Epistemic status: This is non-experimental psychology, my own musings. Presented here is a model derived from thinking about human minds a lot over the years, knowing many people who’ve experienced depression, and my own depression-like states. Treat it as a hypothesis, see if matches your own data and it generates helpful suggestions.
Clarifying “narrative”
In the context of psychology, I use the term narrative to describe the simple models of the world that people hold to varying degrees of implicit vs explicit awareness. They are simple in the sense of being short, being built of concepts which are basic to humans (e.g. people, relationships, roles, but not physics and statistics), and containing unsophisticated blackbox-y causal relationships like “if X then Y, if not X then not Y.”
Two main narratives
I posit that people carry two primary kinds of narratives in their minds:
Who I am (the role they are playing), and
How my life will go (the progress of their life)
The first specifies the traits they possess and actions they should take. It’s a role to played. It’s something people want to be for themselves and want to be seen to be by others. Many roles only work when recognized by others, e.g. the cool kid.
The second encompasses wants, needs, desires, and expectations. It specifies a progression of events and general trajectory towards a desired state.
The two narratives function as a whole. A person believes that by playing a certain role they will attain the life they want. An example: a 17 year-old with a penchant for biology decides they destined to be a doctor (perhaps there are many in the family); they expect to study hard for SATs, go to pre-med, go to medical school, become a doctor; once they are a doctor they expect to have a good income, live in a nice house, attract a desirable partner, be respected, and be a good person who helps people.
The structure here is “be a doctor” → “have a good life” and it specifies the appropriate actions to take to live up to that role and attain the desired life. One fails to live up to the role by doing things like failing to get into med school, which I predict would be extremely distressing to someone who’s predicated their life story on that happening.
Roles needn’t be professional occupations. A role could be “I am the kind, fun-loving, funny, relaxed person who everyone loves to be around”, it specifies a certain kind of behavior and precludes others (e.g. being mean, getting stressed or angry). This role could be attached to a simple causal structure of “be kind, fun-loving, popular” → “people like me” → “my life is good.”
Roles needn’t be something that someone has achieved. They are often idealized roles towards which people aspire, attempting to always take actions consistent with achieving those roles, e.g. not yet a doctor but studying for it, not yet funny but practicing.
I haven’t thought much about this angle, but you could tie in self-worth here. A person derives their self-worth from living up to their narrative, and believes they are worthy of the life they desire when they succeed at playing their role.
Getting others to accept our narratives is extremely crucial for most people. I suspect that even when it seems like narratives are held for the self, we’re really constructing them for others, and it’s just much simpler to have a single narrative than say “this is my self-narrative for myself” and “this is my self-narrative I want others to believe about me” a la Trivers/Elephant in the Brain.
Maintaining the narrative
A hypothesis I have is that among the core ways people choose their actions, it’s with reference to which actions would maintain their narrative. Further, that most events that occur to people are evaluated with reference to whether that event helps or damages the narrative. How upsetting is it to be passed over for a promotion? It might depend on whether you have a self-narrative is as “high-achiever” or “team-player and/or stoic.”
Sometimes it’s just about maintaining the how my life will go element: “I’ll move to New York City, have two kids and a dog, vacation each year in Havana, and volunteer at my local Church” might be a story someone has been telling themselves for a long time. They work towards it and will become distressed if any part of it starts to seem implausible.
You can also see narratives as specifying the virtues that an individual will try to act in accordance with.
Narrative Tension
Invariable, some people encounter difficult living up to their narratives. What of the young sprinter who believes their desired future requires them to win Olympic Gold yet is failing to perform? Or the aspiring parent who in their mid-thirties is struggling to find a co-parent? Or the person who believes they should be popular, yet is often excluded? Or the start-up founder wannabee who’s unable to obtain funding yet again for their third project?
What happens when you are unable to play the role you staked your identity on?
What happens when the life you’ve dreamed of seems unattainable?
I call this narrative tension. The tension between reality and the story one wants to be true. In milder amounts, when hope is not yet lost, it can be a source of tremendous drive. People work longer and harder, anything to keep the drive alive.
Yet if the attempts fail (or it was already definitively over) then one has to reconcile themselves to the fact that they cannot live out that story.They are not that person, and their life isn’t going to look like that.
It is crushing.
Heck, even just the fear of it possibly being the case, even when their narrative could in fact still be entirely achievable, can still be crushing.
