What is the point of the storytelling bore?

Do you remember that classic 1980s American TV series about a group of elderly American women, The Golden Girls? You could call the sitcom the geriatric equivalent of Friends: equally sharp, and every bit as addictive. One of the central characters (she was called Rose) was forever lapsing into interminable accounts of uninteresting events. Her companions would try different means of cutting her short, doing so with a brutality born of desperation. One such intervention became almost a catch-phrase among her circle: ‘Where is this story going, Rose?’

I’ve always remembered it. And the more time I spend in the company of those now my age or older — men and women in their sixties, seventies or eighties — the more am I struck by that candid remark. What is it about advancing years that impels some (not all) to recount things that happened — today, yesterday, last year or when young — that are no more than that: just chronological reports of things that happened, in the order in which they happened, with no moral, no twist, no real plot, no implication, and no logical beginning, substance or conclusion? It’s just a chunk of day-to-day reality, creeping in its petty pace, and reported in sequence.