Life is not linear
Expecting it to be can cause us to feel off track
I’m reading a book by Bruce Feiler called Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. The author interviewed hundreds of people about their life stories and combed through the interview transcripts with a team of researchers looking for patterns. They found that the old paradigms for how we think about the trajectory of our lives are out of date and completely inadequate.
Historically, people thought of their lives as either a play in three acts, a conveyor belt marching ever forward, or a staircase that peaks in mid-life and then slowly descends toward death. We expect certain transitions, like puberty, entering adulthood, getting married, becoming a parent, and getting promoted. We even expect a mid-life crisis. We expect life to unfold in a particular sequence of events that always follow the same order.
But the researchers found most people in fact go through a much larger series of either self-induced or unplanned transitions, shocks, crises, and major changes throughout their lives that can upend their trajectories and can lead to massive shifts in identity and purpose.
Many people live life “out or order”, for example having children early and then going to college later or having early success followed by a burnout. The author suggests that one of the major causes of the dissatisfaction so many people feel in life is that life unfolds differently from their expectations of linear progress.
The number of transitions we face is significantly more than 100 years ago when people typically stayed close to home, did one job, and had one life partner. Today, people travel, relocate internationally, switch careers, get divorced and remarried, experience rapid technological change, and even change their genders. And these are just the changes people initiate themselves. Unexpected changes like economic downturns, loss of jobs, accidents, injuries, sickness and the death of loved ones also put us in a state of transition. It is not uncommon to go through multiple transitions at the same time.
This being the case, perhaps one of the best things we can learn—and teach our children—is how to manage transitions so life’s constant change and often multilayered transitions do not overwhelm us. According to the book, there are key skills one can develop to master transitions and thrive through change, which I will cover in a later post.
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