I can imagine that depression could serve an important adaptive function when it occurs in the right amounts and at the right times. A person confronted with the possible death of their narratives either: a) reflects and determines they need to change their approach, or b) grieves and seeks to construct new narratives to guide their life. This is facilitated with a withdrawal from their normal life and disengagement from typical activities. Sometimes the subconscious mind forces this on a person who otherwise would drive themselves into the ground vainly trying to cling to a narrative that won’t float.
Yet I could see this all failing if a person refuses to grieve and refuses to modify their narrative. If their attitude is “I’m a doctor in my heart of hearts and I could never be anything else!” then they’ll fail to consider whether being a dentist or nurse or something else might be the next best thing for them. A person who’s only ever believed (implicitly or explicitly) that being the best is the only strategy for them to be liked and respected, won’t even ponder how it is other people who aren’t the best in their league ever get liked or respected, and whether she might do the same.
Depressed people think things like:
I am a failure.
No one will ever love me.
I will never be happy.
One lens on this might be that some people are unwilling to give up a bucket error whereby they’re lumping their life-satisfaction/achievement of their value together with achievement of a given specific narrative. So once they believe the narrative is dead, they believe all is lost.
They get stuck. They despair.
It’s despair which I’ve begun to see as the hallmark of depression, present to some degree or other in all the people I’ve personally known to be depressed. They see no way forward. Stuck.
[Eliezer’s hypothesis of depressed individuals wanting others to validate their retelling of past events seems entirely compatible with people wanting to maintain narratives and seeking indication that others still accept their narrative, e.g. of being good person.]
Narrative Therapy
To conjecture on how the models here could be used to help, I think the first order is to try to uncover a person’s narratives: everything they model about who they’re supposed to be and how their life should look and progress. The examples I’ve given here are simplified. Narratives are simple relative to full causal models of reality, but a person’s self-narrative will still have have many pieces, distributed over parts of their mind, often partitioned by context, etc. I expect doing this to require time, effort, and skill.
Eventually, once you’ve got the narrative models exposed, they can be investigated and supplemented with full causal reasoning. “Why don’t we break down the reasons you want to be a doctor and see what else might be a good solution?” “Why don’t we list out all the different things that make people likable, see which might you are capable of?”
I see CBT and ACT each offering elements of this. CBT attempts to expose many of one’s simple implicit models and note where the implied reasoning is fallacious. ACT instructs people to identify their values and find the best way to live up to them, even if they can’t get their first choice way of doing so, e.g. “you can’t afford to travel, but you can afford to eat foreign cuisine locally.”
My intuition though is that many people are extremely reluctant to give up any part of their narrative and very sensitive to attempts to modify any part of it. This makes sense if they’re in the grips of a bucket error where making any allowance feels like giving up on everything they value. The goal of course is to achieve flexible reasoning.
Why this additional construct?
Is really necessary to talk about narratives? Couldn’t I have described just talking about what people want and their plans? Of course, people get upset when they fail to get what they want and their plans fail!
I think the narratives model is important for highlighting a few elements:
The kind of thinking used here is very roles-based in a very deep way: what kind of person I am, what do I do, how do I relate to others and they relate to me.
The thinking is very simplistic, likely a result of originating heavily from System 1. This thinking does not employ a person’s full ability to causally model the world.
Because of 2), the narratives are much more inflexible than a person’s general thinking. Everything is all or nothing, compromises are not considered, it’s that narrative or bust.
This is aligned with my thoughts on the importance of narratives, especially personal narratives.
The best therapists are experts at helping pull out your stories—they ask many, many questions and function as working memory, so you can better see the shapes of your stories and what levers exist to mold them differently.
(We have a word for those who tell stories—storyteller—but do we have a word for experts at pulling stories out of others?)
A related concept in my view is that of agency, as in how much I feel I am in control of my own life. I am not sure what is the cause and what is the effect, but I have noticed that during periods of depression I feel very little agency and during more happy periods I feel a lot more agency over my life. Often, focusing on the things I can control in my life (exercise, nutrition, social activities) over things I can’t (problems at work) allows me to recover from depression a lot faster.
What happens when the life you’ve dreamed of seems unattainable?
This can also be a standard, what someone considers a bare minimum, whether it’s x amount of good things a, b, and c, or x amount of growth in areas a, b and c.
Narrative Tension as a Cause of Depression
I only wanted to budget a couple of hours for writing today. Might develop further and polish at a later time.
