Lives as Collections of Strands: An Essay in Descriptive Psychology

Role

Imagine the case of Sarah, an attorney and a single mother. She might think of two of her strands as Attorney and Mother. In each of these she has a position (or status) role, one associated with her position in an organization (such as her law office) and the other associated with formally organized groups, such as her family. ²

Cast

When Sarah is in her Attorney strand, she interacts with a cast of people who inhabit it or enter into it. Some of them have long-term roles in relation to her (colleagues, partners, or staff), or others have transitory ones (clients, other officers of the court, or government bureaucrats).

Setting

Sarah’s Attorney strand has a primary setting, her office, and secondary settings, such as court or other places where her professional activity may take her, or even home, where she may need to do some of her work. A strand that can be enacted in more than one location is said to be flexible (Hall & Richter, 1988). Her Mother strand also has a primary setting, home, and many secondary settings, such as the supermarket, daycare center, a friend’s home, or the home of Sarah’s parents. Clearly Sarah’s Mother strand is more flexible than her Attorney strand. When she’s in a public secondary setting she does not exit the Mother strand, although she may need to adjust her behavior to suit the setting (such as breastfeeding or changing diapers; Giles, 2018).

Values and norms

People’s understanding of the context or situation in which they find themselves modulates their thoughts, feelings, and actions (Mischel, 2004; Mischel & Shoda, 1995, 2010). And because a strand is a particular kind of situation—one that is familiar and predictable—it constrains behavior by triggering values and norms (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990; Judge, Simon, Hurst, & Kelley, 2014; Kallgren, Reno, & Cialdini, 2000; Leung & Morris, 2015).

Habits and routines

As Ersche, Lim, Ward, Robbins, and Stochl (2017) remark,

Our daily lives involve high levels of repetition of activities within similar contexts. We buy the same foods from the same grocery store, cook with the same spices, and typically sit at the same place at the dinner table. However, when questioned about these routine activities, most of us barely remember the details of our actions. Habits are automatically triggered behaviours in which we engage without conscious awareness or deliberate control. (p. 73)

In other words, habits are strand-specific activities with two central features: routineness, implying frequent repetition, and automaticity, implying minimal demand for cognitive resources (Ersche et al., 2017, Section 3.1). ⁵ Although habits generally resist change (Nordfjærn, Şimşekoğlu, & Rundmo, 2014), under some circumstances they may change to minimize effort (Zhu & Risko, 2016), and under other circumstances they may even become virtuoso performances (Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 8, 79; 1990, pp. 57, 107), such as the efficiency of a master chef, the effortless grace of an athlete, or a brilliant performance by a musician. ⁶

Each strand draws on strand-specific habits, skills, scripts, and plans (Schank & Abelson, 1977). For example, in her Attorney strand Sarah may write appellate briefs, mostly assemblages of boilerplate, and in her Mother strand she may follow well-honed routines to provide her child’s daily needs (such as feeding and dressing), as well as the household’s needs (such as planning the week’s menu and shopping).

Enumerate strands?

Some strands, such as Son or Daughter, are universal. Others are widespread, such as Spouse or Parent. This raises the question of whether we can, or should, enumerate strands. I do not think that this would be advisable, because doing so a priori would not be in keeping with adopting a first-person point of view. Nevertheless, it may be possible to categorize strands in a manner inspired by Andrews and Withey (1976), who in their work on social indicators of well-being defined life domains as “places, things, activities, people, and roles.” Drawing on previous work (Andrews & Withey, 1976; K. James & Asmus, 2001; Roberts & Clement, 2006), such categories could include family, work, shelter, health, community, leisure, and politics.

Projects and episodes

Strands contain events and activities. If Sarah remembers that an event took place, even if she cannot recall when, she will remember that it began and ended at determinate times. These are temporally determinate events or activities. Most temporally determinate events occur within a strand.

Other events—which Kubovy (2015) called preoccupations—are not determinate in time because they infiltrate current events or activities. They may involve the past (such as guilt, regret, or pride), the future (such as hope, fear, or worry), or the present (such as pain, hunger, or the need to void). When they are negative and persistent (and involve the past or the future), they are instances of rumination (Lyubomirsky, Layous, Chancellor, & Nelson, 2015). If they are positive or neutral, they constitute mind wandering (Smallwood & Schooler, 2015).

