The Beautiful Discomfort of Being Betwixt and Between

Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are an integral and transcendent part of it.

ARTHUR C. BROOKS

  Editor's Note: ​“How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

Transitions are some of the most difficult periods in our lives. Even when we choose them, the disequilibrium they bring can be painful or frightening; when they are imposed upon us, they are even more distressing.

We have been awakening to the reality that the coronavirus pandemic is not a temporary affliction, but an involuntary transition from one way of life to another. Our jobs and personal lives are shifting and, in many cases, will never fully return to “normal.” The only certainty is that, even if a vaccine or cure comes along in the next few months or years, the future won’t look like the past. You may never go back to work like before. Dating may never be the same. Your alma mater might go broke and disappear. Will you hug your friends or even shake hands as much as you used to? Perhaps not.

As uniquely uncomfortable as this feels, it isn’t so different from other life transitions. And truth be told, COVID-19 may not be the most difficult transition you are facing today. Almost every day, I hear from people who are quietly struggling much more through “ordinary” transitions, such as a divorce, the death of a loved one, or a forced retirement. Even when the transition is completely voluntary, it can be the source of intense suffering, because it involves adapting to new surroundings and changing your self-conception.

If we understand transitions properly, however, we can curb our natural tendency to fight against them—a futile battle, given their inevitability. Indeed, with a shift in mindset, we can make transitions into a source of meaning and transcendence.

Psychologists call the state of being in transition “liminality.” Scholars at INSEAD, a business school in France, and Rice University define this as “being betwixt and between social roles and/or identities.” In other words, liminality means that you are neither in the state you left nor completely in your new state, at least not mentally. This provokes something of an identity crisis—it raises the question “Who am I?”—which can be emotionally destabilizing.

Even good transitions can have this effect, as I know all too well. I was in a liminal state even before the coronavirus hit. After a decade as the president of a think tank, managing a large workforce of scholars at the vortex of Washington, D.C., policy battles, I left last summer to join academia, walking away from the people and job I knew and loved, and the excitement of being near the action of policy making.

This was all of my own volition, but that’s scant comfort. My wife and I are still disoriented. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and mentally prepare for a day at the think tank, before remembering that was the past and I am in Massachusetts, not Maryland. Weirdly, I notice that my signature seems to have changed, as if I am trying to impersonate someone else. I don’t regret the decision to change careers, but it has been difficult.

Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a book called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. After interviewing hundreds of people about their transitions, he found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones—what Feiler calls “lifequakes”—happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some lifequakes are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.

Even huge collective transitions such as the pandemic happen with regularity, though the shapes they take vary wildly. Consider: If you are 30 years old, you were born during the collapse of the Soviet Union. At age 11, you saw the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At 18, you lived through the 2008 financial crisis. Today, it’s COVID-19. In the coming decade, there will almost certainly be another unwelcome cataclysmic event—we just don’t know what it is yet.

But here’s the good news: Even difficult, unwanted transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than in real time. Indeed, Feiler found that 90 percent of the time, the people he spoke with ultimately judged their transition to have been a success, insofar as the transition ended and they found themselves once again on solid ground.

Even better, research shows that we tend to see past events—even unwanted ones—as net positives over time. Though our brains have a tendency to focus on negative emotions in the present, over the years unpleasant feelings fade more than pleasant feelings do, a phenomenon known as “fading affect bias.” This may sound like a cognitive error, but it really isn’t. Almost every transition—even the most challenging ones—bears some positive fruit; it just may take time to see it and feel its effects.

Difficult, painful transitions can yield great understanding of our lives’ purpose. Research on how people derive a sense of purpose has found that while periods of pain and struggle make us temporarily unhappy, they also make us feel as if our lives have more meaning. For example, one of my sons is in the military. His boot camp was absolutely brutal, and a day after it finished, he told me that he’d never voluntarily do anything like that again. But today he talks about the experience—which earned him the title “U.S. marine”—with amusement, relish, and pride.

One of the things we learn by not resisting challenging transitions is how to cope with subsequent life changes. In his book Meanings of Life, the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister argues that a sense of meaning gained through change makes the rest of life seem more stable. This is one of the great consolations of aging and seeing a lot of change—transitions likely don’t cause as much distress.

