Good Life Project - Bruce Feiler | Mastering Change

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

Bruce Feiler is the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Walking the Bible and Council of Dads, the presenter of two primetime series on PBS, and the inspiration for the COUNCIL OF DADS series on NBC. He describes himself as an experiencer and explainer. Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, for as long as he can remember, he’s loved going out into the world, creating powerful experiences, then sharing what he’s discovered, first in letters home, then eventually in books, talks, and TV. But his latest set of experiences were ones he neither sought out nor saw coming. Collectively, they dropped him to his knees, and nearly took his life. Still, fueled by a relentless curiosity, Bruce became fascinated with moments of profound transition, "lifequakes" as he calls them, where life after looks very different than life before. So he spent years traveling the country investigating this phenomenon, gathering and coding stories, and that’s led to the groundbreaking new book, Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age (https://amzn.to/2Xk1NV6). Bruce’s experiences and ideas really helped me reframe and better understand how to navigate the disruptions and bigger lifequakes, which for many of us, is something we’re in the middle of now.You can find Bruce Feiler at:Website : https://www.brucefeiler.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/brucefeiler/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bruce Feiler is the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Walking the Bible and Council of Dads, the presenter of two primetime series on PBS and the inspiration for the Council of Dads series on NBC. He kind of describes himself, as you'll hear, as an experiencer and an explainer. Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, for as long as he can remember, he has loved going out into the world, creating powerful experiences, then sharing what he has discovered. First in letters home and then eventually in books and talks and TV. He writes the This Life column in the New York Times and has contributed to the New Yorker, Parade, and Gourmet. But his latest set of experiences were ones he neither sought out nor saw coming nor wanted, for that matter.

Collectively, they dropped him to his knees and nearly took his life. Still fueled by that sort of relentless curiosity that has been this through line his whole life, Bruce became fascinated with the moments of profound transition that we all experience, or life quakes as he calls them, where life afterwards just looks very different than life looked before. So he spent years traveling the country investigating this phenomenon, gathering and coding stories, and that has led to the groundbreaking new book, Life is in the Transitions, Mastering Change at Any Age. And Bruce's experiences and ideas, it really helped me reframe and better understand how to navigate the disruptions and bigger life quakes for which

many of us, this is something we're in the middle of right now. So it's the perfect time to dive into this conversation. Cannot wait to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. For me, I grew up five generations of Jews in the South.

So that's actually two storytelling traditions that sort of exploded in me and a kind of never-ending font of stories. But there's also something else about it I think that has been defining for me, which is that I grew up in the South, and I love the stickiness and the familiness and the storytelling-ness, but I grew up Jewish in the South. So I sort of had a foot in and I had a foot out. I love being Jewish, and I love the familiness and the stickiness and the story-ness of being Jewish, but I grew up Jewish in the South, which is not only different from the mainstream of Judaism over 3,500 years, but also even isolated and different from American Judaism. So I had a foot in and a foot out. So not only did these two kind of storytelling traditions collide in me and in deep, passionate interest in stories going back to the oldest

stories ever told, but they also had in me a kind of outsider-ness who likes to go into worlds that I'm not a part of and go talk to people and kind of immerse myself. So I think of myself as two things. One is an experientialist, like I go off and have an experience. And then also an explainaholic, which is I go off and have an experience and then come back and tell people about what I found. And so it's always been kind of a joy to me that I've had these two nonsensical words that I've used to define myself. And then lo and behold, with this new project, I added another one, which is now I've decided that I'm a life story. That there is just kind of something essential about talking to people about their stories and the stories that they tell themselves about who they are, where they came from and where they're going to.

Yeah. I mean, I love that. It's funny because I think most people think about the southern part of the United States and they don't think that it is a sort of like a hotbed of rich generational Jewish tradition. And yet Savannah actually is one of those towns that has this really long history in this country. And I think it surprises a lot of people when they think about the southern part of the States as realizing that there are very strong pockets where that tradition goes back generations. I grew up in the Israel synagogue. My father was the president of in the late 1970s. My mother was its first female president in its 275 year history in the 1980s. It's the third oldest synagogue in the country. The oldest is in Rhode Island, as you know, and then the second oldest is on the Upper East Side of New off course and ended up off the coast of Savannah. And Savannah had just been founded in February of 1733.

And Jews were not allowed. By the way, as it were, Catholics were also not allowed. And slaves were not allowed, which is also interesting. But there had been an outbreak of yellow fever. And the one doctor in town had died. And cliche of cliches, there was a doctor on board this ship and so they said you know will you come take care of us and i like to joke that it's the opposite of moses he said let my people in so the doctor came and then the whole people came and they set

up a synagogue congregation mc israel in 1733 that's still in existence and i was bar mitzvah there i got married there and uh it is in, deeply part of the Southern story that's just not often told. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also to me that you sort of relay these dual experiences of a sense of fierce connection and belonging within the tradition. And also at the same time, this very real felt sense of otherness or sort of like slash outsider with the broader tradition around that. I'm curious, was that an actual lived day-to-day sense or was it just something you kind of like knew in the background? Was it a script that was running underneath? I think it was certainly lived when I was growing up because I was born in 1964,

which means I grew up in Savannah, Georgia at a time when there was still open and accepted discrimination against not only blacks, but also Jews. And so it absolutely was part of my daily life. And then I then set out, left the South, went North to college. And then that was the 1980s. I think of myself as having grown up in the age of discount airfare, where you could travel for the first time. And so I felt I learned of myself as having grown up in the age of discount airfare, where you could travel for the first time. And so I felt I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to North. And I wanted to learn about myself as an American in the 1980s.

And so I went to Japan, and I started writing letters home. This is where the storytelling began. And I'm old enough that it was on crinkly airmail paper. We had to put the lines underneath the pages. And I sent these letters home. You're not going to believe what happened to me today. And when I got back to Georgia, six months later, everywhere I went, people said, I loved your letters. And I was like, great. Have we met? And it turned out that my grandmother had Xeroxed them and passed them around. And

they went viral in a sort of 1980s sense of the word. And so this is what started me in this life of writing. At the time, it was sort of likened to Plimpton because I spent a year in Japan and wrote about that. I spent a year at Oxford and Cambridge and wrote a book about that. I spent a year as a circus clown. But even though I sort of left that part of my life, even now, when I have a problem and when I get stuck, which of course is what happened at the origin of the book that we're going to talk about here in a minute, my instinct is there must be wisdom out there. There must be a world, there must be people out there who can help me get unstuck. And so let me go out into

the world and find an answer. So I do put my nose in books and I don't mind reading the books, but ultimately for me, kind, travel is the way of learning. I think that is deeply embedded in the Southern Jewish identity that I grew up in. I mean, what's interesting also, so you describe you get out of school, you go to Japan to teach English. That leads to the letters that come home. And then this series of, that leads to learning to bow.

