Keeping the Story Alive: The Economics of Identity Preservation

The common consensus is that the past creates the present. We may believe we are the result of previous events, and that traumatic or significant memories intrude upon our consciousness against our will.

This text proposes the inverse: The present constructs the past.

The past, ontologically speaking, does not exist. It creates no energy, exerts no force, and has no agency. It is an inert archive. So how can it feel like a dynamic force?

Because of the process of excavation.

We engage in this labor not because we are broken, but because the mechanism of identity requires material to sustain itself. To survive, the personal self needs boundaries, coordinates, and history to maintain its form. We do not remember the past because we must; we remember because it provides sustenance.

Keeping the Story Alive is a philosophical inquiry into the economics of this labor. It explores the metabolic cost of resurrecting dead events and offers a manual for laying down the shovel—not by resolving the history, but by realizing that the present is the only reality that is actually alive, and therefore the only source of true sustenance.

Softcover, 29 pages, In a Sense Books, 2026