Some people watch history pass by. Others high in ‘historical consciousness’ truly live it – and seem to benefit as a result

On 6 February 2023, I woke up to terrible news from my home country, Türkiye. Two massive earthquakes had struck back-to-back, flattening cities, displacing millions and killing more than 53,000 people.

When a major event like this happens, it becomes a shared marker in people’s lives. Many of us begin to position our own experiences around it: ‘This happened after the earthquake.’ In speaking of the before and the after, we give shape and meaning to what happened, and a story begins to form. Over time, those stories can become part of how we tell the larger story of our lives.

The evolving story of my own life now carries the earthquakes as one of its defining moments. After that day, I felt more sharply how fragile life is, and how much it is shaped by the systems we build. Unplanned construction, failed disaster education, poor disaster management – they all revealed themselves as sources of loss. This reckoning also reshaped my path as a psychologist. I knew I wanted my work to address the psychological costs of such historic and systemic disruptions.

Of course, my story is only one example. For others, the earthquakes may not carry the same weight. The difference depends on many factors: ties to the region, personal exposure, whether loved ones were affected. Yet, even when two people live through the same conditions, one person might make the event a part of their life story, while the other might leave it out entirely. Seeing this divergence led me to ask: how does history become part of people’s life stories, and why does it, at times, get left out?

Humans are natural storytellers. We often think about our lives in narrative terms, connecting low points, high points and turning points into a personal storyline. Psychologists call this narrative identity: a coherent life story that meaningfully connects a person’s past, present and imagined future.

Let’s take a non-historic life event like graduation as an example. At first, it is simply an event, a date on the calendar, a milestone. But when it’s described as part of a story, it often takes on the weight of a turning point. For a first-generation student, for instance, the diploma might symbolise perseverance against the odds or a gift offered to one’s family. Over time, that turning point might be integrated into one’s broader life story, together with other remembered struggles, triumphs and sacrifices that connect to it in some way. The event no longer stands alone. It is woven into a coherent narrative, one that provides a sense of who one is.

Most research on narrative identity has focused on stories of personal life events. Wondering how historical moments enter life stories, I brought this question with me to the Study of Lives Research Group at Northwestern University in Illinois. At that time, the lab had conducted interviews with 134 late-midlife adults in the US. In addition to talking about events such as personal turning points and high points, participants were also asked to recall an important historical event that their generation had experienced. With a diverse research team, we set out to analyse those responses.

Their stories showed how collective events became turning points in their lives

As we read through them, we found that some people made historical moments central to who they were, while others hardly made personal connections with those moments. The team systematised the differences into what we called ‘historical consciousness’: the degree to which people integrate history into their life stories. Each narrative was carefully coded on a scale from ‘tuning history out’ (1), to ‘witnessing history’ (3), to ‘living history’ (5). Most people fell somewhere in the middle.

One participant, scoring on the lower end, recalled the terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001:

I remember being at home and watching to see what was going on and finally just having to turn that TV off because it was just over and over and over again and I couldn’t figure out why for all this time – what, it’s like a week and a half they just kept talking about it …

For her, the event was something happening on the screen, distant and intrusive, not something that shaped who she was. In a literal sense, she was tuning out history.

Others did what we describe as witnessing history, remembering events in vivid detail. For example, one participant described the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. She recalled the collective disbelief in her classroom:

‘What do you mean shot? With a gun?’ … [My teacher] started** **to get emotional and was crying and she said, I think we should say a prayer … we all just sat there like this with our eyes wide open.

Her account captured the collective shock with detail and emotional reflection – but it ended there. The event didn’t seem to have shaped her broader life story.

A smaller group of high scorers *lived *history. This doesn’t mean that they were necessarily more directly involved in a historical event than everyone else. Rather, their stories showed how collective events became turning points in their lives. One man reflected on the same tragic day when JFK was killed:

I was nine years old when that happened. I learned to be patriotic … Over the years, the impact that had on me was I registered to vote and registered for the draft when I was 18. I have never missed voting in any election, state, federal, or local since I was 18 years old.

In his recollection, JFK’s death influenced his values and his behaviour for decades to come. Beyond simply witnessing, he and other respondents were ‘storying’ the events they’d lived through, finding deep personal meaning in them and integrating them into the larger stories of their lives.

Who are the people who ‘live history’, carrying historical events forward with them as part of who they are? Do they share certain tendencies or characteristics?

Since narrative identity research often finds links between personality and the way people tell their stories, personality traits seemed like a natural place to start exploring this. In our sample, we found that individuals who were higher in historical consciousness – those who made more of a connection between historical events and their own life stories – tended to be higher in the trait of extraversion and lower in neuroticism.

We can speculate about why this might be: extraversion brings social energy and an outward orientation; it could make people more likely to join collective movements and to link those experiences to their identity. You might easily imagine, for example, an extraverted person participating in protests or a voting drive during an election, and later integrating those experiences into the story of who they are. Neuroticism, in contrast, is associated with a more inward, often anxious focus. For some people who are high in this trait, large-scale events may feel too overwhelming or emotionally taxing to process. That kind of avoidance can be a form of protection, but it could also make it less likely that historical events become part of one’s life story. Of course, personality traits are broad tendencies, and individual lives will always vary.

Integrating history into my story goes together with a sense of responsibility

In our research, we also found that people with a more global outlook were more likely to have made history part of their story. Psychologists sometimes use a scale to measure what’s called ‘identification with all humanity’, which asks people how strongly they feel connected to all humans, not just their own community or nation. One participant explicitly demonstrated this kind of identification while reflecting on the US civil rights movement:

‘[It] has made me a lot stronger and given me a resolve [to have] empathy for people throughout the world who are under oppressive regimes … that time in my life – it shaped … what I believe was right and what was wrong, and right and wrong in the whole world, too. ’

For this person, the historical moment expanded into a global worldview.

Integrating history into one’s life story seemed to come with benefits, too. People higher in historical consciousness reported greater wellbeing and a stronger sense of generativity, which refers to the drive to care for and invest in future generations. They were also more likely to vote, volunteer, and engage in civic life. Of course, these are associations, not proof of cause and effect. We can’t yet say whether integrating history into one’s story fosters these tendencies or whether these tendencies make people more likely to integrate history into their stories. What we can say is that the two often go hand in hand.

I see this connection in my own life. Reflecting on the earthquakes brings sadness, but also motivation: to give back to the people of that land, to work toward a society that is better prepared and better educated. For me, integrating history into my story goes together with a sense of responsibility as a writer and as someone who studies aspects of what it means to be human.

Think about your own life story and some of the major historical events that have coincided with it: do any of these events feel like a lived part of your story, or do they seem more removed? And what impact, if any, has that had on you? We might want to encourage each other into this kind of reflection more often. Indeed, one reason history may get left out of many people’s stories is that social conventions don’t always frame it in very personal terms. Someone might be asked: ‘Where were you when X happened?’ but not ‘What has X meant to you?’ Despite the wide reach of disasters, sociopolitical upheavals or major historical changes, it’s possible that many of us are not used to acknowledging them as forces that shape the psyche. But as we’ve seen, when history does enter people’s life stories, it can have a lasting influence on how they relate to the world – and might motivate them to help create a better one.