The Cost Of The Narrative
When losing feels worse than winning feels good.
Years ago, when I worked on Wall St., I used to play a video game called Aperion (Centipede with better graphics) on my downtime. One day, a co-worker who also played posted a high score of 40,000, and bragged he was better than me.
Like MJ said, I took it personally.
I came in the next day and set the stack of reports that were due aside. I played Aperion from 9 a.m. to lunchtime, then hit pause. I came back from lunch, resumed my game, and played until it was time to go home.
Next day, same drill. Morning to lunch. Lunch to end of day. Pause.
About midway through the afternoon on day three, my game finally ended. My high score was in excess of 4,400,000. I showed this to the co-worker who’d taunted me, and retired permanently.
I missed three days of work, which I had to make up, just to prove a point. I hate losing more than I love winning. Losing hurts worse than winning feels good. That’s when I realized: for me, winning wasn’t about the temporary dopamine fix.
It was about changing the narrative.
What’s true for individuals scales to societies. Every civilization has the lie they live inside, fighting to keep truth at bay. The gap between them is the size of the lie. The bigger that gap, the more energy it takes to drag the narrative toward reality.
Manifest Destiny. The Lost Cause. Meritocracy.
For those harmed by the lies, winning was never about feeling good. It was life or death. The cost of changing the narrative was astronomical, on an individual and collective level.
When you’re constitutionally defined as less than human, you take it personally.
Sometimes that meant having an open-casket funeral for your murdered child. Sometimes it meant walking to work for over a year. Sometimes it meant dogs and firehoses.
When the lie is inferiority and the cost is inhumanity, you pay in oceans of blood.
State-sanctioned violence shaped the harmed and shielded differently. The former transformed refusal into resilience. T’weren’t long ago when a public lynching could cow whole communities into feigned deference. Fortunately, empires lack imagination. Over time the old ways stopped working—and started backfiring.
Repeated exposure to fire tempered resolve until it became unbreakable.
The latter committed to preserving a narrative that served and mostly protected them. When faced with generational invoices, the dopamine hit of entitlement became sacrosanct. Preserving the lie of privilege justified their protected status.
Until the lie forced them to admit: they’re expendable too.
Claims of “this is not my country” ring hollow to those who’ve paid to live in facts. When perceptions of immunity are revoked, when the line between “we the people” and “those people” blurs, the question is simple:
Do you hate the truth more than you love the lie?
The death of one white woman moves the needle of social consciousness more than ten thousand Black and Brown bodies. Not because they are unequal in value.
Society changes when the lie moves.
When SNAP benefits are cut. When health care prices spike and the right to choose becomes “your body, my choice.” When farm subsidies vanish. When a generation of children learns active-shooter drills, even after Sandy Hook.
When the lie of supremacy removes its hood and admits it doesn’t judge people by the color of their skin, but by their usefulness? That’s when narrative inertia has caught up to the moment. That’s when empathy forms; not from altruism, from epiphany:
You can die inside the lie, or admit the story you told yourself was never true.
Few things are more expensive than long-held belief systems. Truth becomes cheaper than denial the moment enough people are wired together that they refuse to pay for the lie alone anymore. Surrendering the imagined advantage of melanin deficiency shatters the identities of those who built their entire sense of self on myth.
Them becomes we when enough of us have had enough.
Those who benefit will double down. Harm will grow increasingly indiscriminate. When maintaining the lie metastasizes beyond the price of eggs into literal safety, into door-to-door raids in suburban communities?
Congratulations. Losing now feels worse than winning feels good.
This country is at the crossroads. The choices are simple. Cling to the lie. Preserve diminishing comforts and pretend it’s your eyes, and not your leaders, that are lying. Kick the can down the generational road and hope the next generation can afford the interest on moral cowardice.
Or learn to hate losing more than you love winning.
Don’t wait until a system built on extraction extracts you. Don’t wait until the cost of maintaining the lie comes knocking at your door. Kill the old story before it kills you. Join those who’ve fronted the bill for centuries. Commit to changing the narrative.
The truth costs more up front. The lie exacts a toll forever. Start taking it personally.
Excellent article.