Imagine you quit your job. It was the kind of corporate job you dreamed of getting as a college freshman, complete with cushy benefits and upward mobility. But your mental health plummeted a month into the work. You felt yourself becoming someone you didn’t recognize. Last week, you decided enough was enough – and you left.

Today, you tell your family about it. Your mom says that this is who you’ve always been: a quitter. When you didn’t like piano lessons at age 5, you quit. When you turned out to be a terrible trombone player at age 11, you quit. But your dad says something different: You’ve always known your own mind. When the most popular kid in school asked you to the homecoming dance at age 15, you decided to go with your friends instead. When all your friends wanted to go to Cancun for spring break at age 19, you decided to join your parents in Ireland.

These are two very different storylines. Both have the opportunity to be integrated into your emerging story about this career transition. And most people don’t realize that such co-authored narratives have seeped beneath the surface until the story about who they are is already entrenched: I’m a quitter.

The Listeners Who Shape Us

We tend to think of memory as a private archive. But psychologist Monisha Pasupathi has shown that remembering is a social act:........

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