And then Cambridge experience learns to looking for class. The circus class experience leads to under the big top. And which is in my mind, it's sort of like it's it represents a season for you. And and it's sort of like this this moment. And part of my curiosity around that is because it looks like now you have shifted into this mode over probably the last 20 years or so where it is you have a question let me go and experience something so i can answer it but it feels like those earlier ones was more just i want to have an experience and and share what this particular thing is with people who maybe not they aren't in a position to understand what this is like. Well, you are good. Yes. I would say originally I was led by the experience and I was led by trying to learn about different places because I do think kind of on some level, like there's kind of two things that I have that I enjoy doing and that I have some aptitude at, which is going and entering a world. And a lot of these worlds are vastly, vastly different from the worlds that I grew up in

and then become a part of that world and then leave and tell other people. So yeah, so when I was writing about country music and I spent a year traveling with Garth Brooks and I got interested in that because I had lived all over the world in my twenties and I wanted to come back and lo and behold, the South I had grown up in had changed. Right. Southern things, country music, NASCAR, barbecue had gone national. That was sort of an unexpected thing. The South had been still sort of an outsider place, ghettoized in some ways in the 70s. And then by the 90s, it was the mainstream of American culture.

And so I thought, well, yeah, I'll go. If you're interested in country music, I can manage to get myself a backstage at the opera or on the tour bus with Garth Brooks or whatever. And so that was sort of what I wanted to do. And I was driven by entering worlds, but it still was a question, I would say. What is it Japan's doing right about education? Or what can we learn about America from the back lot of a circus? Or what does it say about our country that the South, which we spent many years degradating and putting down, had suddenly become the mainstream? So there was a question, but yes, I was driven as much by the experience. And then ultimately this led me to the thing that really kind of made all this work, which is that I went, I felt I was 10 years

into this and I felt like I never wanted to be a writer. I'd wanted to have these experiences, but I was, I felt I should be more conversant with the Bible. I was living in Nashville at the time, writing about country music. And I took my bar mitzvah Bible off my shelf and I put it by my bed where I'd sat gathering dust for two years. And then I went to visit a friend who had just moved to Israel. And literally, Jonathan, on day one, I went to this promenade overlooking. Have you been to Israel? Many, many, many years ago. So many people go on their first trip to this promenade overlooking the city.

And my friend said, over there is this controversial neighborhood and pointed to the Golden Dome and said, there's the rock where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac. And I was like, whoa, these are real people in real places. Like, here's an idea. What if I travel along the route and read the Bible along the way? Now, what I thought at the time, which I didn't say publicly for a long time, because I was too embarrassed, was I thought, what if I joined the Bible as if it were the circus, right? And become a part of it. Like, that's what I did. Nobody thought this was a good idea, right? These are in war zones. It's too dangerous. There's nothing to see when you get there. But I do have this kind of stubborn streak. And I found this archaeologist and we made this journey. Three continents, five countries, four war zones. I climbed Mount Ararat looking for Noah's Ark. I crossed the Red Sea. And then I trekked up the

east bank of the Jordan and ended on top of Mount Nebo overlooking the Promised Land. And suddenly, and I write this book called Walking the Bible. And so suddenly this kind of crazy way that I had lived my life for 15 years at this point kind of explodes. And that book, just everything happened to it. I spent a year and a half on the bestseller list. I made three TV series about it. And I went back and forth. And so this unusual way of living my life suddenly all seemed to make sense because there were a lot of people who wondered, what can you learn about the Bible by going to the places and reading the stories in the places where they occurred? Yeah. I mean, it seems like that particular experience also, it kicks off something like a decade long. From the outside looking in,

it looks like this is like for around a decade, you become the you know the tony bourdain of god essentially you know walking the bible the experience leads to the book and then the book abraham and the book where it was god born america's prophet and sort of like you're going deeper and you're you're chipping off pieces that you want to sort of you know like tangents that you want to go explore in in a more meaningful way well think, and yet it had been the continuation of everything else, right? So what happened is when I go to the Middle East for the first time, and I had not been one of those people who'd gone as a teenager, there was no birthright as there is now where everybody gets a free trip.

I felt for the first time like I was home, right? Like that I had had, I was carrying that external geography in my own internal geography. And my wife likes to quote and quote it at our wedding in Savannah, even though she's from Boston, that there's a line in Walking the Bible that I had been this bungee cord who I was rooted in the South. Like I came from a place, I would bounce, I'd bounce back and I would bounce and I would bounce back. And the first time when I show up in Jerusalem, the Middle East and the desert in particular, I bounced. And for the first time, the other half of the bungee cord like caught in the ground, like and like, oh, right. This is this other place that I feel home. So for a long time, that's.

I stayed in my 20s. I had bounced and bounced and bounced. And then in my 30s, I basically stayed and kept doing this over and over again, because what is it? It's the combination of travel, stories, questions, meaning, all of the things I had been interested in, suddenly I felt like I could just be here forever. And in the context of what I've been doing in the last few years, i now see this as what i think of as a linear life like i discovered early on what i wanted to do built on who i had been i did it for no money for a long time then i had huge success in my 30s i got married i had children and my life was that straight linear kind of upward trajectory that we all think that we're all going to have until I got to my

forties and then I just was walloped by life. Right. Yeah. And that is sort of like, you know, life on cruise control, which is interesting because I had this sense that that is the aspiration for so many of us. You know, we want to hit the point where everything, you know, where we have the illusion of security, where everything is sort of, you know, we want to hit the point where everything, you know, where we have the illusion of security, where everything is sort of, you know, there is a fairly linear trajectory. They're not a lot of jags along the way. And, and then we just kind of hit that point and then we close our eyes one day and, and that's it. And not only is that not the reality, but also increasingly, I don't believe it's the ass i don't believe it's the the underlying or the truer aspiration for a life well lived let me say a couple things about this i i

think that first of all i think it has a lot to do with the earliest stories that we read and encounter i was texting with my sister-in-law a few minutes before joining you in this conversation. She has a seven and a 10-year-old boy, and they're big sports nuts. And so I texted her and I said, they must be happy that sports has returned in this pandemic. And she writes back, actually, they're watching Avengers movies, right? So, you know, there's the sort of, there's the superhero narrative, there's the fairy tale narrative, like the stories that we think our lives are going to follow are shaped in an inordinate way by those early stories that we hear. And when we hear them when we're young, we see the hero and we see the happy ending. We don't see the conflict in between. That's not how we talk about it. So that's one dimension of this. And I think another dimension of it is this linear

construct, the idea of either cruise control, or it's not quite cruise control to me because you're getting a little bit faster. It's sort of like cruise control as if every 10 miles you'd go up a mile per hour, if you know what I'm saying? Like you're getting faster and faster in the fantasy that we have. I would say that that's a historical aberration. That's the thing that I learned. The key moment for me, literally in the last five years, I almost never talk about this,

