The Deck of Disruptors

Week 3: 52 Big Events That Can Change Our Lives Forever.

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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This week I’ve been reading a charming, cranky book called A Short History of Progress. It’s so fussy that the paperback boasts this review on the cover, “If you read one book about impending doom this year, make it this one.”

A point for clever marketing there.

But: I’m enjoying it! One reason is that the author, Canadian novelist and historian Ronald Wright, goes out of his way to point out that for most of history, humans changed very little. “Most people living in the Old Stone Age would not have noticed any cultural changes at all,” he writes. “The human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death.”

Well, so much for that.

Today, change is everywhere. Change is the norm. And here’s the truth that I’ve spent the last few years documenting by combing through the hundreds of life story interviews I’ve done, then calculating in excruciating detail the amount of personal upheaval we all face: Change is quickening.

Here's what that means in real life:

The basic unit of personal change is what I call a disruptor. A disruptor is an event or experience that interrupts the everyday flow of one’s life. I call them disruptors as opposed to stressors, crises, or problems because the term is more value-neutral.

Many disruptors like, say, adopting a child or starting a new job would not traditionally be defined as negative, yet they’re still disruptive. Even the most customarily adverse life events, like losing a spouse or being fired, sometimes become catalysts for reinvention. Disruptors are simply deviations from daily life.

By going through all 400 of the interviews I’ve now conducted, I generated a master list of the events that meaningfully redirected people’s lives. The total number of disruptors was fifty-two. The parallel to a deck of cards is irresistible, so call this list life’s deck of disruptors.

My "deck of disruptors" list.

The closest analogy to this list is the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, created in 1967 by psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe. They identified forty-three life change units.

The differences between their list and mine, made fifty years apart, are fascinating. Most items are similar, but they have some everyday annoyances—major holidays, family get-togethers—that rarely came up in my conversations. They have only one category relating to religion (change in church activity), while I have three (change in amount of religious observance, change in religious affiliation, personal calling), which I suspect reflects the fluidity of spiritual identity today.

Holmes and Rahe have eight categories about work, all of which I have, but none about starting your own business or nonprofit. My wife runs a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs around the world, so noticing this is important to me!

Holmes and Rahe have divorce on their list, but no custody battles, which of course have become more common. And most striking, none of the more contentious social flashpoints of our time appear on their list. They have no sexual harassment or domestic violence, no mental illness, suicide, or addiction. All of those were dominant, poignant themes of my conversations. I also have public humiliation, which I dare say is more prominent in the era of social media.

But while the broader range of disruptors is concerning enough, the second big change we're all living with is downright alarming: We face a faster and faster pace of disruptors.

In Life Is in the Transitions, I gather a ton of public data that supports this conclusion, on everything from the rise in the frequency of job changes and moves, more fluidity in sexual identity and religious beliefs, etc.

But just the results from my interviews alone make the point: My data show that we experience an average of three dozen disruptors in our adult lives. That’s one every twelve to eighteen months, more often than most people see a dentist!

The good news is that most of these we get through with relative ease. Unlike our Stone Age forebears, we’re actually pretty good at adapting to change.

The bad news is that every now and then we go through a disruptor so significant – or, more commonly, a clump of disruptors so intense – that we suddenly feel overwhelmed and uncertain about what to do. It’s one of these states that we’ve all been experiencing together over the last year-and-a-half.

Next week: What to do when the big one hits. The four types of lifequakes.

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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.