Part of it must be the normal busyness of life: Who has time to ask another human about their story, when we have kids to pick up and groceries to shop for and TikTok videos to watch? Part of it must also be fear of the rejection that may come if I make a social advance toward you and am rebuffed. Social anxiety is real. But perhaps there’s a simpler and much more fixable reason for why people don’t ask each other about their life stories or talk about their own.
One day, about a decade ago, Nicholas Epley was commuting by train to his office at the University of Chicago. As a behavioral psychologist, he was well aware that social connection is the number one source of happiness, success, good health, and much of the sweetness of life. Human beings are social animals who love to communicate with each other. Yet on this commuter train that day, he looked around and it hit him: Nobody was talking to anyone. It was just headphones and screens. And he wondered: Why aren’t these people doing the thing that makes them the happiest? He later conducted some experiments in which he induced people to talk with other commuters during their rides downtown. When the ride was over and they arrived at their destination, researchers were there to ask them how much they enjoyed the trip. The comments were overwhelmingly positive. People, introverts as well as extroverts, reported that a commute spent talking with someone was much more fun than a commute spent locked into your screen.
So why don’t people talk more? Epley continued his research and came up with an answer to the mystery: We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal. If you give people a little nudge, they will share their life stories with enthusiasm. As I hope I’ve made clear by now, people are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood. And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen. The way you fix that is simple, easy, and fun: Ask people to tell you their stories.
Since Epley told me about his research, I’ve become more likely to talk to strangers on a plane or train or at a bar. And as a result, I’ve had many more memorable experiences than I would have had if I had just been ensconced with my headphones. A few days before writing these words, I was on a plane from JFK airport in New York to Reagan airport in D.C. I was seated next to an elderly gentleman, and instead of burying myself in my book, I asked him where he was coming from, and then I asked him about his life. It turned out he had been born in Russia and had immigrated to the United States alone at age seventeen. To earn a living, he started by sweeping floors at a factory and then wound up exporting T-shirts and other articles of clothing from the States to the developing world. He told me about how much he used to love Donald Trump and why he had begun to sour on him. Then he pulled out his phone and showed me photos from the vacation in Italy he had just completed—cruising around on big yachts, surrounded by glamorous-looking people, hoisting bottles of champagne. This guy was still running around like a playboy at age eighty! He ended up telling me the whole story of his life, which involved more twists and turns—and more divorces—than I could keep track of. He’s not the type of person who would be in my inner circle of friendship, but it was really fun to peek into his world.
Since learning about Epley’s and McAdams’s research, I’ve also tried to make my conversations storytelling conversations and not just comment-making conversations. The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode. The paradigmatic mode is analytical. It’s making an argument. It’s a mental state that involves amassing data, collecting evidence, and offering hypotheses. A lot of us live our professional lives in the paradigmatic mode: making PowerPoint presentations, writing legal briefs, issuing orders, or even, in my case, cobbling together opinion columns. Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding data, making the case for a proposition, and analyzing trends across populations. It is not great for seeing an individual person.
Narrative thinking, on the other hand, is necessary for understanding the unique individual in front of you. Stories capture the unique presence of a person’s character and how he or she changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. When someone is telling you their story, you get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. You get to experience their experience.
We live in a culture that is paradigmatic rich and narrative poor. In Washington, for example, we have these political talk shows that avoid anything personal. A senator or some newsmaker comes on to offer talking points on behalf of this or that partisan position. The host asks gotcha questions, scripted in advance, to challenge this or that position. The guests spit out a bunch of canned talking-point answers. The whole thing is set up as gladiatorial verbal combat. Just once I’d love to have a host put aside the questions and say, “Just tell me who you are.” It would be so much more interesting, and it would lead to a healthier political atmosphere. But we don’t live in a culture that encourages that.
What you do for a living shapes who you become. If you spend most of your day in paradigmatic mode, you’re likely to slip into depersonalized habits of thought; you may begin to regard storytelling as non-rigorous or childish, and if you do that, you will constantly misunderstand people. So when I’m in a conversation with someone now, I’m trying to push against that and get us into narrative mode. I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” That prompts a story.
