What does it mean that meaning is retroactive?

You often do not understand the meaning of an experience until much later.

Example: At twenty-six, you are laid off from what you thought was your dream job. For two years, the event sits in your autobiography as a humiliation — proof that you were not good enough. At thirty, you start a company that would never have existed if you had stayed employed. At thirty-four, you tell the story at a dinner party and call the layoff the best thing that ever happened to you. The event did not change. You changed, and the meaning changed with you. The layoff was not redeemed. It was recontextualized — assigned a different position in a different narrative arc, one that could not have been written until the later chapters existed.

Try this: Choose a significant experience from at least five years ago — one that felt unambiguously negative at the time. Write three paragraphs. First, describe the meaning you assigned when the event occurred (what you believed it said about you, your future, or the world). Second, describe the meaning you assign today (how has the interpretation shifted, and what subsequent experiences made the shift possible?). Third, project forward: write a plausible future scenario — five or ten years from now — in which the meaning shifts again. What would have to happen in your life for this event to mean something entirely different a third time? The exercise makes the retroactive mechanism visible by forcing you to see the same event through three temporal lenses.