Addicted to story

On why we are suckers for a cliffhanger

Nobody can resist a good story.

I certainly can’t.

Be it just one more page, one more episode, or straight-up binging the whole second season in a weekend.

I’m always eager to find out what happens next, who will do what, and how it all ends.

Why do stories deliver such a powerful attraction for us humans? And why do they seem so incredibly addictive?

Because we’re biologically wired for it.

Stories are intrinsically human. They’re in our DNA. And they have been for a while.

Evolution

Our brains are expertly built to process information in the form of stories. I know my brain is. If something has a beginning, a middle, and an end, I’m already less panicky and anxious for what’s about to come. 

Organizing information into a logical sequence makes it easier to understand and remember. 

Apart from being a fun pastime and campfire activity, stories have been essential to our survival. Hunting strategies, medicinal practices, life-saving wisdom, they’ve all been encapsulated into stories for ages, passing down essential knowledge from one generation to the next.

On top of that, humans are prediction machines.

Our brains are continuously building expectations of what (we imagine) will happen next and even though we’re not always right, they help us navigate the scary outside world.

And they better be. They still make sure we survive on a daily basis. While there may not be that many predators around where you live, I bet you still have to be careful not to be hit by a car.

Stories are an excellent tool that basically have kept us alive as a species for generations. But they’re not always serving me when I need to go to bed and I’m glued to my screen.

Attention span

A friend of mine is building a YouTube channel from scratch. We were talking about the process and he shared how helpful and intricate the viewer data is on his videos. He can see exactly when people drop off and click away when there’s a lull in his video. This helps him improve his content creation enormously because he can pinpoint where things (apparently) got boring.

One of the biggest discoveries he made while learning from his ‘mistakes’ was to start incorporating a storyline. If people want to know what comes next, they’ll be sure to stick around until the end.

To keep people engaged throughout, it’s simply not enough to state a ten-item listicle and drone on like ChatGPT. You want them to hang on your lips until the end, and storytelling seems the way to do it.

The basics

Telling a story is powerful. But what is a story?

When I hear the word story, my brain immediately goes to grand and epic tales. Hero’s journeys with brave, bold, adventurous characters from faraway.

But the basic building blocks of a story are actually quite simple and humble.

All stories consist of a sequence of events that are meaningfully linked together (usually but not always centered around characters).

Examples of how these events can be linked together are complication and causation (or but and therefore).

Imagine you’re a hobbit, merrily having dinner in your cozy kitchen, and suddenly a bunch of dwarfs show up to take you on an adventure. That would be a complication. Or if you’re cold and lonely in a cave somewhere, hiding from all kinds of weird creatures, because you’ve made some bad decisions in the past, like going on an adventure. That would be causation.

When we go even more basic. Stories are built up from a multitude of tiny steps. These steps can either go up, or down. The sun is shining, things are looking up. Oh no! Everything is going to hell after all. But wait, here’s the comeback. Redemption. That sort of up and down.

Expectation and resolution, dissonance and resolve. A continuous flux of ups and downs and round and rounds. It’s a rollercoaster ride, and because as an audience, we don’t know what’s coming, it’s extremely exciting.

Aren’t we all suckers for a cliffhanger?

The next one

We want to know how the story continues, what happens exactly doesn’t matter so much.

The famous ‘Shortest Story Ever Written’ often attributed to Ernest Hemingway goes as follows: ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’

Setting up an expectation: ‘for sale: baby shoes’. Setting up our curiosity. Where is this going? What is going to happen in this story? And then, the devastating answer: ‘never worn’. Making us realize that from the beginning this ‘story’ was about the death of a child.

A setup and a punchline. A slightly macabre one in this case. But still satisfying, because we know now.

We want to know what happens next. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad (for our protagonist) we just gotta know what happens.

It’s like stories are addictive.

The promise of reward

A good story mirrors well-known addictions, like gambling, food addiction, compulsive shopping, or even social media addiction.

With all of these addictions, it’s constantly about the next hit. It’s the expectation/gratification cycle that keeps people addicted. Our biology promises (and delivers) us a reward when we engage in these actions.

Placing another bet, taking another bite, looking for another sale, or another scroll, always quick onto the next one because the temporary pleasure of novelty never lasts.

This is not very different to how stories work.

A good story pinballs our hero through all types of situations and, because we’re rooting for them, we want to know how it ends. And even if it ends badly (for our hero) we can still be satisfied at the end of the story because we’ve received our ‘hit’. We know how it ends. And not all endings have to be happy.

Interestingly enough, stories keep us engaged not because of the outcomes they deliver, but because of the promise of an outcome. Any outcome.

Our hero might not always survive the story, but at least we have.