The moral claim (2)

When it comes to the moral to be drawn about messes, Cowen wants to reverse things. He doesn't want us to come back and clean up our mess. Running away from a mess is not, for him, a matter of running away from our responsibility to clean up the mess. Rather it is a matter of running away from our happiness because we'd be happier, he says, if we just lived with our mess:

If I actually had to live those journeys and quests and battles it would be so oppressive to me. It’s like, my goodness, can’t I just have my life in its messy ordinary, I hesitate to use then word, "glory", but it’s fun for me. Do I really have to follow some kind of narrative. Can’t I just live. So be more comfortable with messy, be more comfortable with agnostic.

What I'd like to ask is whether this moral claim is it can stand independent of the epistemological one? They go together for Cowen. In his view: stories mislead us and they mislead us into taking on quests that make us unhappy.