but the key moment for me was one day I pull a book off my shelf. I really wish I could remember what book it was, but I can't. I actually had just written a book about Adam and Eve. I had thrown out my back. I was lying on bed for three months. And I pull some book off of my shelf. And it's like that moment, speaking of fantasies, where you pull a book off the shelf and the

whole case opens. And then you're in a new section of the library. Apparently, Dan, doesn't Dan Brown, I think, have one of these in his castle in France or something. And what I stumbled into in that other room was something that was completely new to me, which is this idea that every culture, in every culture, our lives have a paradigmatic shape. And this is something that I had never thought of. And then I kind of went scrounging around because I did spend a lot of time in the ancient world. So I've got kind of a weird collection of books in my library. And in the ancient world, they did not have linear

time. So they thought that life was a cycle to every season, turn, turn, turn. And then in the Middle Ages, they think that life is a staircase up to Middle Age and then a staircase down. I actually kind of broke the fourth wall. And in the book that came out of all this, Life is in the Transitions, as you know, I have those images. They really show that middle age is the peak. And kind of let me just remind you, those of us who were born in the 20th century, we were told that middle age was the trough. But they ever hundreds of these representations, you peak told that middle age was the trough. But hundreds of these representations, you peak in middle age and then it's down. So what does that mean? That means

no new love at 40, no new job at 50, no discovering a passion that you have when you become an empty nester at 60 and starting over, no relocating in your 70s and having a retirement life. None of that. Straight up, straight down. Men and women, the exact same. And it really was the birth of science 150 years ago. Now, I'm talking to you. You went through this education system in a way that I didn't. But when you go back and you look at the first century of psychology, it is stunning to realize how many of the basic building blocks

are linear constructs, right? So Piaget with childhood development, Freud with the psychosexual development, Erickson with the eight stages of moral development. And Erickson actually gave up the, what's the phrase? He kind of gave up the conceit by saying that he modeled his after the conveyor belt like that's what the economy was it was an industrial age and and all of these are linear constructs the five stages of grief the hero's journey that is what we were told and this reaches its peak in the 70s when gail sheehy writes passages which all of our mothers read, in which she takes, as you know, plagiarized material from Roger Gould at UCLA and from Dan Levinson at Yale, and she popularizes the idea of the midlife crisis. And it is based on extremely flimsy, virtually non-existent science.

It captures the attention because that was the peak year for divorce when women's rights and civil rights were happening. And so there was a kind of period of flux, but it locks in this idea that life is linear till you get to middle age. Everyone is going to have a middle age crisis. It must start by 39 and it must end by 45 and a half. I mean, all of these incredibly restrictive things based primarily on men. And so this idea of linearity turns out to be this historical aberration. And that's what I didn't realize. And that's one of the things that really propelled me into kind of trying to pick apart how we live now and how it's different from how we expect it to be living. Yeah. And I mean, in addition to this moment where you

pull out the book and you're sort of recovering from back, there's something bigger. You have this short, intense window that becomes a bigger inciting incident for your own. So you're looking at this in the context of the broader society and culture. And isn't this fascinating? It's more of a fascination, but it gets really personal for you really quickly through a series of personal and familial experiences that really kind of turn everything upside down for you really quickly through a series of personal and familial experiences

that really kind of turn everything upside down for you. That's exactly right. So I'm living this linear life, right? I have these successful books. I'm making television. I have married. I have identical daughters. And then boom, I just get walloped by life. First, I get cancer. I'm 43

years old. That's the original nonlinear event in my life. So nonlinear that it was an adult onset pediatric cancer. I can't even get the right cancer at the wrong time. I got the wrong cancer. I mean, I had an osteosarcoma in my left femur. 600 people a year get one, 85% are under 21. 100 adults a year get one. And I'm a new dad at the time. I responded, as you know, by creating the Council of Dads, which turned out to be a kind of signature experience in my life by asking a group of friends to be present in the lives of my daughters. Ultimately became the title of a memoir. But I wrote about this time and recently this NBC series. That was 08 and that was the year of the recession.

My family was in the real estate business in Georgia and were hit incredibly hard. 80 banks in Georgia go under, and so I almost went bankrupt. And the kind of, I don't know, what's the opposite of a cherry on top? Like the real turd on top, I don't know what it is, is that my dad has Parkinson's. My dad, who's never depressed a minute in his life. We don't think about, I didn't think about Parkinson's as fundamentally a disease of the dopamine, which affects your movement, but also your mood. And he tries to kill himself six times in 12 weeks. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And the, I mean, I like having difficult

conversations and I almost died. So I liked messy things to talk about, but these conversations were literally unhappable. I mean, like the content of them was, it was extremely challenging. So what are we going to do? We're dealing with family, we're dealing with medical. Hey, you know what? I'm the story guy. Like, and I had found about a year earlier, I was writing a book on families. I was writing a column in the New York Times about contemporary families. And I'd gone to the home of a researcher named Marshall Duke in Atlanta. And he and Robin Fivish had done this research that had never been published, basically, that children who know more about their family history are better able to navigate the ups and downs in their lives. And I put that in The Secrets of Happy Families. I knew it when the

second I heard of it. It was the most interesting idea I found in five years of writing about families. I wrote it in the New York Times and it went viral in the modern sense of the word. I mean, like with the most emailed article for a month, I heard from people all over the planet about the power of storytelling. And so this was six months after that. And so I thought, oh, storytelling. So one day I sit and I send my dad Monday morning a question. Tell me about the toys you played with as a child. My dad can't move his fingers at this point. He thinks about it all week. He dictates his answer to Siri. It's about a page. And I thought, well, this is working. Like this is the first time in a while he's got something else to think about. Here's another one. Tell me about the house you grew up with. And I start to do this essentially every Monday morning. Tell me about how'd you become an Eagle Scout? How'd you join the Navy? How'd

you meet mom? And this goes on for five years. As we are talking today, my dad is still answering questions like that. And he has completed a 52,000 word memoir in the course of the last seven years. And he's now in hospice, Jonathan. And it's the thing that with the limited amount of time he has every day that he's still focused on. And so this was essentially, I'm doing this visually, but we're on a podcast. But if I pulled off the book with my right hand, in my left hand, it's like I pushed another button and it was in another room that I didn't, had never been in, which is, it turns out there's this whole field of narrative gerontology, right? And there's a field of narrative adolescence and narrative medicine of when you go through difficult times, using storytelling as a way of making meaning.

