Hey there,

How is your Sunday going?

Here’s what’s in today’s issue:

• One big thing. Why are your strongest memories from when you were 10-30? Is your life story as unique as you think? 🧠

• You have to check this out. Robots go to the library. 🤖

• Tools and tech. This meeting could have been a Loom. 🎥

Let’s get into it.

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

Your cultural life story.

You're heading to dinner to meet your lifelong best friend and his new wife, Seraphina.

You’ve never met her, and your friend decided not to tell his wife anything about you.

You all sit down. You order a bottle of Cabernet, pita bread, and dips for the table.

It doesn’t take long before Seraphina asks, “So, tell me about your life!”

“What would you like to know?”

“Tell me your whole life story. We’re going to be in each other's lives. Take me to the beginning. I want to know everything.”

As you sip wine, you enter a series of queries into the Google search bar of your brain’s memory database: “Hey brain, what are the top events from our life that are most central to our life story?”

Your brain replies: “Oh, remember… remember that one time we saw Eddie Murphy live and we laughed so hard? That was awesome.”

“Yeah, that was pretty awesome,” you think. But is it central to my life story? Nah.

So you refine your memory retrieval attempts until you cobble together a cohesive series of events and manage to put them in chronological order until you have an answer that doesn’t make you sound like Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCarty on SNL circa 1993.

You take another sip of wine and get started: “Well, I was born in… blah blah blah… then my sister was born… then we moved to a new house… blah blah blah… then I met my first girlfriend… blah blah blah…”

We are autonomous individuals, dammit.

Individualism is a central aspect of Western society, especially in modern times. Constraints on the type of life we choose to live have progressively fallen away over time. Good parents and teachers tell kids that they can be whoever they want to be.

Right?

A few years back, the folks down in the research lab had an idea. They heard about your dinner with your friend’s wife. They wondered what would happen if they asked hundreds of people to tell their life stories. Would they get hundreds of wildly different variations?

In many studies conducted over many years in different countries (this one being the most cited), researchers asked people over 40 to recall memories from their personal lives… to tell the story of their lives (known as recalling autobiographical memories).

What did they find? Did anyone else mention that Eddie Murphy concert?

I’m going to cover three of the primary findings today:

1. Cultural life scripts. Most of the moments people include in their personal life stories are the same and occur in a similar sequence at similar ages. People’s individual life stories closely mirror cultural life scripts learned in childhood.

2. The reminiscence bump. Most of the moments in people's life stories occur between the ages of 10 and 30 and are positive in nature.

3. The midlife story gap. Very few events recalled in these life stories come from midlife. Aw, sad.

Cultural life scripts.

We all have scripts in our minds for how things work.

When you go out to eat, you get seated, review the menu, place your order, eat, and then duck out the back before the bill comes.

These scripts help us communicate about and navigate through recurring, complex situations in life.

It turns out we have these shared scripts for life, too.

“A life script represents a series of life events that take place in a specific order, and it represents a prototypical life course within a certain culture,” says Annette Bohn. “It influences how we communicate, think about our life, and plan our future.”

When researchers analyzed hundreds of personal life stories, they found incredible similarity in the types of key events mentioned in these stories. These included having children, getting married, beginning school, going to university, falling in love, the first time having sex, retiring, leaving home, a parent's death, starting your first job, taking a long trip, settling on a career, divorce, etc.

Across various studies, 40-70% of events mentioned in an individual’s life stories matched the cultural life scripts where they lived. This alignment was higher in research done in Denmark and lower in the United States, for example, likely reflecting differences in the homogeneity of these cultures.

What’s going on here?

There are two sides to it:

The first is a function of storytelling and memory. Remember the dinner with your friend’s new wife? As you selected key events from your life to include—and others to leave out—your decisions were influenced by the cultural life script understood by everyone around the dinner table that night. Getting an education came before getting a job, which came before buying a home. You left out the story of getting robbed on a train in Europe because it didn’t fit into a cohesive life narrative… it didn’t fit inside an easy-to-tell story.

Here’s where things get interesting. 🔥

Think of how often you have told some version of your life story. The more often you recall memories, the longer they last. The longer you go without telling the story of being robbed, the more it fades in your memory. Over time, your individual life story matches the cultural life script in your mind.

The second is a function of life choices. As we live, it is easier to make life choices that match the cultural life script we inherited. If you decide to go to college after high school, people pat you on the back. If you choose to move to India and study under a guru after high school, you will find yourself explaining your reasoning and defending your choice.

Most people follow the cultural life script. I'm not arguing this is bad or good. I am explaining one reason so many aspects of individual life stories match cultural life scripts. (However, research does show that variance from cultural life scripts increases depression and PTSD symptoms.) Swimming upstream is stressful.

The reminiscence bump.

