"Lore": why we tell our lives like a saga

The word comes from video games and sprawling fictional universes: "lore" is the mass of stories, details and old episodes that give an invented world its depth. Then it slipped into real life. People now talk about the "lore" of their friend group, the "lore" of a teacher, their own "lore" — that collection of anecdotes, nicknames and old nonsense only insiders understand.

Every group is a small universe

Just listen to two long-time friends and you'll hear it: they speak a language of their own. A perfectly dull sentence sets off helpless laughter, a first name keeps coming back with no explanation, an ordinary object clearly has a history. That's exactly what lore is: accumulated references that mean nothing on the outside and everything on the inside. Calling it "lore" rather than "memories" is a way of admitting that a group of friends works like a fictional universe, with its recurring characters, its founding episodes and its jokes that never die.

Casting yourself as a character

The shift gets more interesting when you apply the word to yourself. Saying "that's my lore" means stepping back a little from your own story: mistakes become episodes, strange stretches become chapters, failures become origin stories. There's something healthy about that distance. Seeing yourself as a character whose story is still running is far more bearable than judging yourself on one single moment — a bad chapter is still just a chapter, and there are always more left to write.

Careful not to write for an audience

The risk is ending up living with one eye on the narrative. Choosing an experience because it'll make a good story, turning every irritation into an episode to recount, keeping a feud going because it makes a good character: at that point the lore isn't telling your life anymore, it's directing it. And the best lore was never written to be published anyway. It builds itself, among the people who were there, and it only makes sense from the inside — which is precisely what makes it worth something.