I’ve seen a few tweets this week about how sales of Moleskine notebooks are up and it got me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves.

I think you can draw a line that starts with writing a journal, then passes through blogging and vlogging and (for now) ends at Instagram stories and other microvlogging platforms. I think the line is about building narratives out of our lives.

I’ve been keeping journals on and off for thirteen years. As much as I enjoy writing them I don’t think they’d be of much interest to anyone else and even I almost never read them back. Reading the old ones, especially, is like hearing my own recorded voice: grim).

When you write a journal you build a narrative out of the events of your day or your week or your year or the part of your life. You massage the events into a story that makes sense, drawing out some meaning, finding some story arcs or at least some cohesion. It helps make sense of it all. It’s also fun.

I see something similar being done (and sometimes do it myself) through Instagram stories. You string together some videos and images and use them to tell a story. The difference is that the story is for other people, although you probably build the narrative you want to tell yourself too.

You can monetise your journals by selling memoirs or turning them into stories and autobiographies. You can make the writing into a product.

Now the narratives get monetised in more obscure ways and often the product turns out to be the person building them. There are professional vloggers like Casey Neistat who build video narratives out of their life and monetise them by taking a slice of the ad money. Less clear cut, you get newsletter writers like Christian Payne, who monetise their narratives by building their personal brand and advertising their services. Even less tangibly you get Instagram influencers, who monetise their narratives by taking sponsorship and placing products into them.

I wonder what that’ll do to the stories. With a personal journal there’s an incentive to bend the story to keep yourself entertained or make yourself feel good about your life. When the story is for other people there’s an incentive to bend it to make it more entertaining or neatly-packaged. But with microvlogging the incentive is to warp the narratives to show products in the best light, even when that product is a person.

So instead of the incentive being to entertain, now it’s to advertise. And the basic formula of advertising is to make your audience feel deficient because they don’t have your product. That’s nothing new and most people seem to accept it as a way of paying for things. But when those highly-polished, largely fictional stories are intertwined in your Instagram feed with the posts from your actual friends (who are, of course, also building narratives with their posts, but without the financial incentive) it can be a bit depressing.

I wonder if that’s why sales of Moleskine notebooks are up. Blogging and vlogging services have reminded people how much fun it is to tell stories and people are remembering that you can do that perfectly well without the #sp tag.