We make sense of our lives by telling ourselves life stories.
If we learn good storytelling skills, we can rely on them when we have to face up to, and get beyond, the things that happen to everyone every so often in life that, quite properly, make us unhappy for a while.
Having this mature, practised storytelling skill is part of what makes us grown ups (at the final stage of "ego development") and is how we create and preserve our eudaimonic well-being, the belief that life is meaningful and worthwhile. [Narrative Identity and Eudaimonic Well-Being - Bauer, McAdams and Pals]
If storytelling is something everyone has to learn in order to be happy, then the value of participatory media is clear.
You only need to read Secret Tweet or One Sentence for a few days to recognise that it is people rehearsing difficult chapters in their lives, trying them out as a story. And also just trying out storytelling - not everything on One Sentence is about difficult moments by any means.
This storytelling practise doesn't even have to happen in places that have been designed for publishing. What else is World of Warcraft, for example, if it's not a training ground for practising narratives.
But the storytelling we have to do isn't just about the process. Doing it, in itself, isn't enough to create eudaimonic well-being.
It has to be a good story. And good is an objective measure of literary quality. Badly written life stories won't help as much.
A couple of years ago I did some work with psychologists who were interested in rumination - the unhelpful dwelling on ourselves and the past that we do when depressed rather than just bog-standard unhappy. The psychologists found that depressed people tended to remember in abstract, unspecific terms - "I'm always making mistakes, that's why I'm a failure." rather than using real, concrete details - "Getting drunk and photocopying my arse at the Christmas party wasn't the best way to get promoted."
What sparked my interest straight away was that it sounded almost exactly like judgements about good and bad writing.
The difference between good and bad poetry, for example, is pretty much down to two things: firstly using abstractions and generalisations instead of concrete descriptions; and secondly not being careful with words as things - all words bring tones of voice and echoes with them, and these have to be handled.
So the first rule of writing a good life story is be concrete not abstract: what really happened? What are the details only a witness would know? (If you want to practise try this. You'll find it's a lot harder than it sounds, but you'll be a better writer for it.)
The second rule is that there are already a lot of stories out there.
Bauer and his colleagues looked at a lot of life stories reported by Americans and found that they were, in a nutshell, very Hollywood. The Hero (in this case the person telling their own story), is a rugged, self-reliant individual, and uses their own god-given resources to overcome obstacles outside of themselves, in order to triumph in the end, and ride off into the sunset. Growth and progress are important narrative structures for life stories (the folk wisdom for this would be "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"), but Bauer points out that this is a very culturally specific template, modelled on the cultural products of one society, and might not suit other parts of the world, even though those products are exported everywhere.
And if the people with the power to control mainstream stories give them all the same worldview, a worldview that says powerful people got there because they earned it, then those might not always be helpful models for the rest of us. What if our rugged individualism and god-given resources don't triumph? Trying to hammer our life stories into the shape given by the X Factor, for example, might not lead to eudaimonic well-being. We can't all be Susan Boyle after all.
So the third rule of life-storytelling might be "There Can't Always Be a Happy Ending".
But the danger is that there might be some events that are so overwhelming that we won't have enough storytelling resources to form a story from them, or that no one could have. The space-eagles might not arrive in real life.
It's this danger that drives our learning and practising of stories - reading a book, going to the pictures, hearing a joke, playing World of Warcraft - and it must have an evolutionary force behind it.
But some people, through no fault of their own, are more at risk of meeting overwhelming events, or meeting them more often, or finally running out of resources and resilience, than others. In some kinds of story that might be called bad luck, but more often it is to do with how we all, between us, choose to organise our world to the advantage of some of us and not others.
Fate makes everyone's life a page turner, but we have a responsibility to make sure we all have a fair chance to tell a good story to ourselves.
If we learn good storytelling skills, we can rely on them when we have to face up to, and get beyond, the things that happen to everyone every so often in life that, quite properly, make us unhappy for a while.
Having this mature, practised storytelling skill is part of what makes us grown ups (at the final stage of "ego development") and is how we create and preserve our eudaimonic well-being, the belief that life is meaningful and worthwhile. [Narrative Identity and Eudaimonic Well-Being - Bauer, McAdams and Pals]
If storytelling is something everyone has to learn in order to be happy, then the value of participatory media is clear.
