There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. We are expected to be ambitious, to find everlasting love and to take good care of our health. The particularly dominant social narratives can serve to make our lives easier, by providing guidelines for behaviour, and they might sometimes make us happier too. But they are, at their heart, stories – and ones that may not have originated with present-day people in mind. As such, many of these stories end up creating a kind of social dissonance whereby, perversely, they cause more harm than good. They become what I will refer to as
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