Temporally determinate activities fall into three categories: projects, episodes, and routine activities (as discussed earlier). Projects and episodes consist of a sequence of events (Fig. 2). Each has an initial event and a terminal event.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Fig. 2.

Projects and episodes consist of a sequence of events.

Projects

Projects are sequences of activities designed to achieve a goal. For example, in her Mother strand Sarah will promote good hygiene practices (Matson, 2017), model emotional responses to good and bad behavior (Quinn, 2003; Quinn & Mathews, 2016, pp. 372–378), and shape her child’s use of language (Duranti, Ochs, & Schieffelin, 2012) and political values (Quintelier, 2013).

People have at least four reasons to initiate a project. These reasons are outlined and described as follows:

Little and colleagues (Argyle & Little, 1972; Little, 1983, 1993, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2013, 2014; Little, Leccl, & Watkinson, 1992) have suggested that there is another important, perhaps essential, category of project: personal or intrapersonal projects such as “be more outgoing with my clients,” “try not to get angry at the kids for being away all the time,” and “be more open to others.” The examples they offer suggest that such projects do not encompass all the domains of a person’s life. Instead, they unfold within strands: Being more outgoing with clients would be pursued in a Work strand, not getting angry with the kids would be pursued in a Parent strand, and being open would be pursued in a Socializing strand.

Episodes

In addition to habits, routines, and projects, lives contain episodes. As Bruner (1991) puts it, episodes are generally the result of “an implicit canonical script [having] been breached, violated, or deviated from” (p. 11). Some episodes may be confined to a strand, such as the events leading up to the firing of a partner in Sarah’s law firm, but many are not. Some episodes Sarah experiences firsthand (having her car rear-ended while driving to an appointment), others she experiences secondhand (hearing of the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice), and yet others she experiences virtually (through a work of literature, film, or visual art; Kubovy, 1999).

Episodes have two central features: (a) They often engender narratives, and (b) when these narratives are shared or remembered, they are continuous.

Narratives

According to Labov and Waletzky (1997), narrative is a “verbal technique for recapitulating experience—in particular, a technique of constructing narrative units that match the temporal sequence of that experience” (p. 4). The temporal sequence of events that can be inferred from a narrative has been called (according to Shklovsky, 1965, and other Russian formalists) the fabula of the narrative. Undoubtedly, a story may become more interesting if the narrator uses devices such as flashbacks, in which case the telling deviates from the chronological order of events (the Russian formalists called this the narrative’s sujet). Although flashbacks have been used in literature since at least the Odyssey, they are rare in personal narratives (Labov, 1997).

The circumstances for the generation of a narrative are social. A typical prompt is as follows: “Okay, so tell me how you have reached this situation, that you are a single mother of a 10-year-old boy. You may start wherever you wish” (see Labov, 2006; see also, e.g., Zilber, Tuval-Mashiach, and Lieblich, 2008).

Another common impetus for the generation of a narrative is the conclusion of a project. When a goal is achieved (and sometimes when it is not) it is eminently reportable or tellable (Fludernik, 1996; Norrick, 2005) or noteworthy (Kubovy, 2015). Likewise, an episode gives us a reason to generate a narrative because, as discussed earlier, the essence of an episode is to contain a tellable event.

Continuity

Earlier I argued that strands contain two kinds of narratable sequences of events: projects and episodes. This narratability endows strands with continuity.

Let us revisit the project undertaken by Sarah in her Attorney strand: the merger of two companies. Suppose that, in the course of negotiations, there is a disagreement about intellectual property, which takes a few days to clear. During this time, Sarah lives her life as usual, alternating between strands: Mother → Attorney every morning, and Attorney → Mother every evening (these are microtransitions; see Fig 1; Ashforth, Kreiner, & Fugate, 2000). Indeed, she lives what Simmel (2002) called a metropolitan life, which requires that “all of its activities and reciprocal relationships [be] organized and coordinated in the most punctual way into a . . . framework of time” (p. 13). In other words, it is governed by clock-and-calendar time (Postill, 2002). But there is reason to believe that strands are not governed by clock-and-calendar time. Organizing our activities by strand is incompatible with it. Indeed, memory is not organized by temporal continuity but by narrative coherence (Friedman, 2004; Hintzman, 2016). To quote D. C. Rubin and Greenberg (2003),

