I’m the king of taking a life era and flattening it into a self-depracating story, like “oh yeah I went to Asia and I was really sweaty and didn’t get much from it”, removing a whole bunch of great experiences from my summary by mistake/automatically/without realising. So I wanted to gather nice stuff from each era, add more context etc.
(I call this “gisting”, and “gist updating”, where I can have a “gist” like “oh yeah I worked at Alvea and I probably shouldn’t have been hired and I was overpaid”, rather than a more positive and fun gist)
From ChatGPT, when I first came up with this phrase:
Another angle is McAdams’s work on how we form a narrative identity: our sense of self becomes the sum of remembered events woven into a coherent story. Yet we rarely carry every thread of that tapestry in our heads at once. Instead, we compress whole chapters into a single resonant statement—like the single-sentence memory you’ve described—because it preserves the essence of that story, much like an epigram might capture a philosophical system in a single phrase.