Related to and an expansion of Identities are [Subconscious] Strategies
Epistemic status: This is non-experimental psychology, my own musings. Presented here is a model derived from thinking about human minds a lot over the years, knowing many people who’ve experienced depression, and my own depression-like states. Treat it as a hypothesis, see if matches your own data and it generates helpful suggestions.
Clarifying “narrative”
In the context of psychology, I use the term narrative to describe the simple models of the world that people hold to varying degrees of implicit vs explicit awareness. They are simple in the sense of being short, being built of concepts which are basic to humans (e.g. people, relationships, roles, but not physics and statistics), and containing unsophisticated blackbox-y causal relationships like “if X then Y, if not X then not Y.”
Two main narratives
I posit that people carry two primary kinds of narratives in their minds:
Who I am (the role they are playing), and
How my life will go (the progress of their life)
The first specifies the traits they possess and actions they should take. It’s a role to played. It’s something people want to be for themselves and want to be seen to be by others. Many roles only work when recognized by others, e.g. the cool kid.
The second encompasses wants, needs, desires, and expectations. It specifies a progression of events and general trajectory towards a desired state.
The two narratives function as a whole. A person believes that by playing a certain role they will attain the life they want. An example: a 17 year-old with a penchant for biology decides they destined to be a doctor (perhaps there are many in the family); they expect to study hard for SATs, go to pre-med, go to medical school, become a doctor; once they are a doctor they expect to have a good income, live in a nice house, attract a desirable partner, be respected, and be a good person who helps people.
The structure here is “be a doctor” → “have a good life” and it specifies the appropriate actions to take to live up to that role and attain the desired life. One fails to live up to the role by doing things like failing to get into med school, which I predict would be extremely distressing to someone who’s predicated their life story on that happening.
Roles needn’t be professional occupations. A role could be “I am the kind, fun-loving, funny, relaxed person who everyone loves to be around”, it specifies a certain kind of behavior and precludes others (e.g. being mean, getting stressed or angry). This role could be attached to a simple causal structure of “be kind, fun-loving, popular” → “people like me” → “my life is good.”
Roles needn’t be something that someone has achieved. They are often idealized roles towards which people aspire, attempting to always take actions consistent with achieving those roles, e.g. not yet a doctor but studying for it, not yet funny but practicing.
I haven’t thought much about this angle, but you could tie in self-worth here. A person derives their self-worth from living up to their narrative, and believes they are worthy of the life they desire when they succeed at playing their role.
Getting others to accept our narratives is extremely crucial for most people. I suspect that even when it seems like narratives are held for the self, we’re really constructing them for others, and it’s just much simpler to have a single narrative than say “this is my self-narrative for myself” and “this is my self-narrative I want others to believe about me” a la Trivers/Elephant in the Brain.
Maintaining the narrative
A hypothesis I have is that among the core ways people choose their actions, it’s with reference to which actions would maintain their narrative. Further, that most events that occur to people are evaluated with reference to whether that event helps or damages the narrative. How upsetting is it to be passed over for a promotion? It might depend on whether you have a self-narrative is as “high-achiever” or “team-player and/or stoic.”
Sometimes it’s just about maintaining the how my life will go element: “I’ll move to New York City, have two kids and a dog, vacation each year in Havana, and volunteer at my local Church” might be a story someone has been telling themselves for a long time. They work towards it and will become distressed if any part of it starts to seem implausible.
You can also see narratives as specifying the virtues that an individual will try to act in accordance with.
Narrative Tension
Invariable, some people encounter difficult living up to their narratives. What of the young sprinter who believes their desired future requires them to win Olympic Gold yet is failing to perform? Or the aspiring parent who in their mid-thirties is struggling to find a co-parent? Or the person who believes they should be popular, yet is often excluded? Or the start-up founder wannabee who’s unable to obtain funding yet again for their third project?
What happens when you are unable to play the role you staked your identity on?
What happens when the life you’ve dreamed of seems unattainable?
I call this narrative tension. The tension between reality and the story one wants to be true. In milder amounts, when hope is not yet lost, it can be a source of tremendous drive. People work longer and harder, anything to keep the drive alive.
Yet if the attempts fail (or it was already definitively over) then one has to reconcile themselves to the fact that they cannot live out that story. They are not that person, and their life isn’t going to look like that.
It is crushing.