Narrative establishes a major form of organization in autobiographical memory, providing temporal and goal structure. Autobiographical memories are usually recorded as narrative; they are told to another person and to oneself. Inclusions and exclusions depend in part on the narrative structures used. If information is not central to the narrative structure, it is less likely to be remembered. (p. 61)

Wagenaar (1986) provides a vivid example. Over a period of 5 years he kept a diary of personal events. For the days on which the diary contained at least two events, he tested whether the presentation of one of them would elicit a recollection of the other. It did not: Out of 314 pairs, he succeeded only 22 times. And when he did succeed, it was because the two events occurred in the same location; that is, they probably took place in the same strand.

This does not mean that we are necessarily good at remembering sequences of events that occurred within the same strand. Unless two events within a strand are spontaneously inserted into the same narrative, their order might be difficult to remember.

Returning to Sarah’s negotiations: After she concludes them, she needs to report the successful outcome to her client. In generating her narrative, she has no reason to remember (let alone report) that between drafting two sections of the agreement, a microtransition took place, because she went home. Neither her recollection of the project nor the narrative she may construct is likely to mention such interruptions. This is true in general: When one recalls a project, clock-and-calendar time interruptions are suppressed. ⁷ This is tantamount to saying that we tend to represent projects to ourselves, and to others, as continuous. Or perhaps it might be more prudent to say that when we recollect projects, we elide discontinuities unless doing so would reduce the informativeness of the account. ⁸

There are, however, inevitable discontinuities in lives. Some scholars (Bohn & Habermas, 2015; Brown, 2016; Brown & Lee, 2010; Brown, Schweickart, & Svob, 2016; Enz & Talarico, 2015; Pillemer, 2009; Shi, 2017; Uzer & Brown, 2015) have drawn a distinction between turning points in lives, which are changes in life direction, such as St. Augustine’s conversion at Ostia (Saint Augustine of Hippo, 1997, pp. IX, x, 23–25), and transitions, which are external changes in daily circumstances, such as Primo Levi’s transport to Auschwitz in 1944 ( Levi, 1948/2015). Regardless of whether they are internally driven or externally caused, these have been called macrotransitions (Fig. 1; Ashforth et al., 2000).

Within a culture, some macrotransitions are shared by many (such as leaving home or taking a first job) and occur in a fairly predictable order and at a fairly predictable age. Shi (2017) has called these script-consistent transitions. ⁹ It is important to keep in mind, however, that the scripts themselves have been changing over time (Burgin, Schumacher, & Ritschard, 2017), such that many transitions that are script-consistent today would not have been so a century ago. Other transitions are script-divergent (such as a breakup or the death of a close friend) and are most often painful and involve loss; their timing is unpredictable.

Because projects and episodes lie at the core of strands, their continuity is true of strands as well. When one recalls the evolution of a strand, interruptions are not represented. Exceptions may occur, however, when a strand undergoes a macrotransition, as would occur were Sarah to take an extended maternity leave (I return to this issue later).

Even if a life undergoes a severe macrotransition that destroys a strand (such as a divorce or losing a job), a larger-scale continuity is possible. When such a transition occurs, there is often the possibility (and the desire) to begin a new strand of the same general kind, that is, belonging to the same theme (such as Relationship, Mother, Work; see Fig. 1). Themes manifest themselves in autobiographical memory (Barsalou, 1988; Belli, 1998; Conway, 1992, 1996; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Burt, Kemp, and Conway (2003) had students record their experiences over their summer vacation. Subsequently, for each day in a student’s diary, the experimenters transcribed at most one entry onto a card. Then the diarists were given their entries in a random order and asked “to arrange them so as to describe themes in your life.” By and large, these clusters shared content rather than temporal sequence (see also Burt, Kemp, & Conway, 2008; Kemp, Burt, & Malinen, 2009). (In laboratory studies, Tzeng & Cotton, 1980, have shown that the order of events is remembered far better when items are semantically related, suggesting that people would also remember the order of autobiographical events if they belonged to the same strand. ¹⁰ )

