Life Narratives, Complexity, and Generality

Recently I find myself falling into the trap of narrating my life in very general terms.

I say 'these days', I say 'I'm successful', I say 'this period'.

Last night someone told me I spoke like I was very old. That I would live so many lives with the way I speak. 

There will be endless periods! Wave after wave of classifiable 'days' and 'phases'.

But this kind of speaking is problematic because it is my way of not confronting complexity. I try to chunk my life into clean, generalizable, easily narratable segments. 

The problem is that I love narrative. I love thinking about narrative. I love philosophers who regard narrative as definitively human. A book on this topic, The Story Telling Animal, was published earlier this year. Alasdair MacIntyre and Roger Smith  make similar arguments, claiming that human action only becomes intelligible through narrative, and that in the process of narrating our actions we also create our future actions. 

What they say is that humans are the beings that create themselves by telling stories about themselves.

So why am I telling such simple stories about myself?

Why am I making myself into this generality by telling these general stories about myself?

Because the complexity of my life is unintelligible to me at this point. 

Even the way I think about complexity is loaded with generality. My half-assed thinking and writing about nonlinear dynamics is a good example of this.

Not that I need to be hard on myself.

It is okay that I don't grasp the complexity of my life. 

I just need to stop telling such simple stories about what is in reality a very complex dissatisfaction. 

Things are not as simple as I'd like to make them out to be, my own unhappiness included.