Farewell to the Linear Life
Week 1: How to Get off the ‘Should Train’
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.
---
I can remember where I was the first time that I realized I had missed something basic about how we understand ourselves.
Our lives have shapes.
I know that sounds odd at first. Wait, are you saying that my life is a circle, a triangle, a heart, or a line? That was my initial reaction, too.
I was standing in my office in Brooklyn. I was going through a bit of a funk, having thrown out my back and facing a host of personal and professional challenges. I was looking for some wisdom in the many books about spirituality and the ancient world I have collected over the years. I pulled a book about the history of time off my shelf and began flipping through it. And suddenly, the entire shelf started moving, revealing a hidden room behind it.
I was queasy. I was lightheaded. That may not be exactly what happened.
But when I stepped into that magical room what I found was an entire library of mostly forgotten ideas that would radically reshape every conversation I would have for the next five years.
The simplest way to capture what I discovered is as follows: How we look at the world shapes how we look at our lives. Specifically, whether our lives are expected to follow a path that’s circular, ascending, descending, oscillating, or something else entirely. While these distinctions may sound abstract, they have thousands of real-world implications, affecting everything from when we should get married, to when we should change jobs, to when we should get sick, to when we should take risks.
I call it the Should Train. And it runs out of control in most of our lives.
But it doesn’t have to. Because here’s the point: The Should Train hasn’t always run on the same tracks.
In the ancient world, there was no such thing as linear time. They believed time was cyclical so agriculture was cyclical so our lives should be cyclical. As Pete Seeger and The Byrds popularized the line from Ecclesiastes:
To everything (turn, turn, turn)There is a season (turn, turn, turn)And a time to every purpose, under heaven
The Bible introduced linear time, and by the Middle Ages, people in the West believed that life was a staircase up to middle age, then down. The rigidity of that structure can’t be overlooked. It meant no new love at 40, no new job at 60, no retiring at 70 and opening an Airbnb. Straight up, then straight down.
This default life shape began to change in the middle of the 19th century with the birth of science. Grandfather clocks and pocket watches became ubiquitous around this time, as did industrial factories, assembly lines, even conveyor belts. It’s no surprise that suddenly all the popular frameworks of human life followed a similar, linear track.
Those linear structures included Freud’s psychosexual stages, Piaget’s stages of childhood development, Erickson’s eight stages of moral development, the five stages of grief. All of these are linear constructs. Erickson even went so far as to admit he took his idea from the industrial factory.
This linear model reached its peak in the 1970s, when Gail Sheehy published her mega-popular book Passages, in which she took partially plagiarized material from scholars at Yale and UCLA [she actually lost a lawsuit to one of the professors she lifted material from] and advanced the idea that adulthood proceeds in a series of linear stages. We all do the same thing in our 20s, she argued, the same thing in our 30s, then have a midlife crisis between 39 and 44 1/2.
Again, it’s hard to overstate how popular this idea was. Suddenly, having a midlife crisis wasn’t a possibility; it was a fact.
There’s only one problem: It’s baloney. It wasn’t true then, and it’s even less true now.
Just think about the pandemic. If you were between 39 and 44 ½ you were having a crisis. But if you were between 24 and 32 ½ you were also having a crisis, and if you were between 52 and 77 you were having a crisis, too. Even kids have been in crisis.
The point is: Crises don’t clump on birthdays that end in zero. They happen whenever. Forget the midlife crisis; we’re all facing the whenever life crisis.
And we shouldn’t be surprised by this new perspective. In recent decades, we’ve updated how we view the world, but we haven’t updated how we view our lives. We no longer believe the world is linear; we know it’s nonlinear.
That realization is what hit me in my office that day. And that’s why we all must embrace what I call The Nonlinear Life.
Next week we’ll define exactly what that means.
☀
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 previous posts.
You might enjoy reading these pieces:
#Words4Life: Live the Questions
Introducing: The Nonlinear Life. A Newsletter About Navigating Life’s Twists and Turns
The #1 Secret of a Successful Life Transition
Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, Council of Dads.
Or, you can also contact me directly.
