Stories We Tell to Survive Each Other

Recently, I endured a few emotionally and mentally draining weeks. I won’t delve into the reasons behind it; they’re not relevant here. What’s important is what has been revealed, what has been contemplated, and how those thoughts might form a unique language. This isn’t enlightenment; it’s merely another attempt at communication which is why I’m putting counter arguments to everything below and navigating my way through it.

Also, I’ve recently started posting on the substack as well.

Loneliness as Ground State

Loneliness isn’t unique–it’s structural. Human consciousness, by its very construction, is solitary. No matter how deeply we connect with another, the raw content of our minds is never transferable. I can describe my thoughts, my fears, my joys–but the description is always mediated by language, by gesture, by expression, all of which fall short of the experience itself. You can listen, you can imagine, but you cannot be me. That private chamber remains locked.

This is why loneliness persists even in crowds, even in families, even in love. It is not the absence of people–it is the impossibility of ever fully escaping oneself. Philosophers have circled this truth for centuries. Kierkegaard thought despair was built into the self’s relation to itself. Sartre argued that “hell is other people,” not because others are absent, but because even in their presence we remain mis-seen and misinterpreted. Camus himself called this the absurd; the mismatch between the hunger for complete understanding and the silence of the world.

Counter-argument: One might say loneliness is simply circumstantial: find a community, a family, a lover, and it dissolves. But this assumes loneliness is solved by presence. If that were true, why do people feel alone even in their most intimate bonds? Why does solitude persist in marriages, friendships, or crowded cities? The persistence itself proves it is not solved by addition of bodies. Loneliness is not circumstantial; it is existential.

Two Forms of Communication

When reduced to essentials, I see only two forms: emotional and transactional.

Emotional communication

Emotional communication is unstable because it is built not on facts, but on projections. Consider someone close to you…a friend, a parent, a lover. What you “know” about them is never a direct transcript of their being. It is a collage: fragments of what they said, gestures you interpreted, silences you filled in. The human brain evolved as a predictive machine. It hates gaps. When it encounters one, it does not wait for reality to clarify, it fills the void with narrative. This is not error; it is efficiency.

But the consequence is that our relationships are layered with stories of our own making. Scroll through the social profile of someone you once knew, and within seconds your mind has constructed a storyline of their life. When, years later, you speak to them, the reality is inevitably out of sync with your pre-formed script. The stories we make are not only incomplete but deeply colored by our own states. Anxiety turns gaps into threats; jealousy turns ambiguity into betrayal; hope turns it into closeness. This is why emotional communication feels fragile; it is less about the other person and more about the state of the one doing the interpreting.

Language is part of the limitation. The brain predates it by millennia. Words are crude tools compared to the complexity of experience. This is why the richest parts of life, fear, desire, absurdity…resist expression. Faced with this inadequacy, the mind spins narratives to approximate meaning. But these narratives are reflections of ourselves more than of others.

Counter-argument: Some may argue that communication can be perfected, through honesty, through openness, through enough conversation. Yet honesty itself cannot breach the structural gap. When someone tells you “I am sad,” you hear the word “sad,” but the felt experience of their sadness is locked within them. Language communicates the outline, not the texture. No amount of words removes the distance; it only narrows it. That is why emotional communication remains inherently fragile, no matter how sincere.

Transactional communication

Transactional communication, on the other hand, appears cleaner. When you work on a project, negotiate terms, or solve a technical problem, context is already narrowed. Both parties know the scope: the goal, the steps, the expected outputs. There are fewer gaps to fill, so fewer opportunities for misfiring stories. That’s why transactions feel clearer–they are bound by predefined frames.

Yet even here, distortions emerge. When society rewards outcomes, the brain learns to measure value by productivity. Soon the internal narrative becomes: “If I do not produce, I do not matter.” Communication in this realm hardens into calculation. Others are viewed less as beings and more as instruments toward goals. The clarity of transactional communication comes at a cost: it reduces complexity, filtering humanity through the lens of efficiency. What seems like “less ambiguity” is simply “more reduction.”