Difficult periods can also stimulate innovation and ingenuity. A large amount of literature talks about “post-traumatic growth,” in which people derive long-term benefits from painful experiences, including more appreciation for life, richer relationships, greater resilience, and deeper spirituality. Another manifestation of this growth, according to some newer scholarship, is heightened creativity. I have noticed a new well of creative energy during my own transition. While I have always written and spoken a lot, my productivity has increased dramatically this past year, even during the pandemic; my comfort in exploring and expressing new ideas appears inversely related to my sense of stability. Among other things, this column is the fruit of my transition.

Life changes are painful, but inevitable. And as hard as they may be, we only make things harder—and risk squandering the benefits and lessons they can bring—when we work against them instead of with them. As I have argued in this column, those who benefit the most from painful periods are those who spend time experiencing and processing them. The right strategy is to accept transitions as an integral part of life, and lean into them.

The current period of transition in my life reminds me of fishing in the ocean. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and would fish off the rocks on the Oregon coast in the summers. I learned as a kid that the best time to catch fish was during a “falling tide”—the period when the tide is going out, or, you might say, transitioning. That’s when plankton and bait fish are stirred up, so game fish are biting like crazy. If you put in your line, you’ll pull them out, one after another. Practically the only mistake you can make is not to have your line in the water.

“Man was made for conflict, not for rest,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.” I believe this is true, but it’s so easy to forget. This very morning, upon waking, my first thoughts were about my old job and my friendships in D.C. Then, I thought about how much I hope the world returns quickly to the way it was before the pandemic. I guess I’m still resisting transitions a little bit.

But I know what I have to do. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, got up, and cast my line into the falling tide of the new day. Let’s see what I catch.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School

Love Is Medicine for Fear

Life, especially pandemic life, is full of threats and uncertainty. When we feel afraid, bringing more love into our lives can help.

Editor's Note: ​“How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

We are living in a time of fear. The coronavirus pandemic has threatened our lives, health, and economy in ways most Americans have never experienced. We have no idea what the future will bring. According to the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America” survey, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say that “the future of our nation is a significant source of stress” rose to 83 percent in June 2020, up from 63 percent in 2017.

But even before the pandemic, fear about the future was high and on the rise. Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who had experienced worry “during a lot of the day yesterday” rose from 36 percent to 45 percent from 2006 to 2018; similarly, feelings of stress rose from 46 percent to 55 percent. This matches my personal experience. Given what I write about for a living, it may not be surprising that I start many conversations by asking people about their happiness. If you make the mistake of talking to me on an airplane, that’s where the conversation is going to go. In recent years, I have noticed, people have told me more and more that they are afraid.

People’s fears vary widely. The pandemic aside, the answers I hear are all over the place, from leaders they don’t trust, to environmental problems, to simply being able to support themselves and take care of their families. According to Chapman University’s annual “Survey of American Fears,” almost 74 percent of Americans in 2018 were afraid of corrupt government officials, nearly 62 percent were afraid of pollution in bodies of water, and 57 percent were afraid of not having enough money for the future.

One way of dealing with these fears is to strive to eliminate the threats that caused them. But while social and economic progress is important and possible, there will always be threats to face and things to fear. The way to combat fear within ourselves is with its opposite emotion—which is not calmness, or even courage. It’s love.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Through Love, one has no fear.” More than 500 years later, Saint John the Apostle said the same thing: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

This is a very strong argument: Love neutralizes fear. It took about 2,000 years, but contemporary neurobiological evidence has revealed that Lao Tzu and Saint John were absolutely on the money.

Fear is a primary emotion processed in the amygdala, a part of the brain that detects threats and signals to the body to produce the stress hormones that make us ready for fight or flight. This is largely involuntary, and, while necessary for survival, is unpleasant (except under controlled circumstances, such as roller coasters). The fear response is also maladapted to modern life. For example, a friend of mine with a large Twitter following once told me that he felt his chest tighten every day as he clicked on the social media app on his phone. His amygdala was alerting him that dangerous threats lay ahead, and he was getting a dose of adrenaline and cortisol in response—even though nothing was likely going to harm him.

