This entire thread seems somewhat missing without the famous predecessor article Against Narrativity <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lchc.ucsd.edu&#x2F;mca&#x2F;Paper&#x2F;against_narrativity.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lchc.ucsd.edu&#x2F;mca&#x2F;Paper&#x2F;against_narrativity.pdf</a> by the same author.<p>The linked article provides some phrases&#x2F;concepts which seem more amenable to grappling with&#x2F;interacting with. Specifically, it breaks the concept of Narrativity into the psychological Narrativity thesis (That it is human nature to experience their lives as a story or collection of stories, with narrative arcs and plot points as we&#x27;re used to describing in fiction),
and the ethical Narrativity thesis (That the act of experiencing&#x2F;conceiving of one&#x27;s life as a narrative is a capital-g Good Thing, and that narrativity is essential to full personhood).<p>From there, it splits outlooks based on truth values. One could think that humans are innately narrative-driven in their thoughts and that this is good (many people here). Alternately, one could think that people are narrative-driven and this isn&#x27;t good (This also shows up in the article). Contrarily, one could think that people aren&#x27;t innately narrative (but that it&#x27;s good to aspire to), or lastly that narrativism isn&#x27;t innate, and that it isn&#x27;t good to assume that this is the case.<p>I find the last one compelling, myself. Many people do continually tell themselves the story of themselves, but this isn&#x27;t innate&#x2F;required. One can have a series of events, see the causality, and have plans for the future without a Narrative. Believing in the Narrative would suggest things like believing that your life is part of the Campbellian Hero&#x27;s Journey.<p>This is sometimes helpful, as it can suggest to people that they can hold on for things to get better, but it&#x27;s also where we get things like the decried Nice Guy behavior where men expect that inputting kindness coins leads to the sex payoff, because those are the stories they&#x27;re immersed in and the ones they believe in.  I&#x27;ve seen schizophrenics describe their mental models as taking this pattern-matching wiring in humans and having it turned up to eleven. Seeing data points and watching connections form to where there&#x27;s a Grand Narrative connecting things. (Not a point against them, though to me at least it does point towards narrative pattern-matching as something people can vary more and less in feeling tendencies towards.)<p>As for myself, I sometimes tell narrative tales of myself, but it feels like a deliberate thing. I can describe my past in narrative arcs (and it&#x27;s a really good point made above that there&#x27;s many incentives to do so in the workplace), but it&#x27;s not something I feel is actually the case or needs to be the case. &quot;Plucky young farmboy gets into computers, is drawn to the Big City by Megacorp, has a fall-from-grace there&quot;. Where does the story go from here? Under a Narrativist mindset, there&#x27;s some predictive capacity here. Fall-from-grace leads to soul-searching and redemption? If we could use narratives to predict the future, that would definitely point towards Narrative as a driving force. On the other hand, being able to say &quot;No, my story doesn&#x27;t have to go like this, I don&#x27;t have to have a story leading me in this direction&quot; is powerful. By throwing off those chains of narrativity, it allows some measure of greater control.<p>So yes, I think people are drawn towards personal narratives. They&#x27;re compelling. We&#x27;re surrounded by stories all the time. There&#x27;s incentives to talk about one&#x27;s past in that way. But they can be confining, and they can lead to harmful behavior as people are immersed in stories suggesting specific arcs.