Boundaries

Strands partition our lives into categories that provide us cognitive economy (Daniel, Schuck, & Niv, 2015; Huys et al., 2015; Rosch, 1978) and social clarity (Ashforth et al., 2000; Kallens, Dale, & Smaldino, 2018; Nippert-Eng, 1996; Zerubavel, 1991, 1996, 2016). This partition implies boundaries (Allen, Cho, & Meier, 2014; Barrett, 2014; Daniel & Sonnentag, 2016; Fleming & Waguespack, 2007; Nippert-Eng, 1996; Pachucki, Pendergrass, & Lamont, 2007), which have been a core concern of the work–family literature. In this field, scholars have made two distinctions ¹¹ (Ashforth et al., 2000): (a) thick or impermeable strand boundaries (i.e., compartmentalizing Attorney and Mother) versus thin or permeable strand boundaries (i.e., blending Attorney and Mother), and (b) two types of strand transitions, microstrand transitions, which are frequent (e.g., the commute from Mother to Attorney to Mother again), and macrostrand transitions, which are infrequent and often involve permanent change (such as a promotion or a divorce).

Even when the boundary between strands is thick, intrusions between them are inevitable. For example, Sarah may need to take a day off from work if her child is ill.

The possible existence of impermeable boundaries raises the issue of extreme compartmentalization, which—according to Showers (1992) and colleagues (Showers, Ditzfeld, & Zeigler-Hill, 2015)—may be maladaptive for some individuals.

Asynchrony

Boundaries do not only separate strands from each other; they create asynchronous clock domains, a concept I borrow from the field of semiconductor design. In electronic devices, different modules may have clocks with different frequencies. This is surely the case with strands. Whereas Sarah’s Mother strand is dense and involves many events each day, as long as her mother does not require frequent assistance, and is still independent, her Daughter strand may consist of one phone call a week. Even though the strands do not share a clock, one can say that many events in her Mother strand occur between events in her Daughter strand.

Although in electrical engineering the problem of cross-clock-domain data transfer is crucial, this is not the case with strands. There is rarely a good reason for events in one strand to be registered in another. Take the case of an intrusion of one strand into another, a fairly common occurrence. Imagine a time when Sarah’s Daughter strand intrudes into her Attorney strand: While Sarah is at work, her mother calls to ask that she renew a prescription. Sarah makes a mental note of the request (generating a prospective memory; Rummel & McDaniel, 2019), and when she has a free moment, she takes care of it. But there is no reason for her to also make a mental note of what she was doing when she received the call. The event belongs to her Daughter strand and has no place in her Attorney strand.

There are exceptions to the asynchrony of strands. There are times when macrotransitions occur at the same time in many strands (such transitions were discussed earlier, where examples of leaving the parental home or getting a first job were given). According to transition theory (Brown, Hansen, Lee, Vanderveen, & Conrad, 2012; Svob & Brown, 2012), subsequent events may be timed in relation to these transitions (Uzer & Brown, 2015), much as historians divide the calendar into BCE (before the common era) and CE (common era). Furthermore, if a sudden transition threatens the entirety of one’s strand structure, a person might register a flashbulb memory (Hirst & Phelps, 2016; Hirst et al., 2015; Kraha, Talarico, & Boals, 2014).

Intensity, importance, and satisfaction

Not all strands are equally intense, nor need we assume that their intensity is constant over time. For example, Sarah’s Mother strand waxes and wanes over time and eventually (under usual circumstances) diminishes. Just as one can assess the effort required by a job (Cooman, Gieter, Pepermans, Jegers, & Acker, 2009), one could assess the intensity of a strand. Sarah’s Daughter strand would likely become more intense as her mother grows dependent on her. The degree to which it feels intense to Sarah depends on the previous quality of the relationship, the investment of time it entails, the frequency with which it intrudes on other strands, the conscientiousness it demands, and the persistence it requires.

Even if two strands are of equal intensity, they may be of different importance. Consider the case of Stephen Hawking, the prominent cosmologist who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is frequently accompanied by pain (Moisset et al., 2015) and depression (Kübler, Winter, Ludolph, Hautzinger, & Birbaumer, 2005) and requires 5 to 15 hours of care per day (Chiò et al., 2006). And yet, in his autobiography, Hawking (2013) mentions his illness only six times; he talks mostly about the evolution of his theories and to a lesser extent about his personal life.