However, we have a natural modulator of the hyperactive amygdala: the neuropeptide oxytocin, sometimes called the “love molecule.” Oxytocin is often produced in the brain in response to eye contact and touch, especially between loved ones. The feeling it creates is intensely pleasurable; indeed, life would be unbearable without it. There is evidence that an oxytocin deficit is one reason for the increase in depression during the coronavirus pandemic, with its lockdowns and social distancing.

Oxytocin has also been found to reduce anxiety and stress by inhibiting the response of the amygdala to outside stimuli. If you have loving contact with others, the outside world will seem less scary and threatening to you. What Saint John asserted is literally true: Perfect love drives out fear.

Our current fear problem is not due to a proliferation of threats. Despite all the troubles we face, as my Harvard colleague Steven Pinker has shown, the world of the 21st century is safer for the vast majority of us than the world of previous eras (current pandemic aside). The real issue is that we have too little love in our lives to protect us against our fears.

Americans are getting lonelier. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has written a book about this, and the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration has declared a “loneliness epidemic,” specifically citing “living alone, being unmarried … no participation in social groups, fewer friends, and strained relationships” as the culprits. Clearly, a lack of relationships makes life’s fears harder to cope with.

It is especially notable that today’s adolescents and young adults enjoy less romantic love than in the past. Research shows that young people are far less likely to date, marry, and have sex than in past generations. According to my own analysis, using the General Social Survey, the percentage of married 20-somethings fell from 32 percent to 19 percent between 1989 and 2016. Meanwhile, the percentage who had not had sex in the past year rose from 12 percent to 18 percent.

The pandemic makes things worse by driving friends and neighbors apart. But our political culture has been doing this as well for some time, with brutal efficiency. In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that people were more likely than before to express negative opinions about others simply because of their affiliation with the opposite political party, and this is especially true among those who are highly engaged in politics. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that ran from late 2016 to early 2017, 13 percent of Americans have “ended a relationship with a family member or close friend over the [2016] election.”

The math here is easy: More isolation plus more hostility equals less love; less love equals more fear. To reduce fear, we need to bring more love into our lives. If you’re not sure how to get started, let me suggest the following approach, which starts pretty easy and advances in difficulty.

1. Confess your fear to someone you trust. Many people carry their fears stoically, never sharing them openly with others. Hidden fear often expresses itself obliquely and in unproductive ways, such as hostility or aloofness. It is also a missed opportunity: To confess fear, while scary in and of itself, is an act of vulnerability that stimulates the love you crave, in yourself and in the ones you allow to comfort you.

2. Make your love overt. Today, tell someone you love her or him. Not someone you would normally say that to, but rather to a friend or family member for whom this would not feel natural. The point here is to break a barrier of expression for yourself but in a way that is relatively safe. The more you say “I love you,” the less strange or scary it will feel. It is a small act of courage. The payoff is not just more closeness, but also an increase in your fortitude, which you might need for the next step.

3. Take a risk. Confess your love or admiration for someone who doesn’t know you have these feelings. This requires particular courage in the case of romantic love, because the risk of personal rejection feels so high—and is even harder if you have no practice with this kind of rejection. It is a direct confrontation of fear with love. But even telling someone you’d like to be friends, or telling a coworker you admire them, can feel risky, because the feeling could be unrequited. Do it anyway.
   
   If you want, blame the coronavirus: Say the lockdown has made you a little crazy. Or tell the person why you are doing it, and let them comfort you (and see where it goes from there).

4. Love your enemies. This is perhaps the hardest piece of advice, in our polarized ideological climate. But it may also result in an enormous payoff to you personally as well as to the broader culture of contempt we have come to inhabit. Try resolving for a week not to attack anyone over differences of opinion, in person or on social media. Disagreement is fine, but try to have those conversations with understanding and kindness.

I realize that this advice runs counter to today’s culture. If you think someone is wrong, your instinct may be to hate more, to fight harder. But you can’t insult anyone into agreement, and you probably have little or no real power to force others to do your will. Furthermore, antagonism, the opposite of an expression of love, will likely only make your fears worse.

What I’m suggesting isn’t easy. Showing love in the face of fear isn’t a natural reaction. Fear instinctively provokes fight or flight, not tenderness and affection. But remember: Instinct doesn’t care if you are happy. You need to violate your instincts if you want to build a better, less fearful life.

So stand up to your amygdala. Walk toward your fear. Face it, feel it, and love courageously.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.