Then as they get older, a new task enters the picture: to learn about how the world works. Their field of vision expands. They notice keys, teddy bears, doors, rattles, and balls. Babies develop a powerful explanatory drive, a desire to know about the world. The baby’s perspective adapts to effectively perform this task. Adults, Gopnik argues, have a spotlight consciousness. We tend to focus on one thing at a time. Babies develop a very different kind of consciousness, a lantern consciousness. In this phase of maximum learning, they attend to the whole room. They pay attention to anything that is unexpected or interesting. To put it another way, they are bad at not paying attention, so their attention shifts from one thing to another. The lantern shines in all directions, and the baby learns at a rapid clip.
A couple years down the road, yet another life task emerges. The toddler is gripped by an intense desire to establish herself as a separate person. Before, the baby was embedded in her caretaking system, embedded in Mom and Dad. But around age two, the child realizes, “Oh, I am not my mother. I have a mother, but I am my own person.” And so begins the terrible twos—driven by the child’s desire to say, “No! No! No!” This is a developmental crisis, for both child and parents. As Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl put it, it’s not just that your child does something you don’t want her to; she does it because you don’t want her to.
The life tasks continue to roll, throughout one’s life. The theme of this chapter is that if you want to understand someone well, you have to understand what life task they are in the middle of and how their mind has evolved to complete this task.
The people who think most carefully about this procession of life challenges are called developmental psychologists. This field has been led by people like Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, and Bernice Neugarten. For over a century, developmental psychologists have been trying to understand how people change and grow over their lifetimes.
Developmental psychology is a bit out of fashion now, mostly because the field got associated with a couple of ideas that are now widely considered to be false. First, most of human development happens in childhood: People go through a series of developmental stages until about age twenty-one, and then they’re done. That seems to be wrong. People develop across the life span. Second, some developmental psychologists argued that life is a march through a series of distinct “stages,” and you can’t enter one stage of life unless you’ve completed the previous stage. You have to take Algebra I before you can take Algebra II. That turned out to be wrong too. Human lives aren’t so formulaic; they can’t be reduced to a series of neat stages.
But I’ve found the insights of developmental psychology to be tremendously helpful in understanding other people. Their wisdom is unfairly neglected. We don’t want to fall back into the old concept of “stages,” but we do want to see life as a succession of common life tasks. Not everybody does the tasks in the same order, and not everybody performs all the tasks, but when we look at someone we want to see them engaged in the heroic activity of their life, tackling this or that task.
Over the next few pages, I’d like to sketch out this theory of life tasks, which I’ve adapted from the developmental psychologists, especially from scholars like Erik Erikson, the author of “Life Cycle Completed,” and Robert Kegan, author of “The Evolving Self.” As I lay them out for you, I should make it clear once again that these are just templates, not photographs. It’s not like every person goes through the same life tasks in the same way. The templates simply name some common patterns of human behavior. They help us step back and recognize ways in which you or I might be like the template and ways in which you or I might be different from the template. The templates also remind us that each person you meet is involved in a struggle. Here are a few common life tasks, along with the states of consciousness that arise to help us meet each one.
Pretty early in life, sometime in boyhood or girlhood, each of us has to try to establish a sense of our own agency. We have to demonstrate to ourselves and others that we can take control, work hard, be good at things. In the middle of this task, Erikson argues, a person has to either display industry or succumb to inferiority. If children can show themselves and the world that they are competent, they will develop a sense of self-confidence. If they can’t, they will experience feelings of inferiority.
To establish a sense of agency, people develop what Kegan calls an imperial consciousness. People with this mindset can be quite self-centered. Their own desires and interests are paramount. The world is a message about me, about how I am valued. People can also be quite competitive at this stage. They want to win praise, achieve glory. Whether it’s in sports or schoolwork or music or something else, they crave other people’s positive judgments about their own value. In John Knowles’s novel A Separate Peace, set in a boys’ prep school, the narrator notes, “There were few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry.”
We tolerate this somewhat self-centered consciousness in kids and teenagers, but sometimes the imperial consciousness carries on into adulthood. An adult who has never left this mindset behind experiences his days as a series of disjointed contests he wants to win. Whether in business, pickup basketball, or politics, he has an intense desire to see himself as a winner, and a touchy pride that causes him to react strongly against any sign of disrespect.
For people with this consciousness, relationships tend to be instrumental. The person is always angling, manipulating the situation to get what he wants. He is emotionally sealed up, hiding any vulnerabilities, even from himself. His message is: I get something out of my friendships. My hot girlfriend is a sign of my status as a winner. A guy I know goes into every party scanning the room for high-status people he can make contact with. Every time you meet him he has some agenda, something he wants from you.
If you try to become intimate with such a person, they will complain that you are not giving them enough space. They can form alliances with people (working with others to get what they want), but they can’t form collaborations (working with others to serve shared wants). They just can’t see the world from the perspective of another person. They can’t internalize another person’s affection for them, so they need constant reminders in the form of other people’s affirmation and praise.