Like the way I say this now is like the proper response to a setback is a story. And so what I did was basically link those two rooms and say, what if I take this issue of what shape go out and talk to people about their life story and see what I can learn? And it was like bringing those two things together that set me off. Making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

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Flight risk. I mean, it's interesting also, I think, I'm always looking at the scripts that are running underneath the surface with individuals, with larger culture. And I like taking a long lens. And it feels like, and I'm curious whether this feels true to you or not, or whether it's just really my overlay from the outside looking in, that you had this really long window where you described yourself when we started out

saying, I'm an experiencer, an explainer. And it feels like a huge chunk of your career and your writing, there was a substantial motivation for you seeking a particular experience was the opportunity to explain it. And you were proactively seeking experiences. You were choosing to say this and then devote yourself to it and go it. And you were proactively seeking experiences. You were choosing to say this and then devote yourself to it and go it. Then we hit 2008. That script gets changed because you don't seek bone cancer. You don't seek the family being dropped into near bankruptcy. You don't seek your dad's Parkinson's. So all of a sudden, something is different about what you're doing.

And it's not you, let me go find something, experience it, so that I can, in part at least, explain it to the world. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to experience this, whether you want it or not. And most of it, you don't. So there's a change in the motivation and the way that you're going about things, at least. And I'm curious whether you felt that. Wow. Let me answer that question this way. In those early years of my life, and particularly my professional life,

I wasn't seeking experience. The one thing that you said that, let me start over. Wow. Here's what I was hearing when you said that. And there's a distinction that's important to me that may not be important to you as the outsider here. But in those early years of my life and my professional life in particular, I think the way you said it was that I was seeking out experiences in order to explain them. And that's not how it felt to me. I was explaining them so that I could seek out the experiences. Like I liked the idea of the experiences and explaining them was a way to get to do it. I was talking to actually one of my closest friends in the last week, and we were talking about, you know, kind of the experience I've just had

of bringing this book into the world and having it kind of land with this kind of magical explosion of timing and visceral reaction. Bringing this book, Life is in the Transitions, out in a moment when the entire planet is going through a transition

and like, and how that happened. And I was talking about this and he said, well, for you, it's always the experience. So that's what you're going to go do next. So for me, it's always been driven by the experience. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I do think that the experience was different in the sense of in my 20s and 30s, I was seeking grand experiences. I used to I've always thought about myself as I'm not an interesting person. I've just done interesting things.

And then what happened in my 40s was that the experiences came and found me. So in that part, I think that you're dead right. But the impulse to me was similar in the sense of, okay, now I've had an experience. And now I have to explain it first to myself and to anybody, anybody else who might care. But what's the last thing that I was thinking when you were talking about that turns out to be a big key that unlocked what I found. Okay. And so when I did what I did, which is then I created this thing called the Life Story Project, where I went and I spent, it became three years, crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories of Americans of all ages,

all walks of life, all 50 states, people who lost limbs, lost homes, changed careers, changed religions, changed genders, got out of cults, got sober, got out of bad marriages. I did a thousand hours of interviews and 6,000 pages of transcripts. So in that experience, and then I went teasing through them, trying to find out patterns that could help all of us in times of difficulty. What I found to the point that you're making, and I'm not frankly sure I've seen this connection before this conversation, but I'm grateful for the insight, is that the big experiences that wallop us, some of them happen to us. In my study, it turns out to be 53% of these are involuntary lifequakes, as I call them. But 47% are voluntary lifequakes. Sometimes we seek them

out, getting married, having children, moving, changing religions. These are all getting sober after being addicted for a long time. These are things that we initiate the big changes. And I think you'll get a kick out of this is that I got this team of 12 people. They were almost all of them millennials. They were computer scientists, they were poets, they were psychologists, and we spent a year coding these stories and debating them in these murder boards, I called them. And I looked at this and thought, oh, 47% of our life quakes are voluntary. Good on us. Like we're taking advantage of them in your life. We are initiating changes. And these millennials looked at this and were like, 53% are involuntary? Like, wait a minute, I think I'm in

control of my life. So they had a totally different reaction to this kind of signature piece of data that half of them we initiate. And what's the life quick that you initiate? You cheat on your spouse, right? You choose to change your job versus something that happens to you. You get a diagnosis. You get your face blown off by the Taliban. You, you know, you get hit by a natural disaster. So, but it does turn out that we actually do have some influence in our lives.

And some of them, and I guess early in my life, these were voluntary life breaks. And, you know, more recently in my life, they've become involuntary. I'd like to have some more voluntary ones before I'm done. It's so interesting, right? When you actually break down, you can actually see that distinction between them. You see the data. And it is fascinating too that the millennials took this one view. There's an analogy in my mind to the data around happiness, where a lot of people in science agree that there's kind

of a set point. A certain amount of it is based on genetics, and a certain amount of it is changeable through behavior and environment. And I've seen it range between 40% and 60% either direction. And similar conversation, when you share that with people, certain people are like, oh, man, I'm hosed. You mean genetically, I'm just wired towards this? And then other people are like, oh, how awesome is that? That I have some level of control over this.

Right. And if you think, and again, you think of the reductive way we used to talk about it when, when, when we were young of the sort of nature versus nurture that, that, you know, there is, it is some combination. I am the father. I mean, I will remind you of identical twin girls. So I'm living this psychology experiment where I have two people who live in my house and they have the same DNA. And yet they, you know, they differentiate. And I think some by choice and some by, you know, circumstances or whatever it might be. But I think that's a powerful, that's a power. To me, what happened was when I got all this data and I was looking for, I didn't go into it looking for lifequakes. I didn't go into it looking for the idea that life transitions were going to be a central part of life.

But that was the pattern that kept appearing. And I went further. Let's just go even further because it's relevant to the moment that we're in now. So I divided these lifequakes. And just, again, to reset the stage a little bit, because I'm using, I'm getting into the jargon here. What I found was that we have 36 disruptors that we face in the course of our lives. That's one every 12 to 18 months. And I kind of teased them out of the data.

So there were 52, I call them this deck of disruptors. And comparing it to the last time something was done like this in the late 60s. Two psychologists did a study like this and they had fewer of them. And it was interesting, there was a difference and they called them stressors. But I didn't want to call them stressors because some of these are things that we initiate. So we have kind of one disruptor every 12 to 18 months, and then one in 10 of them becomes a lifequake, and that we have three to five of them in our lives, and that they take an average of five years, four, five, six years, or three to five, four, five, six years. That's 25 years. That's half of our adult lives were in transition. And there hadn't been a major book on life transitions

since the late 1970s and more than 40 years, because I think that we got used to the, what you call the cruise control, what I'm calling the ascending life, the idea that medicine and technology are going to make everything better. And we're just going to cruise along. We'll have a little dip. Think of the happiness U curve. We're going to have a little dip at midlife. And other than that, it's going to be up, up. And that's not at all what I was hearing in these, in these conversations. So I divided these lifequakes on two metrics. So we did voluntary and involuntary, and we've talked about that. But then we also did personal and collective.

