Happy Endings and Illusions of Narrative Coherence

J.D. Trout

A diary accurately records the quality of our current experience; our retrospective evaluations do not. Unfortunately, it is not our faithful diaries, but our remembered experiences, that predict our future choices. So your vacation to France may have been far less pleasant than you recall; but don’t worry, you’ll go again. Research by figures like Ed Diener and Daniel Kahneman show that our intuitive standards for faring well are not merely additive; they do not simply add up segments during which we fare well. Instead, they weigh heavily the peak and terminal sequence of an episode (the Peak-End Rule) and the quality of the terminal sequence of a life (the “James Dean effect”). At the same time, David Velleman’s work reflects philosophical standards that agree with lay intuitions, noting that we may judge differently two lives that have the same integrals of happiness, as long as they have different narrative structures. I argue that findings in autobiographical memory show that the apparent narrative coherence in one’s life is mere illusion, an artifact of retrospective confabulation designed to maintain or enhance our present self-esteem. Research in positive psychology shows that faring well depends less on narrative continuity and more on participation in enjoyable activities, whether or not those pleasant engagements are tied to our overarching life-aims. Living this lesson requires the kind of discipline found in well-tested reasoning strategies.