Life Course Changes for the New Millenium

(From a talk presented by Dr. Watts at Northern Colorado University-Pueblo for a group of high school foreign exchange students, August 2007)

     There has been a major transformation along with the population and technological explosions of the 1970’s and after.  Educational and economic opportunities have restructured the playing field for both genders, and the structure of family organization and peoples’ basic expectations in all arenas of life have been in major flux.  Divorce rates in America, for instance, have increased from 4.3 million in 1970 to 19 million in the year 2000.   Global telecommunications devices such as television, the World Wide Web, outsourcing and cell phones have integrated virtually the entire globe into one economically based World System.  While people’s cultures still vary, everyone has been introduced to many aspects of modernization in ways that have been leading toward an eventual homogenization of world societies.  Along with all the social and economic changes that have come about, medical improvements have also led to increased life expectancies for both men and women—at least seventy-one for men and seventy-eight for women in 1990.  This is more than two decades longer than in 1900 (Cole 1991: 236). 

     I want to bring to your attention in this paper the impact all of this has had on each of our individual lives. 

     For the past seven years I’ve been doing research about the contemporary human life course.  I sit down with people and map out their life histories on a chart I call their Life Path Map.  We chart the most significant events of their lives and give chapter titles to important phases of their lives. 

Here’s an example, for a man I’ll call Scott:

 The central horizontal line on Scott’s Life Path Map is his age line.  The colored lines show when significant events of various TYPES or Themes (like Travel in green, Work in blue and Health in maroon) have occurred.  We have charted these events according to whether they have had a positive (on the chart, up to +5) or a negative (down to -6) impact on Scott’s life, or both.

     One thing you can see clearly in Scott’s Life Path Map is that his work life (in blue) has had a lot of ups and downs. That’s because Scott has tried for a long time to get settled into a steady job but he keeps getting laid off—companies he works for go out of business, or outsource and fire local employees, or whatever.  You can also see in his chart how several times Scott has picked up and moved to other cities (the Travel events, in green) in order to try to jump start his life with a new job, but each time that one has failed too.  Scott told me he should have “a Ph.D. in the Hard Knocks of life”, and we can see here why he has felt that way. 

     But now let me get to my point.  We often grow up believing our lives will be pretty much like the lives of our parents or grandparents’ generations.  In the 1950’s or ‘60’s and earlier in the 20^th century, people held some pretty clear ideas about the various stages of a person’s life that most normal people could be expected to pass through in fairly similar ways.  A psychologist named Erik Erikson mapped out what he saw as the typical life cycle of a person in the 1950’s according to the model shown below:

Erickson described a life course as consisting of a step like series of eight major developmental stages, passing from Infancy through Childhood, to Adolescence, through Adulthood, to Old Age according to a fixed series of steps.  At each stage, Erickson said, people have to learn certain basic lessons and resolve a specific conflict in order to mature in that stage and move into the next.  Babies learn about trust vs. mistrust ; adolescents deal with identity issues; young adults focus on finding a lifelong intimate partner and often marry; then adults focus on having children and on developing single careers to become what Erickson calls generative (if they have trouble at this stage they might go through a mid-life crisis).   Finally after retirement especially for men, or for women of the 1950’s an Empty Nest syndrome, venerable elder people will focus on establishing their Integrity to become worthy of the Trust of their grandchildren and younger generations. 

     Does this sound like a reasonable model of the human life course to you? Is it pretty much like the typical sort of life course you expect will actually be true for your life, too? Let’s stop and think about the implications of that question for a minute:

v     Do you or did you expect to go to college or trade school, get your qualifications and then work at one job or in a closely related job category or at the same company for the rest of your working career?

v     Do you or did you expect (not just hope) to marry one person and raise a family with that same person for a lifetime? 

v     What will or did happen if things went differently from this picture? How might you deal with these ideal expectations breaking down?