So personal is something that happens to you or your family, and collective is something that happens to the entire community in some way. So the smallest category is personal, involuntary lifequake. And so the examples would be a natural disaster, a recession. 9-11 was the one that came up most often in my conversations. And there's a throwaway line. Like just I like, I'm going to put this line in my book and not think anything of it. But it did pop to me and it's interesting to me. I'm not going to dig into it.

And the line was, had I done these conversations a century ago, when we have two world wars and depression, there would be a lot more people would have talked about a collective involuntary life quake and then boom, lo and behold, I work on this book for half a decade. And it shows up at this moment when the entire planet is going through a collective involuntary life quake in terms of the pandemic. And so that kind of leads to this kind of very interesting situation that we're in now, which is that we all are going through this experience together, which is both bonding, but also I've come to think deceptive because kind of one of the ideas that kind of most resonates to me now from this book that may not have been so important when I was working on it is that the lifequake can be voluntary or involuntary.

But the life transition that comes out of it must be voluntary. Like you have to choose to make the steps. And so now we're in a situation is that you and I and everybody listening is going through a collective involuntary lifequake. But the life transition that each of us is going to go into as a result of it is going to be different. So we have this kind of mirage of shared experience, but the reality of completely different reactions to the shared experience. I think it's related in my mind to the idea of post-traumatic growth, where you look at people who've been through some deeply traumatizing incident and many will have PTSD, disorder or disease, and then others, they identify this phenomenon of, well, this

something happens either through a blend of circumstance, genetics, behavior, support that allows certain people to in some way take that identical experience, circumstance, and move from it, move into this transitional phase and experience that as a growth window rather than be absolutely paralyzed and traumatized and have it be the exact opposite of that experience. So I do think that there's a parallel to the idea of post-traumatic growth, but I'm a bit grumpy about post-traumatic growth because of the word trauma, right? Because the trauma there implies that the precondition for the growth, whether it happens to us or not, would be an involuntary lifequake. But many of these lifequakes are voluntary. So we are choosing them. And I think the trauma, though the experience is similar to trauma, it's a little bit

different. I'm thinking of Brian Wecht. So Brian Wecht is a theoretical physicist. He solves a rare open problem in physics. And after earning his PhD, is just given all the acclaim you can get. He's invited to teach at Harvard and MIT. He's a fellow at the School for Advanced International Studies in Princeton, where Einstein was. He gets a tenured position in London, but he's got this side hustle that he's in a YouTube comedy band called Ninja Sex Party, where he dresses up in costume and doesn't speak and sings about, as he says, quoting him, like keg parties and boners. And it starts to take off. He's married, he's got a child, and he's like crying on the phone with his partner, and he wants to leave this job. He calls his advisor who says,

you can't leave your job as a tenured physics professor for this silly side career. You're the only student I've ever had who's got a tenured job. But he wants to do it. And he ultimately says the fear of staying is greater than the fear of leaving. So he goes through this lifequake,

moves his family to Los Angeles, devotes himself to Ninja Sex Party. Their next album reaches the top 20 of Billboard, and he's been happy ever since. And he kind of reads science on the side and he knows he can't go back. And I heard story after story after story of people who chose to put themselves in these difficult situations. So the experience is akin to trauma, but the precipitating incident is in and of itself not traumatic. Which speaks to another question that's been spinning in my head,

which is if we take this phrase lifequake, how do we know we're in it? Are there a set of, whether it's voluntary, involuntary, personal or collective, are there a set of fairly definable circumstances or qualities that let you know you're in it? Why did I settle on the word lifequake?

First of all, because it's higher on the Richter scale of consequences and it has aftershocks that last for years and it is this sudden burst of change. What makes a disruptor become a lifequake, right? Because most of the disruptors we get through relatively easy. We're actually pretty good at adapting to change, but then suddenly some percentage of them become a lifequake. So what are the qualities that allow us to know? Number one, it could just be timing. Like this one happens after a long string of events. It could be the magnitude of it.

But there is this quality that they tend to have, which I have to say I had never encountered in the literature on human change, which I feel I know pretty well at this point, which is that they tend to clump together. Right. So just when you have an accident, you know, just when you change jobs, you wreck your car and you break your leg. Right. Just when you're going to move, your mother-in-law has cataract surgery and your daughter is found to have an anxiety disorder. So that they tend to clump together. And so why would that be? I mean, some of it is coincidence, but I think one of the qualities of going through this is that your immune system is weakened. So that you, something happens to you and you're feeling it. And so then something that you might otherwise let slide by pushes you more toward change, either because you're

short-tempered and impatient or because I did a story of Will Dana, who was the editor of Rolling Stone and was the editor of what turned out to be the fake UVA rape scandal. And he ultimately lost his job and he'd been in a challenged, loveless marriage for a long time. And he's at a conference right after he loses his job and he's like, you know what loveless marriage for a long time. And he's at a conference right after he loses his job. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to throw it all away and I'm going to have an affair. And everything came down. Like, as long as I'm going through this period, I might as well bring it down. I talked to a lot. There are two, I called this

phenomenon, by the way, a pileup. It took me a long time to name it, but I ultimately saw one of those black and white movie clips, you know, where the car and then boom, the next car and the next car and the next car. Like that's what it sort of. And I had two car pileups. You know, Henry Ferris would like lost his job and his wife walked out on him within six months. He also had a need to have a kidney transplant and had severely premature children at the same time. There were three car pileups. There's a four car pileup.

I talked to a preacher in Virginia who preached his mother's funeral, his father's funeral, lost 60 pounds, ultimately left his church and started teaching special needs kids. That's like a five car pileup in about two years. So I think that one of the ways that you know it, that you're in a, is that you can't cope with it. If you can't get through it. I think of,

I think when you get into these lifequakes, kind of people have say one of two instincts, either they get manic and like make a 57 item to do list and like try to like really control it or they feel inert lying in a fetal position and unable to move that's where you get this idea okay oh i'm in this difficult situation i want to go through a transition and and maybe that's the moment that you really know you know you're in a lifequake where you decide the only way to get through this is to make a big and meaningful change in my life and is to go through a transition that might be the actual trigger because if it's just a disruptor and you can get through it you're not going to commit to to go through the long sometimes challenging but ultimately incredibly renewing

process of going through a life transition yeah i mean it sounds like part of that equation also is that some combination of things happen where a switch gets flipped in your brain that says there's no going back. This is brutal, but there's no returning to the way things were. So now what do I do with that? Which is in a weird way, the way that I have heard researchers describe the experience of true awe as well, which is that we have a model of the world. Something happens that fundamentally shatters that model of the world. And we are then gifted, we're invited then to reassemble the pieces in a way that in some way allows us to not only make sense of the past, but create meaning.

