#47: Is your life story dragging you down?
Do you view your life as a narrative? If you do, you might be holding yourself back in ways you don't even realise. From seeing failures where there aren't any, to restricting your choices to those that fit the story, unhelpful views about what shape a successful life should take are happiness-deleting distractions from what's really important. Join your imperfect friend for the lowdown on how you can change the narrative to one that fits you better - or even reject the life-is-a-story thing altogether.
References:
Setiya, K. 2022: Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (Penguin).
Strawson, G. 2015: 'I am not a story', Aeon (https://aeon.co/essays/let-s-ditch-the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story)
Episode transcript:
Is your life story dragging you down?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Do you view your life as a story in which you’re the protagonist? If so, is that story working for you to help you live as well as you’re capable of living? Or, might it be holding you back, narrowing your world view, and constraining your choices? I’ve had so many coaching clients who are weighed down by the unhelpful stories they tell themselves about their lives that I decided I should get around to making a podcast episode about it, and so here I am. These clients often don’t even realise what they’re doing. Their my-life-is-a-narrative outlook is second nature to them - so much so, that it doesn’t occur to them that they are free to question it, to replace the narrative with another one, or to completely reject the idea that they need any sort of narrative at all. Bear with me, and I’ll get to all this.
First of all, let me tell you about what sort of thing I mean when I talk about people telling themselves unhelpful stories about their lives. Here are some examples, each of which has been instantiated by multiple clients of mine. Some clients are facing a big decision in their lives - a career change or a divorce or a move abroad - and rather than considering all the options that might realistically be available to them, they view themselves as constrained by what they have done so far. Their view is, sort of, ‘the next chapter in the story of my life needs to follow on from the last, in a meaningful way’. So, if they trained and worked as a historian, they tell themselves that whatever they do next has to use their historian skills in some way, otherwise it’s a waste. They can’t possibly have an abrupt change and do something with no connection to what they’ve been doing so far. The question of what they’d most like to do doesn’t even come into it - the narrative comes first. They can’t run off and join the circus or retrain as a hair stylist. The story of their life needs to involve each successive chapter building on the last. Never mind that their time as a historian might have been fulfilling in its own way, regardless of what happens next. Never mind that sometimes some particular path works for us for a while, and then it stops working for us, and our happiness might be best served by something completely different.
Our culture (and I’m only qualified to talk about British culture here) feeds us certain types of narrative - and this brings me on to another species of coaching client. There’s this view about what a successful life looks like: that it involves spending the first 15 or 20 years of life getting an education or training and working out what you want to do with the rest of your life, and then you spend the rest of your life working towards that. You pick one career and that’s you forever. You get married and stay with that one person forever. Never mind how you might change over the years. Sometimes we don’t even question this view of the successful life until we achieve it and then find that actually it hasn’t made us happy. I’ve seen that a few times too: some of my coaching clients come to me because they have achieved their dreams, they’ve climbed the career ladder to the top, they’ve ticked off everything on the bucket list - and they are left with a hollow sense of ‘well, what now?’ They’re bewildered. They’ve written their life narrative to the end - or at least to the dramatic climax - and only then has it occurred to them that maybe it’s been the wrong one.
A lot of the time, the problem for clients like this isn’t really anything about their lives. Merely deciding that your career or your relationship or your lifestyle isn’t working for you isn’t clearly bad at all - and often it’s the complete reverse. It’s pretty difficult to get to that stage without having been enriched in some way by the career or relationship or whatever, or without having had good or otherwise valuable experiences along the way. The problem for clients like this is the narrative: what they tell themselves about the meaning of their lives, and how they evaluate their lives relative to the narrative shape that they think they should be following.
If any of this rings a bell, what can you do? There are a few options. One is to stick with the idea that life is a narrative, but explore different options for what that narrative might look like. That culturally pervasive narrative envisages life as a single, continuous story from beginning to end: you go to school, you decide to become an accountant, you train as an accountant and then climb the ranks, then you become a retired accountant and potter about a bit until you die. Somewhere along the way you get married and have kids, and you stay with the person you married until one or other of you dies; meanwhile, your kids follow similar-but-different narratives of their own. Digress from this narrative at any point - your career doesn’t work out, you don’t get married, you’re not heterosexual, you don’t have kids, you get divorced - and there’s a risk of feeling like you’ve failed for absolutely no good reason other than that you haven’t lived according to this particular narrative, which may not even have suited you in the first place. If that’s you, you could find it helpful to just pick a different kind of narrative. We’re not all novels: stories that begin at birth and continue until death. Some of us are collections of short stories, or books of poetry. I talked about this sort of thing with regard to careers in episode #29: You need to date your career choices, not marry them, where I challenged the idea that picking a career is a serious business and once you made your choice you had to stick with it forever. In a similar vein, I had a session once with a client where together we came up with the idea that her life was less like a novel and more like a DJ set, made up of very different tracks that segued into each other. Viewed in that way, her life was unfolding exactly as it was meant to unfold.
