The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

Little likes to tell his students, ‘We are our personal projects.’ His studies have found that, in order to bring us happiness, a project should be personally meaningful and we ought to have some level of control over it. When I asked him if a person pursuing one of these ‘core’ projects was a bit like an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution he said, ‘Yes. A thousand times yes.’ Little isn’t the first to argue that the fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle tried to puzzle out the true nature of human happiness. Some posited a ‘hedonic’ form defined by pleasure and the satisfaction of short-term desires. But Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, ‘The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.’ Instead, he described the idea of ‘eudaemonia’. For Aristotle happiness was not a feeling but a practice. ‘It’s living in a way that fulfils our purpose,’ the classicist Professor Helen Morales said. ‘It’s flourishing. Aristotle was saying, “Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.”’ Recent extraordinary evidence that humans are built to live according to Aristotle’s concept of happiness as a practice rather than a goal comes from the field of social genomics.