Well, it's so funny that you ended with meaning because that's what I was going to say in response to this. Let's remember when I'm having these conversations with people, I actually did have a template. The first question I asked people was, tell me the story of your life in 15 minutes. Most people take an hour. And then at that point, I go through, what's the high point of your life? What's a low point of your life? What's a turning point of your life? And then one of the questions I asked was, did you have a transcendent meaningful experience? It could be an experience of awe. It could be religion. It could be travel. It could be nature. Did you have one

of these experiences? And essentially, at this point, I've been talking for an hour and a half to people. We identify one moment that's a big life transition. And then I start going through the micro steps that become the kind of the second half of this model of how to navigate life transitions that I unveil in this book. And, you know, what was the biggest emotion you struggled with? Which phase was the hardest? What advice from friends was the most valuable. But what I was going to say, and I'm still caught up in your fascinating question about how do you know that it's a lifequake, I would say that the answer I was going to give was that it feels like a meaning vacuum. That what happens when you go into a lifequake is that the traditional balance of power that you give to what is most important and meaningful in your life is shuffled in some way and is challenged in a way. Like if you wreck your car and twist your ankle and you're up for six weeks and you go back, that's not a meaning vacuum.

That's just an inconvenience. Whereas a meaning vacuum means you have to do the identity work and the transition work. And so one of the things I'm, like you, deeply interested in meaning, and in the kind of the literature and in the wisdom that has emerged from positive psychology, I think the insights into happiness are clearer and in some ways more constructive and easy to understand. The ones about meaning are much harder, right? You know, you said to me when we were beginning these conversations, when we were off the air,

that you and I share this interest in the connection between the present and the past, right? Between the literature of positive psychology and the wisdom of the ancient world and other past great traditions. That's a meaning equation much more than it's a happiness equation. And happiness, one of the challenges of happiness is that it's, you know, transient. And as Roy Baumeister says in this study that I quote in my book, you know, dogs can be happy.

We can be happy for a minute. But what happens if you have just gotten cancer? You're about to die. Your dad's trying to kill himself. You're going bankrupt? That's not a great opportunity to be happy. But it is a powerful invitation to make meaning. And so I sort of said, what can I learn about meaning from these conversations?

And then what I teased out, as you know, is what I call the ABCs of meaning, right? The three building blocks that we use to navigate our lives are A, agency, doing, making, creating, you know, for many people, kind of their work life. The B is belonging, relationships, connections, family, friend, neighbors, community. And the C is a cause, a higher calling, a purpose, something bigger than yourself. In the narrative terms that we've been talking about throughout this conversation, that's your me story, your we story, and your these story. And so these, as you know, I have this whole idea in my book, which we won't have time to go into here, about whichever of those we prioritize kind of affects the shape and the way that we think of our lives. But what fundamentally happens in a lifequake is that you shape shift and people recalibrate the weight they give to each of these. I think of these ABCs as being like

the Lady Justice. Instead of two scales, there are three. So maybe we've been working very hard and we want to spend more time with our family. Or maybe we've been a parent or a primary caretaker and we've become an empty nester and we want to give back. Or maybe we've been giving back. We're a school teacher or a volunteer or devote ourselves to public service in some way and and we're just burned out, and we want to do something for ourselves. So one of the things that happens in a lifequake is you're in this meaning vacuum. One of the things that you have to do, which is hard work to a certain extent, it's a gift, but it's hard work, is to reexamine those kind of pillars, the dishes that give our weight meaning in our lives and rebalance and recalibrate them in some way. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. to die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk it's interesting you know the abcs of meaning which you know you shorthand as me we the you know like personal communal belonging and sort of like bigger cause

oriented construct similar to the way i think a lot of people would look at that as similar to the way that you described, I think a lot of us have come to think of life as this linear thing. I almost wonder when most people hear these three things that they perceive our progression through them in a linear way. Well, you know, you're younger, you start out, it's all about me. And then you get to a certain point in your life and you find meaning in we, and then you get to, you've now earned the right to sort of like turn to the cause and your greater contribution to society. And it's now, then we move into the, the stage.

But what's interesting to me is that you're saying, no, no, no, that's actually not true. Like similar to the whole fallacy about, you know, life as this linear thing that you may just, you know, any one of these given lifequakes will lead to a re-examination and a rebalancing that may be completely different for any individual based on where they came from. I'm so, so glad you brought this up. I strongly disagree with that idea that once you've had success in the world, you can start giving back. I can't disagree with that more. And that is taking hold. And that is being trapped in this linear mindset. And I will go even further and I will say that this linear notion of life versus this nonlinear notion of life, which I think is how we live now, Xers get this non-linearity intuitively much more than boomers

do and millennials even more than Xers. Those of us, I was born in 1964, which is nominally the last year of the baby boom. And we are all still haunted by the ghost of linearity. The millennials today just are not. And I think that there is this interesting kind of transition gap, I call it between certain age boomers in their late 50s and 60s and their children in their 20s, because the parents are looking at the children and saying, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean you're having a baby before you get married? Or what do you mean you're moving to a new town and you don't know what you're doing? Or you're quitting this job and you don't know what the next job is, right? Or wait a minute, now you're changing religions or you're, I mean, it's confusing to the parents who are still haunted by the ghost

of linearity. No, people have preferences that lock in very, very early. And I learned this the hard way. I was talking to my friend, Michael. So Michael grew up in New Jersey, self-identified as gay and a kind of certain kind of flamboyant gay very early in his life became a hairdresser and an artist and and i so and later had a very early gay marriage got out of that marriage um is now on his way to another gay marriage um and so i say to him so michael what shape is your life because i started asking everyone this question when I realized that life's not paradigmatic shapes. And he said, a heart.

And I said, no, no, you're not understanding me, Michael. I'm asking you, like, what's the trajectory of your life if you think of it over time? And he said, a heart. And I said, no, no, no, let me try to be clearer. You don't understand. And he looked at me, he's like, Bruce, you don't understand. What I'm telling you is I don't look at my life as the trajectory of ups and downs based on my professional success or failure.

Relationships are more important to me than my work. And so I look at if I'm in a relationship, that's the most important thing and everything else can come second. And it just blew my mind. It was the other kind of thing that I pulled off a shelf and I got into another room. And so I started asking everybody and everybody had a different answer to this question of what shape is your life. A lot of people had the lines like I would have been. A winding river, a road, a mountaintop, a stock market came up a lot. But a lot of people had these shapes that contained things, a heart, a house, a circle. I talked to this woman, Michelle Swaim, who grew up in a broken home in Massachusetts, married her high school sweetheart, and he became a preacher. And she was a little unhappy and kind

of elusive. She became a crazy jogger and anorexic. She was down to half an apple a day. She can't get pregnant because, of course, anorexics can't get pregnant in many cases. She slips on the ice one day. She ends up in the hospital. She has a vision from God who says, I did this to you so that you can change. Her husband walks in the next day and said, I had a vision from God that he did this to you so that we would change. They go on to adopt 11 children from eight refugee countries around the world. And I said,

what's the shape of your life? And she said a dented minivan because she would not have been a dented minivan in her twenties, but now she was all about burying her kids all around time. And other people are, they're a shape of their life. My wife works and started in her 20s, an organization that helps entrepreneurs around the world. The shape of her life is a light bulb. She helps other people make their dreams come true. So she's cause-oriented. And it took me a really long time because these answers were all over the place. And I thought, oh, this is a party game, but it has no insight. But it took me six months. And then I realized, oh my God, they correspond to the ABCs of meaning. So that the people who are line oriented are agency oriented. They see their lives based on their own external success.

