The Story Gets Better Every Time
Ordinary Tuesdays
Observations from everyday life. The small moments, familiar places, chance conversations, and ordinary experiences that quietly reveal something larger.
I love when meeting for coffee turns into lunch. And not just because I appreciate a good sandwich. To me, it’s proof that good conversation is happening, and everyone is into it.
So four old friends walk into a coffee shop…
Actually, it was more like three separate individuals came together to meet me for coffee. I had known all three of them, in different capacities, for decades. They had never met each other.
And, like all humans sitting around the campfire, the stories started coming out. You don’t always need a glass or three of wine for this to happen in modern society; sometimes a simple scone will do!
It made me smile sitting there listening to them, because I was the common denominator in the group. The smile wasn’t because the stories were about me, or because I had brought them together. It was because I realised I was watching the adage about stories getting better with age… play out in real time.
Fascinating!
Stories have a funny way of improving with age. Not dramatically. Just enough.
You know how it goes. The storyteller’s timing gets a little bit tighter, and the nuance and details get just a teeny amount more interesting. Or somehow the punchline lands just a little better. And I’m just as guilty as they were of making myself look fractionally more clever, more competent, or more insightful than I probably was the first time around.
I doubt it’s intentional. And I doubt the slight embellishments are lies. I’ve noticed over the years that this is simply something that happens to stories over time.
Then another thought crossed my mind.
Were they trusting me not to call them out on their embellishments? Had they forgotten I’d heard every version before? Or was something else happening entirely?
Oh look, a bug. Yes, that’s me changing the topic and helping you follow my crazy stream of consciousness.
Driving home, I happened to catch a discussion on the radio about the ancient Greek thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus.
The question is wonderfully simple, and fabulously complex!
The premise of the experiment is this: If you gradually replace every plank in a wooden ship over many years, is it still the same ship?
Philosophers have been arguing about that one for centuries.
Neuroscientists have been asking a surprisingly similar question about memory.
Their current thinking goes something like this: we don’t retrieve memories the way we pull photographs from an old album. Each time we remember something, the memory briefly becomes editable before being stored again. We don’t simply replay the story. We reconstruct it.
Suddenly, my coffee/lunch companions made a little more sense.
Perhaps they weren’t consciously polishing their stories. Maybe they weren’t hoping I wouldn’t notice.
What if every retelling was simply another opportunity for the memory itself to be rebuilt—ever so slightly. Not enough to change the story, but enough to make it feel freshly remembered rather than merely repeated.
The older I get, the more fascinated I become by the stories people choose to tell.
Not because I’m fact-checking them. Although retirement has given me more time to think about why these little things fascinate me.
I think the stories we tell over and over probably reveal as much about who we are today as they do about what happened years ago.
They’re not imperfectly remembering the past. And not just because we’re still making sense of them.
I don’t think we’re just reconstructing our memories. Perhaps I’m making a huge leap here; I’ve been known to do that. But I couldn’t help but wonder if somehow we may innately know that we need to reconnect and to reconcile our identities from who we were to who we are now.
Related Reading
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Research Note
The observations in this article are informed by ongoing reading and research in psychology, sociology, adult development, aging, friendship, purpose, identity, and life transitions. While these essays are observational rather than academic, many of the underlying ideas are grounded in established research.
James W. B. Elsey, Vanessa A. van Ast & Merel Kindt (2018). Human Memory Reconsolidation: A Guiding Framework and Critical Review of the Evidence. Psychological Bulletin.
Karim Nader & Oliver Hardt (2009). A Single Standard for Memory: The Case for Reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Cynthia Ross Tustin is the founder of I'm Thinking of Retiring, an online publication exploring the psychology, purpose, and everyday realities of life after work. A retired Fire Chief, former ICU and Emergency Room nurse, instructor, and policy writer, she combines lived experience, research, and a lifelong curiosity about human behaviour to write thoughtful essays on retirement, identity, purpose, friendship, and the ordinary moments that quietly reveal something larger. Through her Retirement Field Notes and Ordinary Tuesday series, she encourages readers to approach this next chapter with curiosity rather than certainty.