A person embedded in this task, and the imperial consciousness that emerges to help people complete it, probably doesn’t have a rich internal life. He’s not going for self-knowledge; he’s trying to make his presence impressive to the world. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin strike me as men who experienced an imperial consciousness in childhood, and then never moved beyond it.
There’s a rough rhythm to life. Periods that are dominated by an intense desire to stand out and be superior are often followed by periods dominated by an intense desire to fit in. For many of us there’s a moment in life, often in adolescence, when the life task is to establish your social identity. Friendships and social status become the central obsessions in our lives. At this point, Erikson notes, the person will either achieve intimacy or suffer isolation. The person who succeeds at this life task develops the ability to be an intimate partner, a devoted lover, and a faithful friend. Those who can’t fall into isolation.
The mind adjusts to meet the challenge. A person with an interpersonal consciousness has the ability to think psychologically. If you asked somebody embedded in an imperial consciousness who she is, she might talk about her actions and external traits: “I’m a sister. I’m blond. I play soccer.” A person with an interpersonal consciousness is more likely to describe herself according to her psychological traits: “I’m outgoing. I’m growing more confident. I’m kind to others but sometimes afraid people won’t like me.”
A person with this consciousness has a greater capacity to experience another person’s experience. In his book The Discerning Heart, Philip M. Lewis tells the story of a married woman who, while away at a business conference, faltered and spent the night with another man. A person with an imperial consciousness would be worried as she flies home—worried that her transgression might be discovered and that it might have negative consequences for her personally. But a person with an interpersonal consciousness feels guilty. Her sense of herself is defined by the shared love she has with her husband. She has potentially hurt her husband and betrayed that shared love.
People in the midst of the interpersonal task often become idealistic. The person with an interpersonal consciousness can not only experience other people’s experiences, she can experience the experience of humanity as a whole. She can feel the pain of the community and be driven to heal that pain. Kegan writes that at this moment the person goes from being physical to being metaphysical. She sees not only what is but also the ideal of what might be. Teenage idealism can be intense but also dogmatic and unforgiving. The purpose of idealism, at this moment of consciousness, is not only to seek the common good; it’s also to help you bond more tightly with some group. I fight injustice because it makes me cool, helps me belong; that’s what superior people like us do.
During this task, people are quick to form cliques and think a lot about social status. The interpersonal person’s ultimate question is: Do you like me? At this point, her own self-appraisal is not yet the arbiter of her sense of self-worth. The opinions of others are still the ultimate arbiters. That is a voracious master to try to please. As Seneca put it, “Nature’s wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.” This also leads to a lot of conformism. You’ll see cliques of adolescents—and even adults—at the mall all wearing the same types of clothes, speaking with the same vocal tones.
A person in this consciousness tends to be conflict averse, tends to be a pleaser. She has trouble saying no to people and is afraid of hurting their feelings. She suppresses her moments of anger. Anger would be a declaration that she has a self that is separate from the social context. She doesn’t yet possess that separate independent self. So instead of feeling angry when she is affronted, she feels sad or wounded or incomplete. Part of the problem is that her conception of self is not sturdy enough to stand up to people.
A person with an interpersonal consciousness will sometimes be in a relationship with someone with an imperial consciousness. She’ll wonder why he doesn’t open himself up emotionally and share the way she does. But he can’t do these things because he doesn’t possess the consciousness that she has access to.
Breakups, when we’re in the interpersonal phase, can feel particularly devastating. To lose a friend, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or a spouse is to lose your very self—the source of your approval and value. When a person with an interpersonal consciousness loses the external structure of the relationship, she may find there is no internal structure to keep her together. Thrown back onto herself by a breakup, she becomes aware of the limitations of this level of consciousness. She realizes that while she treasures relationships, she can’t be embedded and controlled by them. She has to embark on another life task. Along the way, as Kegan puts it, she is changing not just what she knows but the way she knows. Each new life task requires a different level of consciousness.
Lori Gottlieb worked as a TV scriptwriter, entered and then left med school, gave birth to a child, and got a job as a journalist, but she was dissatisfied. She wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, not just write about them. She thought of becoming a psychiatrist. But that’s mostly prescribing medication, she worried. One day, her former med school dean told her, “You should go to graduate school and get a degree in clinical psychology.” If you do that, the dean continued, you’ll be able to get to know your patients better. The work will be deeper and leave lasting benefits.
“I got chills,” Gottlieb would later write. “People often use that expression loosely, but I actually did get chills, goose bumps and all. It was shocking how right this felt, as if my life’s plan had finally been revealed.”
At a certain point in life, we have to find the career that we will devote ourselves to, the way we will make a difference in the world—whether it’s a job or parenting or something else entirely. While confronting this task, Erikson argues, a person must achieve career consolidation or experience drift.
