Life Isn't a Stage. It's a Story
Humans have a habit of dividing life into stages, but are these categories really useful or meaningful? In a recent New Yorker piece, School of Education and Social Policy psychologist Dan P. McAdams tells writer Shayla Love that traditional life stages are limiting.
"They're too set in stone," McAdams told Love. "They're elitist. They're too prescriptive. Modern and postmodern life is too variegated. People follow so many different paths now."
McAdams, one of the nation's foremost researchers in the field of narrative psychology, says a personal narrative is a better framework than a predetermined set of stages. Life is a story we tell ourselves, with a protagonist, a plot, and a cast of characters.
In fact, nearly everyone has a life story, or narrative identity, says McAdams, who studies personalities. Over decades of work, he's only found one outlier — President Donald Trump.
In his 2020 book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning, McAdams asserts that Trump may be the rare person who lacks any inner story, something most people develop to give their lives unity, meaning and purpose.
A life story provides a moral frame of reference because it grounds your experiences in basic values and beliefs, McAdams says. Trump can't form a meaningful life story because he is the "episodic man" who sees life as a series of battles to be won. There is no connection between the moments, no reflection and no potential for growth when one is compulsively in the present.
"In his own mind, he is more like a persona than a person, more like a primal force or superhero, rather than a fully realized human being," McAdams adds.
McAdams, the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology, directs the Study of Lives Research Group at Northwestern University. For more than two decades, McAdams and his students have been coding life-story interviews, looking for themes of one particular life story — redemption.
Their published work shows that people who tell their life story in redemptive terms — such as overcoming suffering or adversity — enjoy better mental health and higher levels of happiness, compared to people whose life stories show fewer themes of redemption.