What you say here is certainly true. Many stories are oversimplified, and stories are a good way to fool ourselves. However, I'd like to push back gently on th

What you say here is certainly true. Many stories are oversimplified, and stories are a good way to fool ourselves. However, I'd like to push back gently on the idea that we should never use narratives. It is true that _traditional story structures_ don't necessarily reflect the real structure of historical experience/occurence, but they _can_ fit, too. It really depends on the occurence. And more importantly, stories can be infinitely granular and complex (just read _War and Peace_ or _In Search of Lost Time_, for example), complex and granular enough to capture actual historical experience without distortion. As for people not describing their lives as a mess, that's because a mess has no structure - whereas a journey or a battle has a structure; life does not necessarily have structure, sure, but those people who choose to describe their lives in structured ways do so because they are _giving_ it structure. If someone's life is structured (by them) as a pursuit of some goal or state, where everything that happens either helps that, hinders that, or acts as a side-quest, then they may well describe it as a journey. A fractally complex journey, but a journey nonetheless.