The Deep Structure of Lives

Abstract

Psychology has always treated behavior and experience as embedded in a unidimensional flow in time, the “stream of behavior”. This means that events and actions occupy non-overlapping time-intervals in this stream. Nevertheless a phenomenological analysis reveals that the structure of lives is richer and far more interesting. Using Herbert Simon’s notion of near-decomposability, I describe the structure of lives as a composite of nearly independent strands that run concurrently, and are asynchronous. This is a “deep structure” of lives in contrast to the current conception, which conceives of lives as “flat”.