Then there is the habit of taking people back in time: Where’d you grow up? When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way? I’m not shy about asking people about their childhoods: What did you want to be when you were a kid? What did your parents want you to be? Finally, I try to ask about intentions and goals. When people are talking to you about their intentions, they are implicitly telling you about where they have been and where they hope to go. Recently, for example, my wife and I were sitting around with a brilliant woman who had retired from a job she’d held for many years. We asked her a simple question: How do you hope to spend the years ahead? All sorts of stuff spilled out: How she was coping with losing the identity that her job had given her. How, for so long, people came to her asking for things, but now she was forced to humble herself and approach others for favors. She told us she had already come to realize that she was a poor predictor of what made her happy. Her original ideas about what retirement would look like weren’t working; now she found it was best just to open herself up to unexpected possibilities and let things in. The story she told us about her previous few years was fascinating, but the best part was that her narrative was so open-ended; her posture toward the future was one of readiness, acceptance, and delight.
The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of. And you can endure present pains only if you can see them as part of a story that will yield future benefits. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story,” as the Danish writer Isak Dinesen said.
Thus I now work hard to push against the paradigmatic pressures of our culture, and to “storify” life. “This is what fools people,” the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once observed. “A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and tries to live his life as if he were recounting them.”
As people are telling me their stories, I’m listening hard for a few specific things. First, I’m listening for the person’s characteristic tone of voice. Just as every piece of writing has an implied narrator—the person the writer wants you to think he is—every person has a characteristic narrative tone: sassy or sarcastic, ironic or earnest, cheerful or grave. The narrative tone reflects the person’s basic attitude toward the world—is it safe or threatening, welcoming, disappointing, or absurd? A person’s narrative tone often reveals their sense of “self-efficacy,” their overall confidence in their own abilities.
That inner voice is one of the greatest miracles in all nature. Life itself can often seem like a blizzard of random events: illnesses, accidents, betrayals, strokes of good and bad luck. Yet inside each person there is this little voice trying to make sense of it all. This little voice is trying to take the seemingly scattershot events of a life and organize them into a story that has coherence, meaning, and purpose.
Think about it: You have a three-pound hunk of neural tissue in your skull, and from this, somehow, conscious thoughts emerge. You emerge. No one understands how this happens! No one understands how the brain and body create the mind, so at the center of the study of every person there is just a giant mystery before which we all stand in awe.
The odd thing about this little voice, this storyteller, is that it comes and goes. When researchers study the inner voice, they find that for some people, the inner voice is chattering away almost every second. Other people experience long periods of inner silence. Russell T. Hurlburt and his colleagues at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that, on average, people have an experience of inner speech about 23 percent of the time. The rest of the time the voice there may be a sense of mood, or a song bouncing around, but the sense of an inner narrator is absent. This is what I try to tell my wife when she asks me what I’m thinking about: “Honestly, honey, it’s just a big crate of nothing up there a lot of the time.”
Sometimes the voice sounds like normal speech, and sometimes it’s a torrent of idea fragments and half-formed thoughts. In his book Chatter, the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross reports on one study suggesting that we talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words a minute out loud. About a quarter of all people hear the sounds of other people’s voices in their heads. About half of all people address themselves in the second person as “you” often or all the time. Some people use their own name when talking to themselves. By the way, the people who address themselves in the second or even the third person have less anxiety, give better speeches, complete tasks more efficiently, and communicate more effectively. If you’re able to self-distance in this way, you should.
Charles Fernyhough, a professor at Durham University, in the United Kingdom, and one of our leading scholars on inner speech, points out that sometimes it feels like we’re not saying our inner speech, we’re hearing it. That is, sometimes it feels like we are not in charge of the voice; we are its audience. The voice tortures us with embarrassing memories we’d rather not relive, cruel thoughts we’d rather not have. Sometimes it seems we’re no more in charge of our voice than we are of our dreams. Or as William James put it, “Thoughts themselves are the thinkers.”
Fernyhough observes that our inner speech is often made up of different characters in the mind having a conversation. The Polish researcher Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl asked people to describe the characters they heard in their head. She found that people commonly named four types of inner voices: the Faithful Friend (who tells you about your personal strengths), the Ambivalent Parent (who offers caring criticism), the Proud Rival (who badgers you to be more successful), and the Helpless Child (who has a lot of self-pity).
So when I’m listening to someone tell their story, I’m also asking myself, What characters does this person have in his head? Is this a confident voice or a tired voice, a regretful voice or an anticipating voice? For some reason, I like novels where the narrator has an elegiac voice. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, the narrators have a world-weary tone. It’s like they’re looking back on glorious past events when dreams were fresh and the world seemed new and the disappointments of life had not yet settled in. That voice sounds to me like writing done in the minor key, and I find it tremendously moving. But I guess I wouldn’t like to be around people with that voice in real life. In real life I’d prefer to be around my friend Kate Bowler’s voice. As I mentioned, Kate got cancer a few years ago, when she was a young mother, and her voice is filled with vulnerability and invites vulnerability, but mostly it says: Life can suck, but we’re going to be funny about it. She has a voice that pulls you into friendship and inspires humor; in her voice, laughter is never very far away.
