resolution. To grieve well often means tolerating long stretches where meaning has not yet formed, where no story makes sense. The template offers stages, closure, progress. But grief frequently ignores all three.
Templates struggle with this. They prefer outcomes to processes, answers to questions, stability to transformation.
To live before the story is not to reject narrative. It is to restore its proper place. Narratives are how we make sense of what we have lived. They are not instructions for how life should unfold in advance.
Templates are useful tools. But when they begin to precede experience, they quietly narrow the range of what can be lived without friction.
Life needs room to be confusing, unresolved, unfinished.
The story will find us.
Modern Intuitions is an ongoing exploration of symbolic thinking, decision-making and cognitive structure. Subscribe if you’d like to follow its unfolding.