You only need to read Secret Tweet or One Sentence for a few days to recognise that it is people rehearsing difficult chapters in their lives, trying them out as a story. And also just trying out storytelling - not everything on One Sentence is about difficult moments by any means.
This storytelling practise doesn't even have to happen in places that have been designed for publishing. What else is World of Warcraft, for example, if it's not a training ground for practising narratives.
But the storytelling we have to do isn't just about the process. Doing it, in itself, isn't enough to create eudaimonic well-being.
It has to be a good story. And good is an objective measure of literary quality. Badly written life stories won't help as much.
A couple of years ago I did some work with psychologists who were interested in rumination - the unhelpful dwelling on ourselves and the past that we do when depressed rather than just bog-standard unhappy. The psychologists found that depressed people tended to remember in abstract, unspecific terms - "I'm always making mistakes, that's why I'm a failure." rather than using real, concrete details - "Getting drunk and photocopying my arse at the Christmas party wasn't the best way to get promoted."
What sparked my interest straight away was that it sounded almost exactly like judgements about good and bad writing.
The difference between good and bad poetry, for example, is pretty much down to two things: firstly using abstractions and generalisations instead of concrete descriptions; and secondly not being careful with words as things - all words bring tones of voice and echoes with them, and these have to be handled.
So the first rule of writing a good life story is be concrete not abstract: what really happened? What are the details only a witness would know? (If you want to practise try this. You'll find it's a lot harder than it sounds, but you'll be a better writer for it.)
The second rule is that there are already a lot of stories out there.
Bauer and his colleagues looked at a lot of life stories reported by Americans and found that they were, in a nutshell, very Hollywood. The Hero (in this case the person telling their own story), is a rugged, self-reliant individual, and uses their own god-given resources to overcome obstacles outside of themselves, in order to triumph in the end, and ride off into the sunset. Growth and progress are important narrative structures for life stories (the folk wisdom for this would be "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"), but Bauer points out that this is a very culturally specific template, modelled on the cultural products of one society, and might not suit other parts of the world, even though those products are exported everywhere.
And if the people with the power to control mainstream stories give them all the same worldview, a worldview that says powerful people got there because they earned it, then those might not always be helpful models for the rest of us. What if our rugged individualism and god-given resources don't triumph? Trying to hammer our life stories into the shape given by the X Factor, for example, might not lead to eudaimonic well-being. We can't all be Susan Boyle after all.
So the third rule of life-storytelling might be "There Can't Always Be a Happy Ending".
A book that reads "Once upon a time we all knew it was going to be all right in the end." isn't going to be much of a page turner. To feel eudaimonic well-being we need a sense of narrative structure, not just a personal history. And narratives need an uncertain future that the reader thinks forward into - "The hero is hanging from a cliff edge on Mars by her fingertips! When I tune in next week will she be rescued by the space-eagles or fall to her death on the rocks below?!"
This is why even though religious conviction is strongly predictive of happiness, I don't think religious life stories are well written: "Once upon a time God said it was going to be all right in the end. The End. For ever and ever amen."
Eudaimonic well-being can and does survive bad, unfair and meaningless things happening, and in a way, without the possibility of these events it can't exist - life is just blissed out hedonic happiness. What we do at these moments is rewrite our life story to accommodate the bad thing in the narrative, often as the value of understanding about ourselves and the world that we wouldn't have had otherwise.But the danger is that there might be some events that are so overwhelming that we won't have enough storytelling resources to form a story from them, or that no one could have. The space-eagles might not arrive in real life.
It's this danger that drives our learning and practising of stories - reading a book, going to the pictures, hearing a joke, playing World of Warcraft - and it must have an evolutionary force behind it.
But some people, through no fault of their own, are more at risk of meeting overwhelming events, or meeting them more often, or finally running out of resources and resilience, than others. In some kinds of story that might be called bad luck, but more often it is to do with how we all, between us, choose to organise our world to the advantage of some of us and not others.
Fate makes everyone's life a page turner, but we have a responsibility to make sure we all have a fair chance to tell a good story to ourselves.
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