The real underlying question here is this:  Can we still hold the same life course expectations that Erickson presented as normal in 1950? And my short answer to you is: Generally speaking, No.

         Next let’s look at some specifics about how the structure of a typical Life Course—especially in the Western world like here in America, but also in many other parts of the world—has changed dramatically since the 1950’s or 60’s.   Our lives today are often punctuated by change, requiring more flexibility and creative adaptation on our parts than our parents or grandparents usually had to cope with for these specific issues.  High divorce rates, company downsizing, and the fast-paced, overcrowded, competitive world we live in present us with many new contemporary challenges. 

Is Life Like a Staircase or a Patchwork Quilt?

     The anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (daughter of the famous Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson), has written an interesting book called Composing a Life (1989).  Based on her interviews with successful modern career women, she talks about how in our modern lives we need to develop creative flexibility in order to cope with change.  Rather than viewing a lifetime as a set of steps arranged in a fixed order like a staircase, as Erickson described, Mary Catherine Bateson says a modern life is rather more like a quilt, or a musical composition, with patches of different experiences or tones woven together into a fabric uniquely our own.  Read below what she says about a typical successful life course today:

“…Just as it is less and less possible to replicate the career of a parent, so it will become less and less possible to go on doing the same thing through a lifetime.  In the same way, we will have to change our sense of the transitory and learn to see success in marriages that flourish for a time and then end.  Increasingly, we will recognize the value in lifetimes of continual redefinition, following the Biblical injunction: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might’ (Ecclesiastes 9:10).”  (Bateson 1989:6-7) 

Is Life Like a Series of Cycles within Cycles?

     With our lifetimes punctuated by so much potential uncertainty and change we need to develop adaptive flexibility.  We often today experience the Chapters of our lives as cycles (or, cycles within cycles) rather than as an extension of a straight and narrow arrow of Time.

     Frederick Hudson, a psychotherapist, has written an excellent book I recommend called THE ADULT YEARS: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal (1999, NY: Jossey-Bass).  As a practicing therapist, he has found that most of his clients seek him out for help in going through difficult or painful life transitions.  They may be surprised or are do not feel well prepared to handle significant disruptions in their lives.  Divorce, job loss, or dissatisfaction with current or changing situations may cause great grief or anxiety.  Hudson says much of the reason for his clients’ anxiety is that the reality of their lives may not appear to measure up to the standard model of what they have grown up to believe a life is supposed to be like at a certain stage or age; again, as based on the traditional one job, one spouse and family, one bread winner model of the ‘50’s. 

     Hudson encourages his clients to recognize that times have changed.  He coaches them that they may need to learn how to celebrate the cycles of life’s unexpected changes and make the most of them.  Hudson also inspires his clients to plan for new cycles of growth and change if they are feeling stuck where they are.  The diagram below is from Hudson’s book, describing a typical “Life Chapter” cycle.  You might find it helpful when you come to turns in the road or major changes from one chapter to the next in your own life, either now or in the future.

From Frederic M. Hudson, The Adult Years. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (1999), pg. 57

    Hudson diagrams how any Life Chapter you may go through, or cycle of change, can be understood as having four phases:

1)                  A Beginning (Go For It!)… which rises to a plateau;

2)                  The Doldrums…bringing dissatisfaction with current conditions.  This may lead to either letting go, improving conditions and renewing the chapter, or else:

3)                  Cocooning, which involves reflecting on your core values and needs as you consider what your next move should be and developing a clear dream for the next chapter; then:

4)                  Getting Ready (training, planning, sending out resumes or making appropriate contacts, meeting new people, etc.), to be followed by Phase I of your next Chapter, A New Beginning!

Can you relate to this diagram of the four phases based on some transitions you have gone through in your life?   What phase are you at in your current Chapter?   

From Frederic M. Hudson, The Adult Years. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (1999), pg. 72

     Hudson’s second Life Chapter diagram (shown above), describes how Ten Life Skills can actually help you go through your chapters or plan for new and better ones!  I won’t go through all ten of these but let’s look at a few of them to give you an idea of what Hudson is trying to help us learn with these.

