How the Product Works
You write about your life. An AI reads the structure. You get a map of your narrative — here's what happens at each step.
The simplest version: you answer questions about your life. An AI analyzes the structure of your answers. You get a report that maps how your narrative works — what it does well, where it has tensions, and what that means.
Here's a slightly longer version, because the details matter.
The questions
There are two modes. The brief assessment has 5 questions and takes about 5–10 minutes. The full assessment has 12 questions and takes 15–25 minutes, depending on how much you write.
The questions aren't random, and they aren't trying to be clever. Each one is designed to surface a specific kind of narrative material — a key decision, a peak experience, a difficult moment, a turning point. They draw from scene types that have been used in narrative psychology research since McAdams developed his Life Story Interview in the 1990s, with some additions informed by more recent work.
Every question targets multiple dimensions simultaneously. When you describe a turning point, the analysis looks at whether you positioned yourself as an active agent in that moment, whether the event led to something better or worse, and how you connected it to the rest of your trajectory. One answer, several signals.
The questions are designed to let you tell the story your way. There are no right answers. The diagnostic signal comes from how you tell it — what you emphasize, what you connect, what you leave out.
What the AI actually does
When you submit your answers, the analysis happens in two stages.
Stage one: structural coding. The AI reads each answer and scores it on the narrative dimensions that question is designed to measure. This is the equivalent of what a trained human coder would do with a transcript — identifying patterns like "this person consistently describes themselves as an active decision-maker" or "this answer contains a sequence where a positive experience was undone by what followed."
The scoring system is grounded in validated coding frameworks from the research literature. Each dimension is scored on a scale from strong negative to strong positive, per question. The AI also generates a rationale for each score — an explanation of why it coded the answer the way it did.
Stage two: report generation. The individual scores are aggregated into an overall profile. The system determines your narrative type based on which patterns are most dominant, then generates a personalized report that translates the structural analysis into plain language.
The report doesn't use the technical vocabulary of narrative psychology. You won't see terms like "causal coherence" or "contamination sequence." Instead, you'll see descriptions of patterns in your own words, drawn from your own answers.
What happens between the two stages
Between coding and report generation, the application layer does the math: adding up per-question scores into construct totals, comparing those totals against thresholds, and classifying your narrative into one of ten types. This classification isn't a personality label — it's a description of the dominant pattern in how you tell your story right now.
The thresholds are proportional. Dimensions measured across more questions require a higher absolute score to count as "high," which means the system accounts for how much data it has. A strong signal from one question about loss carries the same weight as a moderate signal across three questions about decision-making.
What the AI does not do
It doesn't diagnose you. It doesn't read your emotions. It doesn't evaluate whether your life is good or bad, whether your decisions were right or wrong, or whether you're psychologically healthy.
What it does is map the structure of how you tell your story — the moves your narrative makes, the patterns it follows, the places where it's strong and where it might have blind spots. Think of it as an X-ray of your narrative architecture, not a judgment of your life.
The AI analyzes structure, not content. It doesn't care whether your turning point was a divorce or a career change. It cares about what that turning point did in your narrative — did it lead somewhere? Did you position yourself as an agent in it? Did you extract meaning from it?
Brief vs. full — what's the difference?
The brief assessment (5 questions) captures the core dimensions: how you handle agency, connection, and the direction of your story arcs. It's enough for a meaningful profile, but with some constructs measured by only one or two questions.
The full assessment (12 questions) adds several things the brief version can't capture well: how you make meaning from experience, how you organize time, how your values show up across different life domains, and a richer picture of how you handle difficulty. More questions means more data, which means higher confidence in the analysis and a significantly more detailed report.
The full version isn't "better" in a moral sense — it's higher resolution. If the brief assessment is a sketch, the full version is a portrait.
Privacy
Your answers are used to generate your report. That's it. They're not used to train AI models, they're not shared with third parties, and they're not stored longer than necessary to deliver your results. The analysis happens, the report is generated, and your raw answers remain yours.
Take the assessment
Choose brief (5 min) or full (15 min). Answer honestly. See what your story looks like from the outside.
Continue Reading
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