The next question I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: Who is the hero here?
By our late twenties or early thirties, most of us have what McAdams calls an imago, an archetype or idealized image of oneself that captures the role that person hopes to play in society. One person, he finds, might cast himself as the Healer. Another might be the Caregiver. Others maybe be the Warrior, the Sage, the Maker, the Counselor, the Survivor, the Arbiter, or the Juggler. When someone is telling me their story, I find that it’s often useful to ask myself, What imago are they inhabiting? As McAdams writes, “Imagoes express our most cherished desires and goals.”
One day, on the set of the movie Suicide Squad, the actor Will Smith went up to Viola Davis and asked her who she was. She didn’t quite get the question, so Smith clarified: “Look, I’m always going to be that fifteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend broke up with him. That’s always going to be me. So, who are you?” Davis replied, “I’m the little girl who would run after school every day in third grade because these boys hated me because I was…not pretty. Because I was…Black.”
In her book Finding Me, Davis depicts a very clear imago. She is someone who grew up amid desperate poverty, with an angry alcoholic father, always feeling like the outsider and the condemned. But her identity is built around her heroic resistance to those circumstances, even as a girl. “When I won spelling contests,” she writes, “I would flaunt my gold star to everyone I saw. It was my way of reminding you of who the hell I was.” Davis presents herself in the imago of the Fighter: “My sisters became my platoon. We were all in a war, fighting for significance. Each of us was a soldier fighting for our value, our worth.”
In Davis’s book, you know who the hero is and what she is like. Not everyone has established such a clear heroic identity. The psychologist James Marcia argues that there are four levels of identity creation. The healthiest people have arrived at what he calls “identity achievement.” They’ve explored different identities, told different stories about themselves, and finally settled on a heroic identity that works. Less-evolved people may be in a state of “foreclosure.” They came up with an identity very early in their life—I’m the child who caused my parents to divorce, for instance, or I’m the jock who was a star in high school. They rigidly cling to that identity and never update it. Others may find themselves caught in “identity diffusion.” These are immature people who have never explored their identity. They go through life without a clear identity, never knowing what to do. Then there is “moratorium.” People at this level are perpetually exploring new identities, shape-shifting and trying on one or another, but they never settle on one. They never find that stable imago.
The third thing I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: What’s the plot here? We tend to craft our life stories gradually, over a lifetime. Children don’t really have life stories. But around adolescence most people begin imposing a narrative on their lives. At first there’s a lot of experimentation. In one study, for example, McAdams asked a group of college students to list the ten key scenes in their life. When he asked the same students the same question three years later, only 22 percent of the scenes were repeated on the second list. The students were in the early process of understanding the plot of their lives, so they had come up with a different list of episodes that really mattered.
By adulthood most of us have settled on the overarching plotlines of our lives, and we have often selected those plotlines from stories that are common in our culture. In The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker describes the relatively few plotlines that show up in our culture again and again, and how we apply them to tell our own life stories. Some people, for example, see their lives as “Overcoming the Monster,” in which the hero defeats some central threat, like alcoholism, through friendship and courage. Other people view their lives as “Rags to Riches,” in which the hero starts out impoverished and obscure and rises to prominence. Or they see their lives as a “Quest,” a story in which the hero undertakes a voyage in pursuit of some goal and is transformed by the journey. There must be more than seven plots, but it’s probably true that every mentally healthy person has one overriding self-defining myth, even if they are only semi-aware of it.
Many Americans, McAdams has found, tell redemption stories. That is to say, they see their lives within a plotline in which bad things happened, but they emerged from them stronger and wiser. For example: I had some early blessing. I saw the suffering of others. I realized my moral purpose. I endured periods of suffering. I grew from my pain. I’m looking toward a beautiful future. If you’re talking with an American and you want to get a sense of who they are, find out if their life story falls into this pattern, and if not, why not.
In Composing a Life, the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson argued that we often shoehorn our lives into neat, linear stories of decision and then commitment: I decided to become a doctor and pursued my dream. She argues that many lives are not like that. They are nonlinear. They have breaks, discontinuities, and false starts. Young people, she wrote, need to hear that the first job they take at twenty-two is not necessarily going to lead in a linear way to what they are going to be doing at forty. I’m always intrigued by people who see their lives as a surfing story: I caught a wave and rode it, then I caught another wave. Then another. That’s a relaxed acceptance of life few of us can muster.
