Retconning Reality
(On how the edits we make to survive can become the lies we live by.)
I was looking for a new job in social work. The interview went fine: polite smiles, a glass of water, the usual nods and compliments on my unusual CV, from farming in the Negev to working for a Thai Chinese politician. For a moment, I thought I had a chance.
A week later, the rejection came. They wanted someone more conventional. I was angry at first, but that faded. By evening I told myself I hadn’t really wanted the job, that the interview had felt off. By next week I was sure I’d only applied to test the market. A month later I caught myself telling a friend the whole idea had seemed wrong from the start and that I was happy where I was. It wasn’t true, but it felt true now.
There’s a word for this in storytelling: retcon—short for retroactive continuity. It means changing a character’s past so the present makes more sense. Writers do it all the time. They erase old details, add new ones, bend the past to fit the current plot. It keeps the narrative alive, even if the truth gets quietly edited out.
We do the same in life. We retcon heartbreak, bad decisions, missed chances. We reshape our memories until the story of ourselves feels coherent again. It’s a survival mechanism, not a sin.
But on the political stage, it becomes something else.
Take Trump. At first he said he could end the Ukraine war in a day, like a salesman promising peace on credit. Now he supports sending Tomahawk missiles for strikes inside Russia.
Recall Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. It was sold in 2020 as ending forever wars, but the chaotic 2021 pullout was retconned into a logistical success despite inherited constraints.
And then there’s COVID. Fauci’s early 2020 mask skepticism—not effective for the general public—became mandates by mid-year, retconned as following the science as it evolved.
At every level, personal, political, or cultural, retconning runs on the same mechanism: we forget what doesn’t fit. Whether it’s an old promise or a painful truth, it fades until only the revised version remains. We need others to agree with our edits, so the audience becomes part of the illusion, nodding along as if the story was always that way. Institutions, habits, and media all conspire to keep the new version stable. Fact-checkers label old clips “out of context,” burying the original. The rewrite becomes reality.
The story changes aren’t contradictions; they’re clarifications that were always part of the plan. See how easy it is. The danger isn’t the rewrite itself. Human minds are built to reconcile contradictions. The danger comes when this habit erodes our sense of what really happened. In stories, retcons keep characters alive. In life, they keep illusions breathing. Truth doesn’t vanish; it splits into versions of itself, each with its own believers.
One could say retconning edits the collective story, while gaslighting erases the individual witness. In politics, the two often merge. When governments or media knowingly rewrite recent events and then tell you it was always that way, the act crosses from narrative maintenance into manipulation.
That’s the corrosive heart of it. The erosion of shared reality isn’t incidental. It’s the outcome of a system that depends on its own revisions. Accountability dissolves when past positions vanish like unsaved drafts. Discourse frays when there’s no stable past—when one person’s evidence is another’s “out-of-context” clip. Trust becomes collateral damage when institutions teach people that reality is negotiable. Cynicism thrives in that vacuum.
This is where personal and political retconning diverge. On a personal level, rewriting handled carefully helps you heal. Handled carelessly, it’s revisionism. But on a political level, it unmakes reality for millions. Reframing admits what was and grows from it; retconning denies it ever was.
The answer isn’t purity. We all retcon. What matters is friction. Keep records. Admit the edits. Say, here’s what I said then; here’s why I see it differently now. Reward consistency over performance.
Because when truth feels liquid, someone will come to mold it. What we protect isn’t perfection. It’s the very concept of a baseline.
Next time you rewrite your past to feel better, ask yourself what the collateral damage is: to you, and to those around you.