The linear life is dead

Bruce Feiler says all the disruption in your life is normal

Joanne McHugh

May 13, 2025

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"We’ve been led to believe that our lives will always ascend, for example, and are shocked to discover they oscillate instead. Our society tells us we should be basking in progress, but our experience tells us we are beset by slip-ups. Might this gap help explain the anxiety so many of us feel?" says Bruce Feiler.

Galvanized by a personal crisis, Bruce Feiler spent several years collecting life stories from Americans who’d been through major life changes–from losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy. He then spent a year coding these stories, identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change.

“A host of unprecedented forces are reshaping contemporary life–technological, political, spiritual, sexual–yet the techniques we use to make meaning of our lives have not kept up. We’re going through transitions more frequently, but our toolkit for handling them has not changed to keep pace,” according to Bruce Feiler.

“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 stately life chapters, we’re confused when those chapters come faster and faster, frequently out of order, often one on top of the other,” said Bruce Feiler.

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,” said Bruce Feiler.

“We tallied up every single variation of unsettling life event I heard. The total came to 52 types. That’s 52 different sources of conflict, upheaval, or stress a person can face. The number of disruptors a person can expect to experience in an adult life is around three dozen. That’s an average of one every 12 to 18 months,” according to Bruce Feiler.

“Every now and then, one–or more commonly a pileup of two, three, or four–of these disruptors rises to the level of truly disorienting and destabilizing us. I call these events lifequakes…The average person goes through three to five of these massive reorientations in their adult lives,” said Bruce Feiler.

“William James, the father of modern psychology, said it best nearly a century and a half ago, and his wisdom has been sadly forgotten. Life is in the transitions. His point is even more true today: We can’t ignore these central times of life; we can’t wish or will them away. We have to accept them, name them, mark them, share them, and eventually convert them into a new and vital fuel for remaking our life stories,” said Bruce Feiler.

“If I could put what I learned into a simple formula, it would be this: The linear life is dead. The nonlinear life involves more life transitions. Life transitions are a skill we can, and must, master,” said Bruce Feiler.

The Things Your Mom Should Have Told You Book of the Month is "Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at any Age" by Bruce Feiler.

In the olden days, moms used to clip articles from newspapers for their kids if they thought it was something they needed to know. I’m keeping an eye out for things that you might have missed that may be helpful to you.

This week’s clips:

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What do you do with all of the lingering hurt when a friendship fades? Writer Christine Wolf offers 3 ways to deal when you can’t get closure.

Gen Twenty suggests 15 ways ChatGPT can help you ace your next job interview.

Things Your Mom Should Have Told You

The linear life is dead

Bruce Feiler says all the disruption in your life is normal

This week’s clips:

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