When the research team asked people to recount the significant events of their lives, they also asked:

• What age did they occur?

• How important were they?

• To what degree they were happy or sad?

When they crunched the numbers, they found two unexpected things.

First, the events included in autobiographical life stories are highly clustered between 10 and 30. This is now referred to as the reminiscence bump. Researchers have recreated this bump in key events early in life across many studies. Regardless of whether people list 4, 7, 15, or 25 key life events, they still cluster between ages 10 and 30.

There are several major explanations for the reminiscence bump, one of which is the cultural life scripts theory—that our inherited life scripts are front-loaded for cultural reasons. If a culture does not reliably guide its members into behaviors that extend the culture (such as having children), it won't last long.

Second, the life story events that cluster between 10 and 30 are emotionally positive. See the chart below.

For one, sad events make up a minimal number of people's reported major life events. More interestingly, unlike happy events, sad events do not peak between 10 and 30. They do not correlate with age at all. In the chart above it may look like sad events increase as we age. They do not. Instead, people are more likely to include recent sad events in their life story. As time passes, people cull sad events from their life stories. I covered a variation of this idea in my newsletter, Rose-Colored Distortions.

The midlife story gap.

The reminiscence bump research shows that just over 20% of significant life events occur after the age of 30 (this is not due to the age of the participants).

In our cultural life scripts, the plot gets awful thin after 30. Bummer.

Why is this?

Researchers have shown that children learn cultural life scripts as part of their development.

But they don’t just learn what goes into a typical life story. “The cultural concept of biography includes more features than the cultural life script, as it also refers to knowledge about narrative conventions and goals pertaining to the telling of autobiographies,” says Bohn. Children learn how to tell stories.

As most people know, kids of a certain age are awful at telling stories (as Tom Segura nails here). They are all over the place. When asked to tell a fictional life story, the facts they include are scattered and disconnected.

Over time, kids' stories about fictional people begin to make some sense. For example, research in Denmark found that boys tended to invent life stories about soccer stars, and girls invented stories about kings and queens (remembering Denmark has a constitutional monarchy and Crown Prince).

Here are two fictional life stories created by a nine-year-old boy and girl in Denmark:

I love these.

Wins the championship at 28. Child at 30. Ill at 75. Drops dead at 95. The end.

Married at 32. Pregnant at 36. Dead at 59. The end.

Sure, these are the cute stories of nine-year-olds, but they actully match the rough structure of narrative arcs provided by adults in similar studies! By nine, kids understand the rough outlines of a typical life story and how to structure the order of events.

Given my interest in charming Gen X friends like you that are navigating midlife, the research team conducted a study in which people aged 38-76 nominated life events they expected a person of their age to experience in the future. In short, they asked: “What comes after the reminiscence bump?”

Of the 28 events mentioned by more than 4% of participants, here are the top 9, in order of how many people mentioned them:

• Travel and leisure

• Retire

• Having grandchildren

• Moving and selling a house

• Other’s death

• Disease

• Own death

• Offspring goes to college

• Offspring gets married

So… two big life ideas: retirement and travel. And then three on death and disease and three on children and grandchildren (beginning to live through the cultural life story of others).

That’s it?

Even when prompted about key events in midlife and beyond, our best ideas as a culture are travel and retirement. I mean, both of those sound cool.

But this really isn’t that different from the nine-year-old’s tale of aging: Child at 30. Ill at 75. Drop dead at 95. The end.

Cultural life story creative writing.

Think about the types of things I’ve mentioned as typical life story events: leave home, start university, get married, buy your first house, retire, etc.

They are all transitions.

I lived with my parents, then I left home and lived with roommates. Something changed.

One way to think about the midlife story gap: nothing changes. You’re just showing up at work every day at 35, 45, and 55. No one is going to watch that movie. Scene 37: the hero goes to work again.

In terms of cultural life scripts, there isn’t much given to you for this window of life. Kids leave home. Take a big trip. Maybe a grandchild appears. From the end of the reminiscence bump at 30 to retirement… the cultural story is more like an HR training video than a summer blockbuster.

With Second Act Creator, I want to expand your thinking on ways to flourish in midlife. Part of this will be to generate more creative life story ideas for midlife, since the cultural life script is not there to help us like it was in our 20s.

Let’s remember, the clock is ticking. As I mentioned in my newsletter Your Life in Weeks, if the average life last s4,000 weeks, at 52 I have about 1,300 weeks remaining.

What are the personally meaningful life events you could insert into your life story? I like to think of things that will add to true happiness during midlife and/or prepare me for health and well-being in my later years (which goes well beyond financial planning for retirement).

I’ll dig into this idea over time in this newsletter, with frameworks to help you write a more creative, fulfilling midlife story.

I hope you’ll stick around to work on this with me.  

Enjoy your Sunday and the rest of the week.

See you next Sunday.