Counter-argument: It might be said that transactional clarity is superior, that emotional ambiguity is a weakness while structured exchange is strength. But this overlooks that human beings cannot live by transactions alone. Efficiency can stabilize society, but it cannot nourish existence. A relationship reduced entirely to utility becomes lifeless. The very fact that transactions feel stable shows their limitation: stability here is the product of stripping away depth. Emotional ambiguity, though fragile, is the price of encountering someone as a full being.

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Possible Ways Out

If loneliness is structural and communication inevitably distorted, then the challenge is not to escape but to endure meaningfully. At the highest level, I see only two possible strategies: love and purpose.

Love

Love is not mere affection; it is a deliberate stance toward the ambiguity of others. To love someone is to accept the incompleteness of what you know about them, and yet to choose trust. It means acknowledging that the stories you form will always be partial and sometimes false, but refusing to let suspicion dominate. In psychological terms, curiosity interrupts anxiety. Instead of assuming, you ask. Instead of filling the gap with fear, you open it with attention.

Love is also a refusal of reduction. While transactions shrink people into roles, love restores their irreducible complexity. It doesn’t demand total knowledge, only the willingness to sit in the unknown without collapsing it into a hostile narrative. This is why love brings joy: it loosens the brain’s survival reflex of constant prediction and lets reality unfold without force. Joy here is not irrational, it is the result of perceiving without the compulsion to control.

Counter-argument: Love may appear naive, even irrational. One could argue that trust in fragments is dangerous, that to rely on incomplete narratives is to invite deception. Yet distrust relies on the same incompleteness, only shaded with fear. Both love and suspicion operate under ambiguity; the difference is which stance creates life and which destroys it. If narratives are inevitable, then love is the more rational gamble…it enlarges the possible world instead of shrinking it.

Purpose

Purpose is different but just as essential. Frankl argued that humans can endure almost any “how” if they have a “why.” The grand “why” of existence may be absent, Camus teaches us that the universe offers no final answer. But sub-purposes, specific, time-bound, relational, are always possible. They do not remove the absurd; they give us footholds within it.

Purpose clarifies communication because it defines the aim. This is why transactional exchanges feel less ambiguous: their end-point is already determined. But the harder task is extending this clarity to emotional bonds. Here, the answer is not eternal promises but temporary purposes. To comfort a friend in pain today, to share in their happiness tomorrow, to build a family for years, to sustain a friendship across seasons. These smaller arcs provide structure without demanding permanence. They acknowledge that meaning need not be eternal to be real.

Without such purposes, emotional life drifts into vagueness. With them, it acquires weight and continuity. They do not resolve the loneliness, but they provide orientation within it.

Counter-argument: Some may object that purpose is unnecessary, that one can live freely without imposing goals on life. But complete freedom quickly collapses into drift. Without orientation, choices lose meaning; freedom without direction is indistinguishable from emptiness. Purpose is not a constraint, it is the condition that makes freedom bearable.

The Final Question

Everything returns to perception. What we call “the world” is always mediated by our narratives, our states, our stories. When we misperceive ourselves, we misperceive reality. If we are fragmented inside, the world appears fragmented outside. If we are unresolved within, the world becomes hostile without.

This does not mean reality is unknowable, it means reality is always filtered. The ambiguity is not a mistake but the human condition. The real question is: can we live within this ambiguity without collapsing into despair or delusion? Can we accept that our communication will always be partial, yet still continue to communicate?

Counter-argument: It could be claimed that if perception is always distorted, then truth is unreachable and effort futile. But this confuses imperfection with impossibility. The fact that we cannot know perfectly does not mean we cannot know at all. Even fragments, though incomplete, are not worthless. They are enough to live by, enough to love by, enough to orient a life. The absence of total truth does not abolish meaning; it makes meaning an act of creation.

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For now, my task is to peel back these layers, not to solve them, but to keep the dialogue alive. Reasoning through loneliness, love, and purpose may not eliminate them. But perhaps the reasoning itself, the insistence on clarity against confusion, is already a form of resistance. A form of communication that, though one-sided, still matters.

The fact that it took me effort to put this into words says a lot about the communication, not just to express myself to others but also to myself. I hope to get better at handling ambiguity someday. Until then, my goal is to create structural thinking patterns to handle such communications.

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Thanks for reading! 🙂