Escaping narrative traps

Most of us will at some point feel under pressure to live our lives in ways that are consistent with the dominant social narratives about what it means to be a grown-up. From the fairy tales we hear as children to the life stories we construct for ourselves as adults, narratives shape many of the important and trivial decisions we make in life. We’re meant to find “the one”, to aspire to riches and high status, and so on.

The stories about how we ought to live can make life easier, and sometimes happier. The narrative trap is when doing what is expected of us makes us less happy than if we were to go against the grain of a prevailing story. Many single women have quite rightly opted out of finding the one, and they are probably happier for it (although none of us can ever truly know what having lived an alternative life would have felt like).

The social narratives around “reaching” for more are a little different to those surrounding how “related” we are to other people. Poverty makes us miserable, and so it makes sense to aspire to move up the income ladder when you’re on the lower rungs. But reaching ever further upwards the higher you go is associated with diminishing returns i.e., the hit on happiness from more money falls as your income grows. There may even come a point at which some of us become less happy as we trade off other determinants of happiness, such as time with family and friends, in the pursuit of more. In other words, for the sake of our happiness, there may come a time at which we should say “just enough” and not “more please”.

Reining in, let alone going against, dominant narratives about how to live is not easy. We must therefore be realistic: it’s hard to stand out when everyone else is fitting in. But the first thing we can all do is to get over ourselves and accept that social narratives do indeed drive much of how we behave. And that’s fine, because those stories will be good for some of us some of the time. But not all of us all of the time. Acceptance is the first step to change of any kind, so let’s all accept how much we like fitting in. This was the main piece of advice in Happy Ever After and I pretty much stopped there.