Even entertaining different forms of narrative carries a danger, though. Much of the valuable stuff in life comes from what wasn’t in the script at all. This is familiar from countless motivational posters that say things like, ‘It’s the journey that counts, not the destination’ and ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’. The message is that by prioritising the narrative we miss out on something more valuable. As the philosopher Kieran Setiya writes in is book, Life is Hard, ‘Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive’. Setiya explains that focusing on the narrative can lure us into placing too much emphasis on the end goal of whatever it is that we’re doing, and that can be unfulfilling. Let me quote a passage from his book:
‘I spent two decades of my own life striving for success in academia. I don’t regret that. What I do regret is treating my life as a project to complete: first earn a PhD, then get a job; tenure and promotion; teach a class, publish an article, a book, then another and another and another—to what end? Life held only more of the achievements and frustrations of the past, a mere accumulation of deeds; and the present felt empty.’
Rather than focus on projects whose value is realised only at the end, he encourages us to focus on activities that don’t culminate in an outcome, and which we can’t ‘exhaust’. He gives the examples of ‘parenting, spending time with friends, and listening to music’. These are important things, and because they’re not defined in terms of a particular outcome, they’re also things that don’t lend themselves easily to thinking in terms of succeeding or failing at them. Nor are they things whose value is wasted or negated by what happens next; by their role in the narrative.
Another, more radical, option for you if you feel like your narrative might be weighing you down is to reject the idea that any sort of narrative is necessary for a good, meaningful life. This is the view taken by the philosopher Galen Strawson. He argues that it’s simply false that, as he puts it, ‘We story ourselves and we are our stories’. This might be true for some people, but not for all. He’s one of those who doesn’t ‘story’ himself. He thinks that people like him, whom he calls non-narrativists, are overlooked in philosophy, psychology, and other fields, where there is - he cites a huge range of heavyweight thinkers to demonstrate this - an overwhelming consensus that taking a narrative view of our own lives is something we humans all do, and that this is a positive thing. If that sounds alien to you, you’re in good company with Strawson. He doesn’t think life needs to have any sort of sequence to be rich. He tells us, ‘I think self-knowledge comes best in bits and pieces’.
A really empowering lesson from all this is that if you’re in a position where you feel frustration or disappointment or dissatisfaction with the way your life is going, you can take steps to remedy this without making any ‘concrete’ changes in your life. Which narrative - if any - you choose to ascribe to your life is completely in your hands. Changing or rejecting it is cost-free. Trying on other narratives for size is risk-free and fully reversible. To test out what works best for you, take some time to reflect on areas of your life where you see yourself as having failed. According to what set of standards or world-view or template-for-living does your life count as a failure in this area? Did you get any say in choosing that set of standards or world-view or template? Would you have chosen it if you had? If your answer to these questions is ‘no’, you’re free to reject it. And what about those decisions about where you go next: if you’re thinking of ending a relationship or changing careers or moving abroad or having (or not having) children, do you feel under pressure to move in a particular direction because of your views about what shape a good life should take, regardless of whether that shape actually fits who you are? Again, you’re free to reject it.
As a cautionary note, though, let’s go back to that ‘focus on the journey, not the destination’ thing. Our views about what shape a life should take can be pretty deeply ingrained and difficult to shift, even when those views aren’t working for us. Getting rid of them is likely to be less like taking off a jacket, and more like trying to wash a stain out of the jacket. Expect it to take time and effort, and to leave a residue that might never go away completely. You might never reach a stage where you can tick off ‘reject unhelpful narratives’ on your bucket list. But you can adopt a mindset where you question why it is that you take a negative view of certain aspects of yourself or your life, and whether that’s because there’s really something negative about those aspects, or whether they simply don’t fit a template that you never signed up to anyway.
Take it easy, friends. See you next time.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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