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The Meaningful Life is Storied
Why we should tell the best stories about ourselves
Is your life a story? Are we literally the authors of our life? Should we be?
Jared Bauer from Wisecrack argues that we shouldn’t think in such grandiose terms, because to do so is to set ourselves up for disappointment. If we don’t receive the redemption we expect, we’ll think our suffering has been in vain. Instead, he suggests, we should come to terms with the pointlessness of our hardships.
“The thing is, real life is not structured like a story. There are no arcs,” he writes. “Suffering is not the second act to your inevitable fairy tale resolution. Suffering is simply suffering. Your suffering does not ennoble you, nor does it make you a moral exemplar. It just hurts.”
In fact, life is structured as a story; moreover, that shouldn’t be surprising. Like songs, stories resonate because they reflect that threefold structure of having a beginning, middle, and an end. Everything in the universe, in that sense, has a basic narrative structure, which is perhaps why we don’t credit events as having a pattern or an order unless they have that threefold division. Like everything else, we come into existence (birth and the growth of childhood), we undergo a stable period with which we most identify (maturity in adulthood), and we…
