Finding Strength in Our Shared Lifequake
We're All in a Collective Lifequake. That Should Make It Easier. Instead, We're Squandering It.
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I thought I had made a big mistake. A few years ago, when I started analyzing the kinds of experiences in our lives that our most disruptive or destabilizing, I divided them into two essential categories: voluntary versus involuntary and personal versus collective.
Voluntary means that the person initiated the change (starting a new job, having an affair, changing religions). The voluntary lifequakes I’ve experienced included moving internationally, getting married, and leaving a stable job in an attempt to sell my first book. Involuntary means the event happened to you (your house burns down, your spouse has an affair, you’re fired). My involuntary lifequakes include becoming the father of identical twin girls and getting cancer.
My involuntary lifequake: becoming a father to two brilliant and beautiful identical twins, Tybee and Eden.
This metric turned out to be quite revealing: 43% of our lifequakes are voluntary, 57% involuntary. While the percentages are relatively close, the way people look at those numbers proved to be vastly different.
As someone in my 50s, I look at that voluntary number and think, “Excellent! We’re embracing the opportunities of the nonlinear life. We’re not afraid of change!” But I’ve heard from a lot of millennials who say, “Whoa! Fifty-seven percent of our lifequakes are involuntary. All my careful planning may not come true!”
That difference in outlook suggests that variable is critical. But here’s where the problem began. The second category was much more lopsided.
A personal lifequake means something that happens to you individually (a career change, a health crisis, losing your home). A collective lifequake is an event that happens to you along with many others; it could be an event in your neighborhood, your community, your country, or something even larger (a recession, a war, a natural disaster).
I found that 87% of lifequakes were personal, 13% collective.
My first thought when I looked at these numbers was that I had made a big mistake. I had chosen the wrong metric to measure. I felt that even more when I overlapped the two figures to create what I now call the lifequake matrix.
Only 85% of lifequakes are collective-involuntary, and only 5% were collective-voluntary.
I did this research before the pandemic, and what I found notable was how rare it was that collective experiences shaped our lives. Had I done my interviews in the twentieth century, with its back-to-back wallops of two world wars, the Great Depression, and the height of the civil and women’s rights movements, surely the number of collective events would have been higher.
But then, just as my book was being released, Bam! The first collective, involuntary lifequake in more than a century shook the world at the same time. If anything, as we’ve learned, the lifequake caused by the pandemic is coming in waves as the virus moves from place to place, circles back, mutates, gains strength, then attacks again. It’s pretty clear this lifequake is not done with us yet.
But that raises a critical point about lifequakes that came through clearly in my conversations. They are not momentary events. They are portals into a new phase of life. Think of any lifequake you’ve been through – beginning a relationship, ending a relationship; becoming a parent, becoming an empty-nester; starting a new job, leaving a job, grieving, growing – and what you experience is not a single day when your way of living changes, but a series of swings that usually occur multiple times a day.
Leo Eaton, a British filmmaker who lost his wife of forty-five years to breast cancer, captured this undulating experience well in our conversation. “I would often talk to Jeri in my mind,” he said. “I remember standing on the deck of a ferry and just telling her what I was going through.” He wasn’t always sad, he told me. “There were moments of absolute joy in remembering her with friends. But then the grief returns like waves. Last week I watched a silly romance on television, and a wave of grief swept over me just as strong as any tide. It passes, but at that moment, it was just stunning in its power.”
Leo Eaton: filmmaker, producer, writer, and director.
What should be remarkable about the moment we’re in now is that we know that everyone around us is going through something painful. That is the blessing of a collective lifequake. It has the potential to lessen our feeling of loneliness. I have vivid memories of going through hurricanes as a child – the scenes of neighbors helping neighbors, banding together, empathy as balm, even as we each had to cope with our ongoing damage.
I fear that today we are squandering the opportunity to benefit from our shared experience. Stoked by our heightened sense of competition in other areas of life – politics, media, sports, money – we have projected our sense of competition onto a problem that does not care about our pre-existing rivalries.
We are in a collective-involuntary lifequake. We can collectively make it easier by each doing our part to lessen the pain on someone else, or we will voluntarily make it harder for all of us.
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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
Week 2: Embracing the Nonlinear Life
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 contact me directly.