The people who are shape oriented, the circles, the hearts, the dented minivans, they're belonging oriented. And the people that have a light bulb or an infinity symbol or lettuce for plant-based medicine or an infinity symbol or lettuce for plant-based medicine or the infinity symbol because they are into space, that those people are cause oriented. And that this question of what shape is your life gets to the question of which of the ABCs do you prioritize? Like I'm an ABC. I'm going to ask you in a second, Jonathan, what you are so i'm agency then belonging back to me in georgia and now me as a dad and then i'm not so interested in cause right my

wife is a cab she's cause and then agency and then belonging so what are you i'm more acb acb oh that's interesting so a is and i think so agency is about being able to have a sense of control direction over the direction and choice. And, you know, the C for me is creating, although actually I'm not entirely sure, the C and the B may be switchable because I think for me... If what you're going to say is you want to create the community, then that's C, I think. The B is being a member of the community. But if you're driven to evangelize people and bring them together to solve problems, my guess is you're an ACB.

Yeah. And that feels right, actually. And it's funny because if you asked me, and I was thinking about when you first saw this concept from you, the shape of your life, your line, a circle, or some other representative thing, I think I'm actually a hammer. Oh, interesting. Is the shape of my life. And that is because-

I don't think I heard hammer, so tell me why. So because, and under the theory that I've been developing, this sort of archetypes for meaningful work, my primary would be what I call a maker, which is in the primary drive of that is to create, to build. And from the earliest memory, I have constantly been building things. I have been making things, whether it's a book, a fort, a house, a book,

a movie, whatever it is, a company. I love the process of building. And for me, a book, a movie, whatever it is, a company, I love the process of building. And for me, a hammer is this representation of taking an idea and making it into something. Because there is no hammer. A hammer is nothing without the arm that's moving the hammer, right? And so it's the moving of the hammer that is the agency, right? It is the building. It's the making.

It's the beating up and kind of molding the world around you? It is the building. It's the making. It's the beating up and kind of molding the world around you into your vision of it. I love that. I love that. Where were you two years ago? I would have had my hammer. I would have had my hammer.

And by the way, let's just also say about a hammer, it's linear. It is a line. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. There's one other thing that I actually wanted to,

that dropped into my head, both as I was sort of introduced to your ideas and during this conversation, it's actually, it came back to me, which is, you know, so you shared that there's this somewhere between 30 and 40 of these disruptors every 12, 18 months or something like that. So let's call it an average of 36. I don't know, some 20 years ago, I think it was Mickey Kaus, like, you know Kaus, sort of coined the Filer Faster Thesis around, I guess it was your idea based on James Gleick's observations that everything moves at a faster pace. Society, information, and our ability to process just continually speeds up.

There's a compression that happens as we move more and more along the line of life or the nonlinear part of life. I'm curious, and I was curious about that applied to this disruptors because my curiosity is, okay, so do these things happen on a fairly regular basis every 12 to 18 months, or do we have this similar compression of disruptors? I'm curious whether you coded for that or were able to notice an acceleration or compression of disruptor events as people move through life. I think that the most important thing that came out of these conversations is that the number of these disruptors is far greater

than we expect. The pace at which they happen is far faster than we expect, and the span in our lives in which they occur is far wider than we expect. I don't particularly, I do not code, and I do not feel I can, with a confidence of the data part of this, say that there are certain years when there are three of them and certain years where there are none of them. So I didn't get into that. I would have had to do, I think, far longer than just a kind of full life story to sort of literally graph it out. That would be a very interesting question. But what I feel very completely confident in saying, because I double checked this,

I both went through all of the 6,000 pages of transcripts I had identifying how many disruptors people went through. But then I also looked at all the publicly available data also to show that the average millennial will go through whatever the numbers are, 15.2 jobs and 11.7 moves and have three accidents in their lives. And you look at the health, a third of us will get cancer. 50% of us will have emotional problems. And those are also quickening. You would look at the health, a third of us will get cancer. 50% of us will have emotional problems. And those are also quickening. You would think that the health benefits, the health crises would be slowing, but they're not. When you look at how many of us will have

heart disease or cancer, we know that suicide and anxiety, suicide is on the rise among men in their 50s, and it's also on the rise among adolescents in their teens. And so then you look at work, and the average person in their 40s is going to have more jobs in their 50s, the 30s more in their 40s, the 20s more in their 30s. And I have teenagers now, I saw this incredible statistic recently, the two thirds of the jobs that a 15 year old today are going to have, haven't even been invented yet because of technology and AI. And relationships, the pace of change is quickening, right? So the multiple marriages, different kinds of families, right? It's not just a two-parent household having

children. There's adoptive families, there's gay families, there's single parents, there's married parents living apart, divorced parents nesting together, so that there is many more relationships. Let's turn to beliefs. Half of Americans will change faith in the course of their lives. Four in 10 Americans are in an interfaith marriage. Let's talk about identity, sexual identity, sexual orientation. Now we can change our bodies. This idea of transgender, look how deeply it's embedded itself in the culture in just the last five years. So by every publicly available metric and by the data that I have in these conversations, we are going through far more of these. And we're going through them all the time.

Some people are born into life breaks, as you know, because one parent is an alcoholic or parents are getting divorced. People lose parents as someone who almost died and left my children without a dad when they were three, right? People lose a child when they're young. Let's just look at the pandemic. The pandemic is a life quake for everybody on planet Earth and certainly everybody, 350 million Americans.

If you are between 39 and a half and 45, that this is a midlife crisis you're in. But if you're 27 to 32, it's also a crisis. And if you're 67 to 73, it's also a crisis. So we have to get out of this idea that was misleading, but I think now become dangerous, that we only have crises on birthdays that end in zero, and that the biggest one is going to be within 18 months of your 40th birthday. That is an absurdity, and it's delusional, and it's dangerous because when you have a crisis that's not on that clock, you become even more isolated, ashamed, and lonely than these experiences otherwise make you, which is isolated and ashamed and lonely. So if you're doing it off kilter, you feel like there's something wrong with you. And there's not. It's the notion of being on kilter that's the problem.

