A concept · How People Actually Work · Psychology

Narrative Identity

You are the story you keep telling about yourself.

The offer is better on every line: pay, hours, the work itself. We turn it down, and the reason that comes out is "it is just not me". Nobody asked us to be anyone. A friend who calls herself a risk taker takes a job she cannot afford, and a friend who calls himself steady stays somewhere that is slowly sinking. Both call it choosing. Who is doing the choosing?

What Narrative Identity means

Narrative identity is the story each of us keeps telling about who we are, built from a chosen past and a hoped-for future, and used to decide what an action means. We are the story we keep telling about ourselves. The line is short; living with it is not. Owning it means we start to hear the plot doing the deciding: "people like me do not", "this is my comeback", "I always end up carrying it". We stop mistaking loyalty to a character for a judgement about the options. Before, a setback was simply what happened to us. After, we can see it being filed, as a turning point or as proof of a curse, and we notice that the filing is ours to change.

Narrative Identity examples: where it shows up

  • At work: the failed venture is a chapter in one person's hero story and a verdict in another's, and the next move follows the story, not the facts.
  • In a relationship: the row we keep having is often two plots colliding, each of us cast as the reasonable one.
  • In the news: we pick the movement whose story sounds like our own, and only later go looking for the policies.

Where it sits

Concept 5 of 5 in How People Actually Work, a journey in the course How the World Works.

See where Narrative Identity sits on the sky →

Before it← Game Theory

Nearest on the sky

A filled dot marks a star that is already open to walk.

Knowing it isn't owning it.
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