Suppose you go through a painful breakup. There are different ways to frame what’s happened. You can view the entire relationship as a failure – as an instance in which you saw but ignored warning signs and spent months or years trying to make the relationship work when you should have known it wasn’t meant to be; or you can frame it as a learning experiences that helped you get to know yourself and what you want in a partner better, so you can find happiness.
Could we refrain from telling a story at all? Not frame things? Can we live without spinning narratives about the past? Probably not.
We do not simply live our lives, we interpret them. It is in this sense -- and not because we have novels, though that is a reason too -- that we can
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