There are moments when you encounter a text, where it feels less like reading and more like being recognized.
Recently, I have been reading The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han. And there has been one particular chapter which I seem to return to again and again. It is called “Bare Life.”
In it, Han discusses Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, and as I moved through the text, I realized I wasn’t reading about something philosophically abstract or distant. It felt as if I was reading about myself.
There is a feeling Sartre describes — and which Han echoes — that I know intimately:
the experience of facing the world as a bare collection of facts, things, and events, devoid of any binding narrative, any deeper thread that ties existence into a coherent whole.
The experience that life is just there, raw and contingent, without necessary connection or purpose. The sheer facticity of the world.
It’s a strange sensation.
The more deeply you perceive it, the more troubling it becomes.
Everything just melts down to mere occurrences, piling one on top of another without order, without telos, as Aristotle would call it.
And as the sense of connection frays, so too does the sense of meaning.
Why do anything, when action itself feels like just another happening among countless others?
What surfaces is a superficiality — not the lightweight kind, but a heavy, suffocating superficiality.
One that stems precisely from the absence of any underlying form.
The world becomes a flat surface, events sliding past one another, with nothing beneath to anchor them into significance.
And yet, I’m not trying to argue — metaphysically — that there must be some great cosmic narrative holding the world together.
I’m not saying that there is a LOGOS as the Stoics thought.
I remain agnostic on that point.
What concerns me is something different: whether human beings, by our very nature, need some form of narrative to live meaningfully.
We are not beings built to endure sheer facticity. Or at least, I am not.
We seem to require patterns, structures, stories — not illusions, but frameworks that allow discrete moments to become part of a lived whole.
Without narrative, the self also begins to fragment along with the world it inhabits.
Modern society, I believe, deepens this crisis.
It moves faster and faster, accelerates the turnover of events, fragments life into consumable moments, and flattens complex experiences into measurable outputs.
We are constantly pulled across superficiality, rarely invited to inhabit depth.
In such a world, it is no surprise that so many of us do encounter this nausea.
What Han calls the “crisis of narration” is for me, clearly a deep wound in the human experience.
It strips us of the ability to weave the fabric of meaning, leaving us instead with the raw data of bare life.
I don’t have a solution to offer.
I’m not interested in preaching a return to some grand metanarrative, nor do I think artificial stories can easily heal what is broken.
But I do believe that recognizing the necessity of narrative, not as a metaphysical truth, but as an existential condition, is a beginning.
Perhaps the task is not to invent new grand stories, but to allow for spaces where life can be lived narratively again:
where actions have weight, where histories are remembered, where futures can be hoped for, and where the self is more than a flicker across a thousand interchangeable moments.
My thoughts so far have led me to this perspective.
The path I am (and many others, I suspect) searching for might just begin simply by refusing to treat life as a sequence of facts —
and instead, daring to live as though it were a story worth telling.