Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

by Bruce Feiler

But I’m the narrative guy. For three decades, I had devoted my life to exploring the stories that give our lives meaning—from the tribal gatherings of the ancient world to the chaotic family dinners of today. I have long been consumed by how stories connect and divide us on a societal level, how they define and deflate us on a personal level.

Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story—are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer—matters a great deal. How you adapt that story—how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life—matters even more.

Stories were how I’d always found myself. How I put my unease and outsiderness into coherent form.

“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.

Stories stitch us to one another, knit generation to generation, embolden us to take risks to improve our lives when things seem most unhopeful.

What I found was a young-but-growing field built around the idea that reimagining and reconstructing our personal stories is vital to living a fulfilling life.

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?

Since navigating such transitions quickly became an overriding theme, I spent a lot of time digging into this underdiscussed phenomenon. I asked subjects whether their biggest life transition was voluntary or involuntary, whether they used rituals to get through this time, what the biggest emotion was that they struggled with, how they structured their time, what old habits they shed, what new ones they created, how long this transition took.

The idea that life follows a series of carefully calibrated progressions—childhood to young adulthood to middle age to old age; dating to marriage to children to empty nest; low-level job to mid-level job to senior-level job to retirement—seems preposterously outdated. 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.

That’s fifty-two different sources of conflict, upheaval, or stress a person can face. These range from the voluntary (losing weight, starting a company) to the involuntary (being fired, discovering your child has special needs); from the personal (getting sober, losing a loved one) to the collective (joining a social movement, being hit by a natural disaster). 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. You or someone you love is almost surely going through one now.

Joseph Campbell’s iconic hero’s journey is a staged model of spiritual growth.

More to the point, nonlinearity helps explain why we all feel so overwhelmed all the time. Trained to expect that our lives will unfold in a predictable series of stately life chapters, we’re confused when those chapters come faster and faster, frequently out of order, often one on top of the other. But the reality is: We’re all the clouds floating over the horizon, the swirl of cream in the coffee, the jagged dash of lightning. And we’re not aberrations because of this; we’re just like everything else.

36 percent of Americans move up the socioeconomic ladder in their lives; 41 percent move down.

The first generations of psychologists stressed that we all finish developing by age twenty-one. That notion is now dead. A wave of recent brain research has shown that we’re capable of change at any age. As one neuroscientist put it, “The brain remodels itself throughout life.”

We’re all comparing ourselves to an ideal that no longer exists and beating ourselves up for not achieving it.

The idea that dozens of disruptors are lurking around every corner of our existence is an unnerving enough feature of the nonlinear life.

Lisa Ludovici.

“I did something I’d read about for decades and I always thought was a great concept: Jump and the net will appear.” Where did she get the courage? I asked. Her answer was nearly identical to Brian Wecht’s explanation of how he quit physics to join Ninja Sex Party: “The fear of staying was greater than the fear of leaving.”

“I’m the first hypnotist to be hired by the United States government to work in the world’s largest healthcare system, and we published work showing a 50 percent success rate eradicating chronic pain when no one else is showing even 30 percent success.” She had transitioned from corporate ad executive

These moments go by many names. Max Weber coined the term metanoia to capture a massive change in a person’s outlook. William James deemed them mental rearrangements. Hollywood likes turning points. Entrepreneurs, like my wife, use inflection points. Others have tried pivots, U-turns, crossroads, crises. Each of these terms has virtues and weaknesses.

Lev Sviridov called them ampersands. “You enter in one place, go through an elaborate squiggle, then come out in another.”

I call them lifequakes, because the magnitude with which they upend our lives is exponentially worse than everyday disruptors. Lifequakes involve a fundamental shift in the meaning, purpose, or direction of a person’s life. I think of them as BCE/CE moments (or BC/AD in the old vernacular), in which a person’s life story gets divided into a before and an after. A full decade following my cancer diagnosis, I still use the experience to demarcate time: I haven’t been to that restaurant since I got sick. My wife does the same with the birth of our daughters, my brother with the Great Recession.

My definition: A lifequake is a forceful burst of change in one’s life that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.

What’s notable about this finding is how people are less and less shaped by shared, communal events. Had I done these interviews in the twentieth century, with its back-to-back wallops of two world wars, the Great Depression, civil rights, and women’s rights, surely the number of collective events would have been higher.

Maybe he should revise this book

The fact that personal, involuntary lifequakes are by far the most common is a reminder that the nonlinear life is, at its core, not something most people seek out. We prefer to think we control the trajectory of our lives; the reality, unfortunately, is far more tenuous.

