Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

by Bruce Feiler

Why would knowing your family’s story help you navigate your own? “All family narratives take one of three shapes,” Marshall explained. First is the ascending family narrative: We came from nothing, we worked hard, we made it big. Next, the descending narrative: We used to have it all. Then we lost everything. “The most healthful narrative,” he continued, “is the third one.” It’s called the oscillating family narrative. We’ve had ups and downs in our family. Your grandfather was vice president of the bank, but his house burned down. Your aunt was the first girl to go to college, but she got breast cancer. Children who know that lives take all different shapes are much better equipped to face life’s inevitable disruptions.

That missing ingredient touched on what Marshall had identified as the key element of family stories: their shape. Our personal narratives, I began to think, have shapes as much as our family ones do. Each of us carries around an unspoken set of assumptions that dictate how we expect our lives will unfold. These expectations come from all corners and influence us more than we admit. We’ve been led to believe that our lives will always ascend, for example, and are shocked to discover they oscillate instead. Our society tells us we should be basking in progress, but our experience tells us we are beset by slip-ups. Might this gap help explain the anxiety so many of us feel?

What everybody said, in one way or the other, was the same thing: My life has been disrupted, my dreams shattered, my confidence punctured. There’s a gap between the upward, dependable, “every problem can be cured with a pill, an app, or five minutes of meditation” life I was sold, and the unstable, unpredictable, utterly fluid life I’m forced to contend with. The life I’m living is not the life I expected. I’m living life out of order.

What I soon discovered is that a host of unprecedented forces are reshaping contemporary life—technological, political, spiritual, sexual—yet the techniques we use to make meaning of our lives have not kept up. We’re going through transitions more frequently, but our tool kit for handling them has not changed to keep pace.

In the final section, I asked about the prominent story lines that shaped their lives, and ended with my two favorite questions, the ones that produced the most enlightening insights: Looking back over your entire life story with all its chapters, scenes, and challenges, do you discern a central theme? Looking back over your life story in a slightly different way, what shape embodies your life?

Instead of passing through a series of preordained life stages interrupted by periodic crises on birthdays that end in zero, we experience life as a complex swirl of celebrations, setbacks, triumphs, and rebirths across the full span of our years. What’s more, Gen Xers feel this way more than boomers, and millennials even more than Xers.

The biggest of those consequences is that for all the benefits of living nonlinearly—personal freedom, self-expression, living your own life rather than the life others want you to live—it obliges us all to navigate an almost overwhelming array of life transitions.

Conflict is the one precondition of a story. For there to be a narrative at all, something unforeseen must happen. The plot twists in Hollywood lingo; the peripeteia in Aristotle’s naming. “Everybody agrees that a story begins with some breach in the expected state of things,” writes Jerome Bruner, the pioneer of narrative psychology. “Something goes awry, otherwise there’s nothing to tell about.” The story is the tool to resolve this breach. A central finding of my conversations—and for me an unnerving one—is that the frequency with which these disturbances are popping up these days is rapidly increasing. We are facing an epidemic of breaches—disruptors, as I call them.

The number of disruptors a person can expect to experience in an adult life is around three dozen. That’s an average of one every twelve to eighteen months.

We manage to get through many of these disruptors with only minor upset to our lives. We adjust, draw on our loved ones, recalibrate our life stories. But every now and then, one—or more commonly a pileup of two, three, or four—of these disruptors rises to the level of truly disorienting and destabilizing us. I call these events lifequakes, because the damage they cause can be devastating, they’re higher on the Richter scale of consequence, and their aftershocks can last for years. The average person goes through three to five of these massive reorientations in their adult lives; their average duration, my data show, is five years. When you do the math, that means nearly half our lives are spent responding to one of these episodes.