Turning your life into a "good story" may result in bad choices

[C C]

https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com...ge-do-good

EXCERPT: . . . At the same time, living a well-rounded life makes it harder for your life to have some other features that some philosophers have thought make lives go well. If you try a lot of different things, some of those aren’t going to pan out, at least not in the way you’d hoped; if some of your pursuits don’t connect to others, you have to figure out how to work through the friction between them. Maybe we can dismiss these as features of bad lives; it’s a mess and we’re all gonna die.

But what the Up documentaries show us is that good lives go like this too; to base our assessments of good lives exclusively or even in large part on their narrative arcs abstracts away from what makes life worth living.

If we try to turn our lives into good stories, we may find ourselves making choices that are bad for us: defining down our ambitions to where we know we can succeed, or exploring less of what life has to offer, or striving to achieve when it would be better for us to be content with amateurism.

So this is my paper. It’s called “Do Good Lives Make Good Stories?”, and it’s recently out in Phil Studies. The answer to the title’s question is, mostly, no, although, if you read it, you’ll see that the situation’s a lot more nuanced than that. I hope you like it... (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

If we try to turn our lives into good stories, we may find ourselves making choices that are bad for us: defining down our ambitions to where we know we can succeed, or exploring less of what life has to offer, or striving to achieve when it would be better for us to be content with amateurism.

I don't know that what makes a good story (dramatic and conflict driven) necessarily makes for a good life. Over the first 38 years of my life there WAS a lot of social activity and conflict from being with my family to being in school to working in successive jobs culminating in a 9 year stint in the U.S. Navy. But when I moved to Portland OR in 98 I shifted into a more internal and less social mode of being, filling my time with movies, TV, computer time, cooking, and walking in parks and museums. This more introverted phase of my life would not make a very good movie. Yet it has come to provide me with more meaning and purpose than my school/work years ever provided. I have come to question my programmed goals of being in a relationship and of working and of having lots of things. All those unchosen roles and values we are expected to pursue in conformity to our specific culture. Overall I am content with the way my life is, which as a story or a movie I'm sure would be very boring to outsiders.