Making it up. Or not.

I don't like this idea.

For the sake of argument, though, let's say that our big five personality traits--openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism--are relatively fixed, and that, therefore, how we interact and react to events is, in a way, more static than it is fluid.

(More likely, we are an amalgam of staccatoed and patterned behavioral choices and our genes.) Either way, behavior modification, and resulting increases in utility might be aided if we at least admit that we are not "as we are" as the results of big conflicts and clashes, but instead, the product of our genes, largely, and secondarily, events we've slowly been conditioned to adapt within.

I still don't like the idea, but: the large event type narratives that we hear about (that people most often attribute personality to--a person like me, for instance!), are often there, perhaps, as a way to cope, because stories make fundamental sense to us.

Like I said, I don't like it, necessarily, but that doesn't really have relevance.