We tell ourselves stories in order to live … We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” which we have learned to freeze shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

Our greatest illusion is to believe we’re what we think ourselves to be, and there is a coherent, single, core self. We’re way more fragmented and inconsistent than we could ever imagine, and the need to construct a coherent narrative about ourselves and our life stories serves as a sort of “psychological immune system” — to help us maintain a sense of well-being. Call it healthy self-illusion. And of course it could easily go overboard.

This constructed self and self stories…could be “more or less adequate rationalizations and secondary elaborations that convey the gist of our life story in a form suitable for the occasion”, as personality psychologist Robert McCrae intimates. We’re masterful spin doctors, rationalizers and justifiers of threatening information, and can always manage to find ways to reinterpret or even distort negative information to neutralize these threats.

The implicit, scattered antithesis to this explicitly constructed self that serves us in public space is more real. But there is no direct view to it. It has to be inferred, most of times not so accurately.

We also constructed stories (often based on faulty data) to explain our feelings, and these stories are often incorrect. “We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action” (Kant). Some really interesting lab experiments have shown evidence that, the feelings people report after analyzing reasons are often incorrect, in the sense that they lead to regretful decisions — compared to those in the control group, who just gave their unanalyzed, gut feelings, but turned out better informed in real life. “He who deliberates lengthily will not always choose the best.” (Goethe)

So the real trick is, to gather enough information to develop an informed gut feeling and then not analyze that feeling too much, as psychologist Timothy Wilson put it. We should just let our adaptive unconscious do the job of forming reliable feelings and then trust those feelings, even if we cannot explain them entirely.