Heck, even just the fear of it possibly being the case, even when their narrative could in fact still be entirely achievable, can still be crushing.
Healthy and Unhealthy Depression
Related: Eliezer on depression and rumination
I can imagine that depression could serve an important adaptive function when it occurs in the right amounts and at the right times. A person confronted with the possible death of their narratives either: a) reflects and determines they need to change their approach, or b) grieves and seeks to construct new narratives to guide their life. This is facilitated with a withdrawal from their normal life and disengagement from typical activities. Sometimes the subconscious mind forces this on a person who otherwise would drive themselves into the ground vainly trying to cling to a narrative that won’t float.
Yet I could see this all failing if a person refuses to grieve and refuses to modify their narrative. If their attitude is “I’m a doctor in my heart of hearts and I could never be anything else!” then they’ll fail to consider whether being a dentist or nurse or something else might be the next best thing for them. A person who’s only ever believed (implicitly or explicitly) that being the best is the only strategy for them to be liked and respected, won’t even ponder how it is other people who aren’t the best in their league ever get liked or respected, and whether she might do the same.
Depressed people think things like:
I am a failure.
No one will ever love me.
I will never be happy.
One lens on this might be that some people are unwilling to give up a bucket error whereby they’re lumping their life-satisfaction/achievement of their value together with achievement of a given specific narrative. So once they believe the narrative is dead, they believe all is lost.
They get stuck. They despair.
It’s despair which I’ve begun to see as the hallmark of depression, present to some degree or other in all the people I’ve personally known to be depressed. They see no way forward. Stuck.
[Eliezer’s hypothesis of depressed individuals wanting others to validate their retelling of past events seems entirely compatible with people wanting to maintain narratives and seeking indication that others still accept their narrative, e.g. of being good person.]
Narrative Therapy
To conjecture on how the models here could be used to help, I think the first order is to try to uncover a person’s narratives: everything they model about who they’re supposed to be and how their life should look and progress. The examples I’ve given here are simplified. Narratives are simple relative to full causal models of reality, but a person’s self-narrative will still have have many pieces, distributed over parts of their mind, often partitioned by context, etc. I expect doing this to require time, effort, and skill.
Eventually, once you’ve got the narrative models exposed, they can be investigated and supplemented with full causal reasoning. “Why don’t we break down the reasons you want to be a doctor and see what else might be a good solution?” “Why don’t we list out all the different things that make people likable, see which might you are capable of?”
I see CBT and ACT each offering elements of this. CBT attempts to expose many of one’s simple implicit models and note where the implied reasoning is fallacious. ACT instructs people to identify their values and find the best way to live up to them, even if they can’t get their first choice way of doing so, e.g. “you can’t afford to travel, but you can afford to eat foreign cuisine locally.”
My intuition though is that many people are extremely reluctant to give up any part of their narrative and very sensitive to attempts to modify any part of it. This makes sense if they’re in the grips of a bucket error where making any allowance feels like giving up on everything they value. The goal of course is to achieve flexible reasoning.
Why this additional construct?
Is really necessary to talk about narratives? Couldn’t I have described just talking about what people want and their plans? Of course, people get upset when they fail to get what they want and their plans fail!
I think the narratives model is important for highlighting a few elements:
The kind of thinking used here is very roles-based in a very deep way: what kind of person I am, what do I do, how do I relate to others and they relate to me.
The thinking is very simplistic, likely a result of originating heavily from System 1. This thinking does not employ a person’s full ability to causally model the world.
Because of 2), the narratives are much more inflexible than a person’s general thinking. Everything is all or nothing, compromises are not considered, it’s that narrative or bust.
This is aligned with my thoughts on the importance of narratives, especially personal narratives.
The best therapists are experts at helping pull out your stories—they ask many, many questions and function as working memory, so you can better see the shapes of your stories and what levers exist to mold them differently.
(We have a word for those who tell stories—storyteller—but do we have a word for experts at pulling stories out of others?)
A related concept in my view is that of agency, as in how much I feel I am in control of my own life. I am not sure what is the cause and what is the effect, but I have noticed that during periods of depression I feel very little agency and during more happy periods I feel a lot more agency over my life. Often, focusing on the things I can control in my life (exercise, nutrition, social activities) over things I can’t (problems at work) allows me to recover from depression a lot faster.
This can also be a standard, what someone considers a bare minimum, whether it’s x amount of good things a, b, and c, or x amount of growth in areas a, b and c.