The Missouri Review

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

—Dante, The Divine Comedy

While temperamentally many of us imagine human lives to be stable, a simple factual recounting of what happens through time proves that they seldom are. Surprises and shocks are in store for most of us. Bruce Feiler's new book Life Is in the Transitions discusses this idea abstractly and by example from detailed interviews of hundreds of individuals. They show that fixed patterns do not work well as life predictors in such areas as jobs, health, and personal commitments. They also suggest that insofar as we need a set of presumptions about our futures, it should allow for and expect transitions—not just small alterations but big changes. I appreciate this idea because it matches my own life experiences and because it is suggested by the radical changes in understanding in most areas of knowledge, from economics and history to the hard sciences.

Feiler points out that early worldviews were based on natural and cyclical time, partly because of the prevalence of agriculture in human life. Early mythologies were seasonal, though there were exceptions that admitted to linearity or the unexpected, for example, in classic religious thought and literature. The nineteenth century moved to a worldview [End Page 5] based on mechanical time, which is regular and linear. By the early modern era, the idea of life following a circle had been replaced by a concept of its proceeding through ages or phases or stages that were essentially predictable and fixed.

During the nineteenth century, people became time obsessed, and by the end of the century the linear view was the dominant model, especially in sciences such as biology, psychology, and economics, among thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Freud believed that all humans were permanently shaped by a series of relatively inevitable psychosexual stages they were expected to pass through between birth and late childhood. Such linear views were espoused as late as the 1970s with Gail Sheehy's best-selling book Passages, describing what she depicted as an inevitable midlife crisis—a theory that she borrowed from preliminary studies by psychologists. This idea of fixed phases of life and a singular dominant midlife crisis, influential for well over a decade, is now seen as largely irrelevant and perhaps one of the last widely believed linear life models.

Since then, such views have evolved with changes in the sciences, and human experience is now seen as dynamic, unpredictable, or nonlinear. One of the early widely recognized examples came from meteorology. Edward Lorenz's study of weather prediction hypothesized the butterfly effect, which points out that a tiny influence at some distant and effectively undiscoverable point in a system can cause changes or even extreme irregularity. This was soon recognized to be more broadly true, especially in complex systems such as those of mathematics, cosmology, biology, and water dynamics, as well as weather. The linear model has been replaced by the nonlinear. Everyday events that reshape lives can be disrupters, and they are more common than we may expect.

In human life, disrupters can include love, identity, economics, beliefs, work, or the human body. They can occur at any point in life, not just at forty-one (midlife crisis) but at six or seventy-six or just about any age. The average worker today holds twelve different jobs before the age of fifty. People with higher educations can expect to change jobs fifteen times and acquire completely altered skill sets three times. The median number of jobs a person has is thirteen; the number of moves in our lives is around twelve. The number of significant accidents is about three. Many feel that their lives are off course, out of sync, while in fact they are statistically typical. The average number of significant changes, or what Feiler and others call "life quakes," is three to five. These major [End Page 6] changes can be either personal or collective; they can be voluntary or involuntary, and a surprising number of them involve intentionally rejecting a...