The next question I ask myself when hearing stories is: How reliable is this narrator? I guess all of our stories are false and self-flattering to some degree. The seventeenth-century French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld issued the crucial warning here: “We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we often end up by disguising ourselves from ourselves.” Some people, however, take fabulation to the extreme. They are beset by such deep insecurities and self-doubts that when you ask them to tell their story, what you end up getting is not an account but a performance. The novelist William Faulkner returned home from World War I in a pilot’s uniform, overflowing with tales of his heroic exploits gunning down German planes. In reality, he never saw combat. The great conductor Leonard Bernstein once told an interviewer, “My childhood was one of complete poverty.” He said his high school offered “absolutely no music at all.” In fact, Bernstein grew up wealthy, with maids, at times a chauffeur and a second home. He was the piano soloist in his school’s orchestra and sang in the glee club.
Some people tell evasive stories. Stephen Cope writes that his mother often told stories of her life but “here was the rub: she left out almost all the hard parts. So actually her narrative was woven from pieces of the truth, but when it was all put together, it turned out to be a kind of elaborate cover story. It was a wish. The shadow side was left out.” Because she felt that it’s shameful to admit you’re in pain, she left the moments of pain out of her story. Since confronting pain wasn’t in her story, she wasn’t able to confront it in real life. One day Cope called her, sobbing, after his best friend had died suddenly. “She barely knew what to say or how to comfort me,” he recalls. “After all, who had comforted her? She couldn’t wait to get off the phone.”
Some people tell you life stories that are just too perfect. There are never any random events; each episode of their life was, supposedly, masterfully planned in advance. Such people describe one triumph after another, one achievement after another in a way that’s just not real. “The only way you can describe a human being is by describing his imperfections,” the mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote. That goes for self-description, too.
Finally, when I’m hearing life stories, I’m looking for narrative flexibility. Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories. Most of us endure narrative crises from time to time—periods in which something happened so that your old life story no longer makes sense. Perhaps you dreamed all your life of becoming an architect. When people asked you about your childhood, you would talk about how even as a kid you were fascinated by buildings and homes. But let’s say you didn’t get into architecture school or got there and found it boring. You ended up doing something else. You have to go back and rewrite the history of your childhood so that it coherently leads to the life you are now living.
Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong. They blame themselves for things that are not their fault, or they blame others for things that are. By going over life stories again and again, therapists can help people climb out of the deceptive rumination spirals they have been using to narrate themselves. They can help patients begin the imaginative reconstruction of their lives. Frequently the goal of therapy is to help the patient tell a more accurate story, a story in which the patient is seen to have power over their own life. They craft a new story in which they can see themselves exercising control.
I find that most of us construct more accurate and compelling stories as we age. We learn to spot our strengths and weaknesses, the recurring patterns of our behavior, the core desire line that will always propel our life forward. We go back and reinterpret the past, becoming more forgiving and more appreciative. “Calm is a function of retrospective clarification,” the Swarthmore literature professor Philip Weinstein writes, “a selective ordering after the fact.”
These days, as I hear people tell me their stories, I try to listen the way I listen to music. I try to flow along with the melodies, feeling the rises and dips along with them. Like music, stories flow; they are about rhythm and melody. I’m aware that telling a life story can be a form of seduction. So I’m asking myself, Are they giving me a full story?
I recently visited a friend in the hospital who, it turned out, was a week away from dying of cancer. I didn’t have to pull stories out of him. He was actively reviewing the story of his life. He focused mostly on stories in which people had done him acts of kindness he didn’t deserve. He told me he was surprised by how often he woke up in the middle of the night thinking about his mother. “It’s such a powerful bond,” he said, with wonder. He talked regretfully about a time when he had held an important job and how it had made him crueler to the people around him. He went back and back into the past and found gratitude at every turn. When we go back and tell our life story with honesty and compassion, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, “we understand what we remember, remember what we forgot, and make familiar what had before seemed alien.”
There’s one more thing that happens as I listen to life stories. I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion to take that step back. You’re giving them an opportunity to construct an account of themselves and maybe see themselves in a new way. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others. So as you are telling me your story, you’re seeing the ways I affirm you and the ways I do not. You’re sensing the parts of the story that work and those that do not. If you feed me empty slogans about yourself, I withdraw. But if you stand more transparently before me, showing both your warts and your gifts, you feel my respectful and friendly gaze upon you, and that brings forth growth. In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.