            First, at a New Beginning, a skill we can use is simply to Dream or to develop a clear Vision of what we hope to achieve in this new chapter. Then we need to work well to pursue that vision in order to achieve our goals.

            When we hit The Doldrums and start feeling bored or stuck, Hudson says we can benefit if we start sorting things out (Life Skill #5); at this point we can evaluate the situation and either make some immediate changes to “fix” the chapter, e.g. the job or relationship, or else we cam move into a Cocooning phase.  While Cocooning, we can do things to heal ourselves, reflect deeply on where we’re at and where we want to be going, and decide what we really need or want (#8).  Finally Life Skill #10 is that we can experiment, try new approaches, explore, network, and train for the next chapter.  We can actively prepare to attain our next Life Dream.

     So, Hudson is telling us that change can mean Renewal, which means positive, conscious transformation. If we understand this, then we can actually become the masters of our own destiny, of our own lives! That’s why the subtitle of Hudson’s book is: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal.  

     A life experienced as being like a Quilt pattern or having cycles within cycles does not have to be thought of as LESS than the step-like progression of stages Erickson described for 1950.  

In fact it can be MORE:  more creative, more fulfilling in the long run, and more exciting with more being experienced over time! 

     Nowadays with our longer life expectancy elderly people are also getting in on all this potential fun of new adventures.  Many people over 60 or 70 are still starting over (and over again!) with lots of new chapters of their own.  Many are going back to school, remarrying late in life or meeting new people, pursuing life dreams with the freedom that retirement or even widowhood brings them, traveling for new adventures, working at new jobs either as volunteers or to supplement fixed incomes, etcetera.  The adventure of a Lifetime no longer needs to be thought of as “winding down” after retiring from that one life job or after the kids move out. There is a new Freedom in all of this, for every one of us.  But it does help to reflect a bit, all along the way:

            Where are you?  How did you get here?

            Where are you going? 

            Where do you want to get to and why?

            How will you bring about your next Life Dream?

Conclusions

     In my own studies with people using the Life Path Mapping process, I ask everyone a question at the beginning:  “In your own understanding, what is the typical structure of a normal human lifetime like?”  How would you have answered that question before reading this?  After?  Would you now describe a model more like Erickson’s or more like Hudson’s? 

     I actually have found three, not two, major types of Life Course Models when I’ve looked at how people tend to answer the above question. We can call these a LINEAR model (like Erickson’s), or a CYCLIC model (like Hudson proposes), or else a third model which I call SEAMLESS.  Some people say life doesn’t have any fixed or normal stages or cycles; it just happens, with episodes of life linked to one another not according to any fixed design but just depending on whatever comes up.  Here’s what a 15 year old foreign exchange student from the Czech Republic said in answer to this question:

            “Maybe fifty years ago you could say that almost everybody had the same goals and life expectations, but today the life and world is so various and so free that people at sixty can get a tattoo and no one would care.  Years ago people were more conservative and your life was basically lined up for you and if you didn’t follow the rules you were an outsider of the community.  That’s why I’m happy I live in the twenty-first century.”

     The fact is, depending on whichever model of a life course we tend to hold, we are going to aim in one direction or maybe plan for new cycles of growth and either way, it will help us to reflect along the way.  I find that when people look back on their lives so far and think about the chapters they’ve been through already, it can help them design a better future of their own design. So, consider where you’re at and where you want to get to, is the simple message I am sharing with you here.  And then: DREAM  ON!  Every one of you can achieve your life dreams and attain your highest purpose according to your deepest values, even though things will come up along the way that seem like obstacles.  Use the obstacles as opportunities for new reflection and then reach out for the next chapter of Renewal and weave a QUILT/ LIVE OUT A DREAM that no one else but YOU will ever achieve.