About
Last reviewed: 20 August 2026
What this is
WhatsMyArc reads what you write about your own life and reports on how that account is structured — how much of it is about choosing, how much is about other people, whether the hard parts lead anywhere, and how tightly the pieces connect. Those are constructs from narrative psychology, and they come from the research literature rather than from us.
The knowledge base explains each of them. Start there if you want the reasoning before the result.
Who builds it
Evgeny Smirnov writes the knowledge base and designed the assessment. His research on meaning-making and suffering was published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2023 — How do people experience innocent suffering?
More of his writing is at smirik.com.
What it is not
This is a self-reflection instrument. It is not a clinical or diagnostic assessment, and the Well-Being section of a report is descriptive rather than an evaluation of mental health.
It has also not been independently validated. The constructs it codes are real and replicated; the specific implementation — the thresholds, the ten types, the machine coding — has no published evidence behind it yet. That distinction is set out at length in the science article, which says plainly that the project is grounded in science without itself being science.