Embracing the Nonlinear Life
Week 2: The Upside (and Downside) of Living Life Out of Order
Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life, a newsletter about navigating life's ups and downs. We're all going through transitions, let's master them together. Every Monday and Thursday we explore family, health, work, and meaning, with the occasional dad joke and dose of inspiration. If you're new around here, read my introductory post, learn about me, or check out our archives.
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Of course Jeff Goldblum would find himself as the poster child for an obscure mathematical idea that would change how we all view our lives. The moment was 1993. The movie was Jurassic Park. And Goldblum, playing chaos-theorist Ian Malcom, flirts shamelessly with Dr. Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern.
What Goldblum explains is the butterfly effect, the idea that the world is so interconnected that a small change in one part of the planet can result in a large change on the other side. As the original idea was expressed: “If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it can set off a tornado in Texas.” [Goldblum replaces Brazil and Texas with Peking and Central Park, and changes the tornado to rain.]
By the time of Jurassic Park, the butterfly effect had been around for 30 years and was already considered the Big Bang of what I’ve come to call the nonlinear life. Since last week we discussed the rise and fall of the linear life, this week: What is a nonlinear life anyway and what does it mean for me?
Let’s go back to the beginning for a second. As it happens, nonlinearity is actually celebrating a birthday this year. In 1961, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz first observed the phenomenon that clouds outside his office had an irregular pattern. Unable to quantify their movement on his rudimentary computer, he started doing calculations and crystallized the idea that not everything is regular and periodic; many things in the universe are irregular and nonperiodic.
Edward Lorenz
Da Vinci had mentioned this notion centuries earlier, but Lorenz’s discovery set off a race to explore previously ignored complexities across science—from the path of lighting to the swirl of cream in a cup of coffee. Each of these phenomena is what mathematicians came to call a nonlinear system.
In previous breakthroughs in science, once observers had identified a phenomenon like nonlinearity in the world, the rest of us would begin to recognize it in our own lives. In some ways, many of us have done that. In the hundreds of life story interviews I’ve collected in the last four years, person after person has described their lives as fluid, fickle, changeable, adaptable. We all feel somehow off-cycle or off-kilter.
A plot of Lorenz's strange attractor.
But for whatever reason, no unifying expression has emerged to capture this variability.
Here’s where nonlinearity comes in. Since we now know that our world is nonlinear, we should acknowledge that our lives are nonlinear, too.
Nonlinearity means different things to different people. It might mean losing your beloved job in an out-of-the blue pandemic or quitting your job out of the blue in a pandemic to move closer to family. It might mean, like one woman I interviewed, moving back in with your parents after a marriage failed quickly, or, like another, being forced to raise your grandchildren after your daughter is killed in an automobile accident. It might mean getting sober or falling back into an addiction; deciding to have another baby late in life or choosing to walk away from a decades-old relationship.
It might just mean feeling confused.
Nonlinearity suggests that instead of resisting upheavals and uncertainties like these, we should accept them. Yours is not the only life that seems to be following its own inscrutable path. Everyone else’s is, too.
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 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. And we’re not aberrations because of this; we’re just like everything else.
Acknowledging this reality is both a rebuke to centuries of conventional thinking that imposed order on our life stories where there was none and an invitation to see in the seeming randomness of our everyday lives patterns that are far more thrilling than we could ever imagine.
The fundamental ingredient of those patterns—the base unit of the nonlinear life—is the everyday events that reshape our lives. I call these events disruptors. Next week we’ll discuss these life events, and why they seem to be coming at us faster than ever before.
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Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through my other posts.
You might enjoy reading these posts:
Week 1 in this series: Farewell to the Linear Life
The #1 Secret of a Successful Life Transition
Burnout: The Good News about the Most Overused Word of the Year
Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, Council of Dads.
Or, you can contact me directly.
