"Lore": why we tell our own lives like a series

At first, "lore" was everything that makes up the story of a fictional universe: the legends of a video game, a character's secret past, the details you uncover by digging. Then the word slipped out of imaginary worlds and landed on our own lives. Today, when someone says "it's a whole lore," they mean their anecdotes, their old dramas, the little stories that make them who they are. This repurposing is smarter than it looks, and it says something about our relationship with storytelling.

From fictional universe to your own life

Borrowing a word reserved for imaginary worlds to talk about yourself isn't trivial: it amounts to treating yourself like a character with a past, arcs and plot twists. Your middle-school breakup, your weird style phase, the legendary drama in the friend group — all of it becomes "chapters" of your lore. The idea is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it changes how you look at what you live through: instead of a string of unconnected moments, your experience takes the shape of a story with coherence, memory, even nods to the past.

Turning the ordinary into a story

The real charm of the word is that it gives weight to tiny things. A forgotten embarrassment, a quirk, an evening that went sideways: by calling them "lore," you turn them into material worth telling, often with a smile. It's a way of putting distance between yourself and what marked you, turning it into a story rather than just enduring it. Telling your life like a series also means giving yourself permission to laugh at it, to defuse the awkward episodes and keep the good ones as references you bring back out with your friends.

A shared language between friends

Lore really comes into its own with other people. In a friend group, there are always those stories everyone knows, those iconic lines you only have to quote to get a laugh, those nicknames no one truly remembers the origin of. All of that is the shared lore: a common memory that binds the group and creates a sense of belonging. Getting the references, knowing the old episodes, is a bit of proof that you're part of the adventure. Ultimately, calling it "lore" is just a modern way of saying we love telling our own stories — and that our stories matter.