“Some philosophers—among them MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor—have insisted that if a narrative is to endow a human life with meaning, it must take the form of a quest for the good. But what makes such a quest an interesting story? There had better be some trouble in it, because that’s what drives a drama. If adversity doesn’t figure prominently in your autobiographical memories, your life narrative will be a bit insipid, and your sense of meaningfulness accordingly impaired. The claim that big troubles are essential ingredients of a good narrative, and hence of a good life, is called by psychologists the “adversity hypothesis.” If true, this hypothesis “has profound implications for how we should live our lives,” observes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats.” It also means, Haidt adds, that we should expose our children to the same. But adversity can be taken too far. We don’t want our lives to assume the form of tragedy (easy as it is to weave our autobiographical memories into such a grim narrative, especially when lying awake at three am). Meaning, after all, is not everything; happiness counts, too. […] Let’s say you’ve done the hard narrative work, the work of self-constitution. You’ve put in the “conscious effort” it takes to “extract an intelligible trajectory out of your past,” one that will “make your life as a whole a meaningful unit” (the quoted phrases are from Jenann Ismael). Perhaps your narrative takes the popular American form of redemption, in which the blunders and setbacks and sufferings you’ve undergone are invested with positive meaning in the drama of resilient triumph. You’ve traveled the hard road to the good life. And on the whole, you’re content with the identity you’ve reflectively forged. Are you now a bit like a happy Socrates? Or could it be that you’re more of a satisfied fool? That would depend on just how good your self-story is. So, at least, we are told by the narrativists. “The only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrative or to-be-narrated quest,” declares Alasdair MacIntyre.”
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