Gina Bianchini, a California native with two Stanford degrees and stints in Congress and at Goldman Sachs, was the rare female CEO of a tech startup in the all-male bastion of Silicon Valley, when her cofounder, the iconic Marc Andreessen, fired her, making her an “unperson” in her own community.

By twenty-five, she was burned out and feuding with her cofounders, when a friend from high school gave her a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a step-by-step guide to discovering your inner creativity.

whopping 87 percent of these lifequakes involve leaving or rejecting a stable condition, whether a career, family, worldview, or home. This strongly suggests that the larger atmosphere of nonlinearity has given people greater permission to turn their backs on something safe in the service of striving for greater personal fulfillment.

I have only one life, she thought. I would rather risk everything than die without being myself.

Dwayne Hanes was married to his high school sweetheart and working to rehabilitate sex offenders in Detroit, but when he got passed over for a promotion, he became so angry he cheated on his wife and sunk his marriage.

But the third factor in why some disruptors become lifequakes was not something I expected: Disruptors seem to clump together.

It’s a pileup.

Lifequakes are massive, messy, and often miserable. They come at inconvenient times that usually make them more inconvenient. They aggregate. But they also do something else: They initiate a period of self-reflection and personal reevaluation. They set in motion a series of reverberations that lead us to revisit our very identity. They force us to ask what we don’t ask often enough: What is it that gives me meaning and how does that influence the story of my life?

Understanding the connections among what gives us meaning, which personal stories we emphasize at any given time, and the visual representation of those pillars of identity was a challenging and ultimately thrilling part of the Life Story Project.

“Everyone is looking for an identity community and they hit potholes somewhere along the road. Those potholes can be trauma, they can be abandonment, they can be witnessing your father commit suicide. The people have misery, but they don’t have company. And sometimes they find acceptance in pretty negative places. My job is to fill potholes. My motto is: ‘I treat the child not the monster.’”

“What troubled me then,” he later wrote, “as it has done throughout my life, was not the fear of dying, but the question of whether the transitory nature of life might destroy its meaning.” His answer would guide his life and that of tens of millions of others in the coming century: “In some respects it is death itself that makes life meaningful.”

His core idea: We should not ask what the meaning of life is because it is we who are being asked. Each of us is responsible for finding our own reason to live.

Frankl’s message was that even in the face of unimaginable bleakness, humans can find hope. “You do not have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering . . . then your life becomes truly meaningless.”

“Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life,” Jung wrote. “Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”

In the end, we identified three key ingredients of a well-balanced life. Let’s call them the ABCs of meaning. The A is agency—autonomy, freedom, creativity, mastery; the belief that you can impact the world around you. The B is belonging—relationships, community, friends, family; the people that surround and nurture you. The C is cause—a calling, a mission, a direction, a purpose; a transcendent commitment beyond yourself that makes your life worthwhile.

These three essential ideas, as powerful as they are, aren’t the only means we use to live with harmony, fulfillment, and joy. They correspond to another set of tools: the three strands of our narrative identity. The first is our me story—the one in which we’re the hero, the doer, the creator; we exercise agency and, in return, feel fulfilled. The next is our we story—the one in which we’re part of a community, a family, a team; we belong to a group and, in turn, feel needed. The third is our thee story—the one in which we’re serving an ideal, a faith, a cause; we give of ourselves to others and, by extension, feel part of something larger.

Agency is so important that even deluding yourself that you have it can improve your life. Merely understanding a problem, even if you can’t do anything about it, gives you a sense of control.

“My life is like waves in an ocean. There are foamy times, there are calm times, but on the whole, it’s beautiful.”

“My life is one of those shapes you make with a Spirograph, where you put a pen in a circle and it turns into a flower. It’s not a line—how boring would that be!”

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.

And perhaps most important of all, nearly everyone who said they’d experienced intra-life dying mentioned that it left them less afraid of actually dying—and thus more willing to take risks to live robustly.

Augustine’s conversion was more than just a lifequake, in other words; it was also an autobiographical occasion. The term autobiographical occasion was coined by sociologist Robert Zussman to describe the moments in our lives when we are summoned, or required, to provide accounts of ourselves.

the words of leading personality researcher Brian Little, “the goggles through which you viewed life in April may no longer be helpful to you in May. . . . You revise your predictions about the world, you test new ideas, and in the process, consolidate a new set of personal constructs that work for you.”

Yet as helpful as these aftershocks can be, they’re still preliminary compared to the major task of rebuilding your life. That rebuilding involves a complex, often wrenching process of transition. While that term is a familiar one, the actual mechanics of how transitions work are poorly understood. A big reason: We don’t navigate transitions in the way that most people expect.