No, so agree with that. And speaking to the observation that the entire planet Earth is now going through this collective life quake. And then your notion of pileups and sort of saying, okay, so yes, the experience itself is a life quake for all of us, for all 7 million people. And what I'm so curious, and this is not a question I'm answering, it's really just, it's a curiosity. You know, the way you described, you know, like one, one major thing then trigger somebody to say, okay, so I'm so groundless at this moment. I'm just going to like all the

shaking up that needs to be done. And maybe that I felt for the last decade or a couple of decades that now this is going to trigger a whole bunch of follow on major disruptive experiences in people's lives that are theoretically unrelated to having to accommodate you know this particular moment in time but but in fact uh it serves as a really powerful inciting incident for them to just say let me clean well let's just start with the most obvious one and it actually it's only been you know i'm relatively late to putting this together but i've now begun to think that the, I know for a fact that the pileup is real. And I know that it needs to be studied and thought about a lot more.

As I said, I do not, I have not encountered this in the literature, but the idea that our immune system is weakened, we're already in a moment of heightened emotion and change. And therefore we begin to initiate change. To me, the best single example of this is Black Lives Matter. Okay, so we're going through the collective involuntary lifequake of the pandemic and along comes the murder of George Floyd. Okay, this is not the first, it's not even the first this year. Okay, we had Ahmaud Arbery and we had Breonna Taylor.

You know, this problem has been around since the 400 years in America we've been fighting this battle. But then why now? Why suddenly did this become this huge national reckoning with this kind of flaw in the middle of the American system? And what can we do about it? The answer, I believe, is connected to the fact of the pandemic and the fact that we were all already in a heightened state of emotion. We were already in a period of change. We knew that the pandemic was disproportionately affecting Black and Brown and other minority communities, and then suddenly this huge outburst. So that's an example on a kind of a systemic kind of nationwide collective.

So the collective involuntary lifequake of the pandemic helps trigger the collective voluntary lifequake of the protest movement. But now flipping to the other side of the equation, which is the personal lifequakes that are going to come out of this pilot. So some of them are going to be involuntary because 50 million of us have lost our jobs and many of those jobs are not coming back. And so we're going to have to, we're going to be involuntary because 50 million of us have lost our jobs and many of those jobs are not coming back. And so we're going to have to, we're going to be forced into rethinking. I was talking to someone this week who was in the travel business for 21 years and she lost her job. That job is not going to come back anytime soon. Her father died. She's got her teenagers home from school. Like this is a kind of a classic pilot. She didn't choose it, but she's going to have to choose her way through it. So that's the involuntary. But then look here. I have all these coders, okay? And we're all digging into these transcripts. And so I say to them one day, I said, okay, tell me something

you noticed while coding that I didn't notice while doing the interviews. Like I'm pretty perceptive and I feel like I teased out a lot of patterns. And this one computer scientist from Rice, he raises his hand and he said, people move. I was like, you're right. I didn't ask that question. So we all go digging back to the transcripts. 61% of people moved in the course of their lifequake. They changed houses. They moved cities. They moved countries. They relocated their office. They did some sort of movement. Now, I don't know about you, Jonathan, but 61% of the conversations I've had since the start of the pandemic, someone's talking about moving. So that is a voluntary lifequake that people are initiating because of the collective involuntary of the pandemic or because of losing their job or because the kids are no longer in school or because they can now work from home.

But this is how an example that we actually, sometimes we add things to the pile. We make the pile up even higher than it otherwise would be. It's so fascinating. And I think it's the sort of framework that you've created around this. It's so rich. It's not only prescriptive and we haven't even gotten into that. There's a whole, like, here's some things to think about as you move through the transition, but it's also, it helps you make sense of both the disruptors as you describe them and these lifequakes. So this also feels like a good place for us to come full circle

as well. So we're hanging out here in this container, Good Life Project. If I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Seize the pencil. And what I mean by seize the pencil is take control more self-consciously of the story that you tell yourself about your life. Stop for a second. I'll invite people listening to this conversation and think of that story going on in the back of your head. It's the story of where you came from. It's the story of who you are. It's a story of what you believe and what's most important to you and where you're going. Imagine right now that you got a call, you had a loved one in the hospital and you had a rush to the hospital, what would be going through your head? That fundamentally is the

story of your life. And we know, in a way that we didn't know even 20 years ago, that that story is not part of you. It is you in a fundamental way, that life is the story that you tell yourself. And what I've come to think about life transitions is that they are fundamentally autobiographical occasions. This was a kind of a minor academic idea from the 1980s that a sociologist named Zussman came up with. And he was saying that an autobiographical occasion is a job interview, your first visit to a doctor, when you tell your medical history, a first date. Well, a lifequake is fundamentally an autobiographical occasion where you have to rethink and revisit and revise the story of your life. And I believe that that is a central idea to living a good life in a way that we may vaguely think about, but that we can surface and take control of in a more self-conscious and constructive and a way that stresses our agency and our belonging

and our cause. And so, you know, in the context of the pandemic and the moment that we're in now, where everybody listening to us either stay awake in bed last night or had a cup of coffee and stared out the window this morning and wondered, you know, do I have a job? If I have a job, is it the job that I want, right? Do I need to quit my job and take care of my children? Like how I'm, you or someone you know is worrying about something profoundly right now. And while it sounds abstract, I just want to say that an essential part of that is understanding that that is a story that you tell yourself. And you said we're going to come full circle. And so I want to go back to this idea that stories that we grew up with are superhero stories or they're fairy tales

and they have a hero and a happy ending. And I think going back and looking at those stories now, we realize that it's not the hero or the happy ending that makes it a fairy tale. It's the wolf. Just when life is going along swimmingly, along comes a wolf, a dragon, an ogre, a troll, a tornado, a downsizing, a death, a pandemic. And we want to banish the wolf. We want to make the wolf go away. We want to pretend the wolf does not exist. We want to protect our children. We want to protect ourselves. But you can't banish the wolf. We want to make the wolf go away. We want to pretend the wolf does not exist. We want to protect our children. We want to protect ourselves. But you can't banish the wolf. And that really is okay. Because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And the one thing that I know, that I learned from this project, so my one advice to people thinking about

a good life, is that you need to be the hero of your own story. And what this experience has been for me has been a great kind of tool factory to give me the tools to fight the wolf and to get over it or around it or through it in some way. And that's what I hope people will get out of this so that whatever you're worrying about and whatever's keeping you awake at night, if you come on this journey with me and you meet these people, they gave me hope, sure, but they actually gave me tools, things I could do tonight, tomorrow, next week, a month from now to handle it better so that whatever you're struggling with and whatever transition you're having, we can get through this better and more effectively. We can beat back the wolves together.

Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself,

what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode.

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