the butterfly effect. The idea is that weather is not regular and periodic; it’s irregular and nonperiodic. Tiny influences in one part of the system can transform the outcome in other parts.

lifequake: a forceful burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.

The term autobiographical occasion was coined by sociologist Robert Zussman to describe the moments in our lives when we are summoned, or required, to provide accounts of ourselves. He mentioned job, school, and credit applications; confessions, both religious and criminal; reunions of various sorts; therapies of various sorts; and diaries.

We manage to get through many of these disruptors with only minor upset to our lives. We adjust, draw on our loved ones, recalibrate our life stories. But every now and then, one—or more commonly a pileup of two, three, or four—of these disruptors rises to the level of truly disorienting and destabilizing us. I call these events lifequakes, because

Our personal narratives, I began to think, have shapes as much as our family ones do. Each of us carries around an unspoken set of assumptions that dictate how we expect our lives will unfold. These expectations come from all corners and influence us more than we admit. We’ve been led to believe that our lives will always ascend, for example, and

coding each story for fifty-seven different variables.

THE AVERAGE PERSON GOES THROUGH ONE DISRUPTOR EVERY 12–18 MONTHS

We’ve talked about the first of those issues—what causes the burst of change and what happens in the wake of the upheaval. But

What I soon discovered is that a host of unprecedented forces are reshaping contemporary life—technological, political, spiritual, sexual—yet the techniques we use to make meaning of our lives have not kept up. We’re going through transitions more frequently, but our tool kit for handling them has not changed to keep pace.