Explore/Protect

The never-ending potential of the pursuit of happiness

Mar 15, 2025

If you’re new here, read this quick primer on the Story Energies, a new way to talk about storytelling.

DNA is a story. One that is handed down, from one generation to the next, and told in the form of a list of instructions—like Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, or How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie) by Junot Díaz. We could call this story How to Survive as a Species. You are listening to your DNA right now, whispering quietly in your mind’s inner ear, instructing you to not let your species die out.

Sure, this whispering can tend to be drowned out by other stories we’re focused on at any given moment. But it’s always there. And it’s shaping everything we do, and long for, and dream of…

In Lillian Fishman’s Metropolitan Review1 article Would You Rather Have Married Young? she tells us that she embraced, as a young woman, the idea that there was an essential conflict between experience and happiness, and that she and her friends felt confident in their decision to choose experience—just like Hannah and her friends were doing in Lena Dunham’s show Girls.

We were entirely convinced by the dichotomy Hannah set up in “One Man’s Trash” — that a girl could either be experienced or happy — and it seemed to be confirmed by our knowledge of feminism and our desire to be modern. To choose experience was to choose to be single when you were young, to be willing to undergo some precarity because you had to look out for yourself, to be curious about the characters you would meet and what effect they’d have on you, and to rely on your friends for solace and support. To choose happiness was to try to make a career, a marriage, and a stable life as efficiently as possible: basically, as I saw it, to spit in the face of the great opportunity that women had finally wrested back from the jaws of history.

But then, a decade or so later, she was blindsided by a passage in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You2, where Eileen looks back at her youth and suggests that she would have been better off if she had ‘done the Christian thing,’ married her boyfriend, and started a family in her twenties. For Fishman, this was a shocking revelation…

This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age […] I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.

Even now, a few years further on—amid a renaissance of the happy-ending romance genre, and the growing influence of tradwives who preach the satisfactions of early marriage and motherhood—she still seems to be reeling from this affirmation of more conservative, traditional choices, and rather than suggest a solution to her dilemma, she concludes by turning the question back on her readers: “Presuming no one did the Christian thing, when you were very young, by marrying you: do you crave, in retrospect, the protection of an affectionate wing?”

Our DNA’s whispered instructions are often called biological imperatives, and usually listed as survival, territorialism, competition, reproduction, quality-of-life-seeking, and group-forming3. We can see these imperatives play out in the dilemma Fishman explores in her essay, as the women she’s describing go about forming friend groups and families, seeking a quality of life that feels somehow ‘better’, competing with their peers (or their parents) in one way or another, seeking erotic encounters and romantic partners, and trying (or trying not to) get pregnant.

These instructions we receive are always vague, and often feel contradictory. Take territorialism—we feel impelled to explore and seek out new pastures, new resources and possibilities AND we feel impelled to set up camp, call it home, and secure it, protect it. When our DNA is telling us to venture forth AND to make a home, how are we supposed to know what to do?

Of course it is true that the idea that a person can have conflicting liberal and conservative impulses (and that we tend to lean more conservative as we get older) is not new. But for Fishman, her revelation—that her appetite for experiences over conventional happiness may have been a mistake—felt so dramatic because those assumptions which were suddenly thrown into question had been so important to her. Her faith she had in her pursuit of experience, and in her rejection of that other way of living, was a fundamental part of her ideology, her identity, her self.

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While our lives are guided by our biological imperatives, they are made interesting by the vagueness of these instructions we receive from our DNA. And this is perhaps one big reason why we’ve evolved this habit of telling stories—so we can take these urges and colour them in with specificity.

In her essay, Fishman confronts her dilemma with compelling honesty and intellectual rigour to explore the complexity of the experience of being a young woman in the twenty-first century. As a counterpoint to the above argument made by Eileen in Beautiful World, she quotes another passage from earlier in the same novel:

Was I really like that once? A person capable of dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there […] All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life — the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs — struck me as permanent. I felt that anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy.

It’s difficult to find a satisfying answer to the question of ‘should you marry young’ because we can make a convincing argument in either direction. Yes, it is natural to go out and seek revelatory experiences. Yes, it is natural to settle down with a partner, have children, and hope for happiness.

The happy thing about this conundrum for us storytellers is that these conflicting impulses open up roads towards two different kinds of story.

It seems to me that the idea of “dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there” is a pretty good description of the work of a lot of my favourite authors, from Virginia Woolf to Denis Johnson to Miranda July. This is our liberal urge to explore new territory translated into story.

And we have all those other stories that embark on an adventure of one kind or another, but end up coming home to something more stable and safe—romance novels, and also every other quest for a fairytale ending where our heroes live happily ever after.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…

So what can us storytellers learn from Fishman’s essay? And from these whispered instructions from our DNA?

While it is of course reductive to try to boil life down to a short list of biological imperatives, it can also be instructive to consider them. It can help us understand why we—or our characters—have these impulses to do the things we do.
When the instructions we receive from our DNA are unclear or contradictory, our stories become more compelling. When two roads open up before us, and both feel like natural routes for us to take, we are faced with a dilemma—and dilemmas are great for story.
We can make our characters more compelling by giving them things that they care about—or Values that they hold4. In that way that Fishman (and Hannah from Girls) had a strong conviction that seeking experience was more important than happiness.
We can make our stories more compelling by confronting our characters with the realisation that maybe they are wrong. In that way that Fishman (and Eileen from Beautiful World) found themselves worrying that they’d wasted their youth.
The more fundamental the Value to the character, the more important it will seem to the story when it is turned on its head.