Narrativists about well-being claim that our lives go better for us if they make good stories—if they exhibit cohesion, thematic consistency, and narrative arc. Yet narrativism leads to mistaken assessments of well-being: prioritizing narrative makes it harder to balance and change pursuits, pushes us toward one-dimensionality, and can’t make sense of the diversity of good lives. Some ways of softening key narrativist claims mean that the view can’t tell us very much about how to live a good life that we can’t find in other theories of well-being; while there are smaller-scale ways we can incorporate narrativist insights into our views of well-being, narrativism should not be a universal organizing principle for our lives.

关于幸福的叙事主义者声称，如果他们写出好故事——如果他们表现出凝聚力、主题一致性和叙事弧度，我们的生活就会变得更好。然而，叙事主义会导致对幸福的错误评估：优先考虑叙事会使平衡和改变追求变得更加困难，将我们推向一维性，并且无法理解美好生活的多样性。一些软化主要叙事主义主张的方法意味着这种观点不能告诉我们很多关于如何过上我们在其他幸福理论中找不到的美好生活的信息；虽然我们可以通过更小规模的方式将叙事主义的见解融入我们的幸福观，但叙事主义不应该成为我们生活的普遍组织原则。