Most of us figure out what to do through a process of experimentation and fit. Some people bounce around among different jobs and try new projects. The psychologist Brian Little argues that people generally have on average fifteen “personal projects” going at any one time. These can be small, like learning to surf, or larger, like serving as an apprentice to a plumber.
During these periods of experimentation, life can feel scattered. But eventually, many of us become passionate about one vocation in particular. Robert Caro has spent much of his life studying and writing about Lyndon Johnson. In his book Working, about the craft of being a biographer, he describes the furnaces of desire that gripped Johnson while he was a young congressional aide. Johnson would leave his basement room in the shabby hotel where he was staying and walk toward the U.S. Capitol Building. After a few blocks, the building would loom on the hill before him. He was so eager, so ambitious, that his pace would quicken and he would start running, winter or summer, up the hill and across the plaza to get to his office. People gawked at this awkward rushing figure, his long skinny arms and legs flapping all over the place. Running. The running was Johnson’s ambition in physical form.
Johnson was propelled by a dream to do something monumental in government. He was also propelled to get as far away as possible from the poverty he’d grown up amid in Texas. And he was running to get away from his father and his failures. Caro writes, “You can’t get very deep into Johnson’s life without realizing that the central fact of his life was his relationship with his father. His brother, Sam Houston, once said to me, ‘The most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.’ ” Johnson and his father bore many similarities. They looked uncannily alike, they both went into politics, and they both had the habit of persuading people by grabbing their lapels and leaning in close to their face as they talked. But Johnson’s father was an idealist and a romantic. In the 1870s, his family had owned a ranch along the Pedernales River, but they had lost it because the soil just wasn’t good enough to make it profitable. In 1918, the ranch came on the market, and Johnson’s father was determined to buy it. He overpaid for the ranch, found that once again his family couldn’t make a living on it, and four years later, when Lyndon was fourteen, he went broke and lost the ranch all over again. Lyndon lost respect for his father and became, by consequence, a man who was hostile to romanticism, hostile to trust and believing in the good of others. He became an astoundingly accurate vote counter in the Senate because he looked, cynically, to people’s interests and not what they said.
People gripped by the career consolidation task are often driven by a desire for mastery—the intrinsic pleasure of becoming quite good at something. They get up in the morning and work their rut. There’s a big field to be farmed out there, the great project of their vocation, but each day they can only work their rut. When they do that, they have a sense of progress being made.
As usual, the consciousness changes to meet the task. People in the midst of career consolidation often develop a more individualistic mindset: I am the captain of my own ship, the master of my own destiny. They become better at self-control, at governing their emotions. They possess a greater ability to go against the crowd. They are able to say no to things that might distract them from their core mission. During this phase, people can appear a bit selfish and egotistical, but as George Vaillant of the Grant Study argued, “only when developmental ‘self-ishness’ has been achieved are we reliably capable of giving the self away.”
During this life task, intimacy motivation takes a step back and achievement motivation takes a step forward. A person who is primarily interested in consolidating his career has a tendency, Kegan observes, to “seal up,” to become less open to deep relationships. Such a person also has a tendency to detach from his or her emotions. Later in life he may wonder how he managed to suppress so many feelings.
You can begin to see why most people eventually rebel against this consciousness. Career success fails to satisfy. The sense of self, which once seemed so exciting to build, now feels a little claustrophobic. People tire of following the formulas the world uses to define “success.” Sébastien Bras is the owner of Le Suquet, a restaurant in Laguiole, France, that earned three Michelin stars, the world’s highest culinary distinction, for eighteen consecutive years. Then one year he asked the Michelin folks to stop coming to his restaurant and never come back again. He’d realized that his desire to please the Michelin system had imposed tremendous pressure, crushing his creativity.
Carl Jung once wrote, “The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.” Eventually the costs become too high. The person at the end of this task realizes that there is a spiritual hunger that’s been unmet, a desire to selflessly serve some cause, to leave some legacy for others.
This crisis sometimes comes as a sense that you simply no longer want what you used to want. Cristina Peri Rossi wrote a short story called “Breaking the Speed Record,” about a runner who has devoted himself to beating a record at his distance. He trained rigorously for the climactic race and by that race’s seventeenth lap he is far ahead of all the other runners, on pace to realize his dream. “It was then that he felt an enormous desire to stop,” she writes. “Not that he was tired; he had trained for a long time and all the experts felt that he would succeed; in fact, he was only running in order to establish a new record. But now, this irresistible desire to stop. To lie on the side of the track and never get up again.” His compulsion to break the record simply dries up. At the end of the story, he longs to stop and does stop. “And he raised his eyes to the sky.”
It’s not that all desire is quenched at the end of this task. It’s just that one set of desires has been satisfied. People in this moment of crisis can suddenly get gripped by thicker and bigger desires. At the end of the career consolidation task, they realize they have overly differentiated themselves from others and the world around them. It’s time to come in from the cold.
The Grant Study, as I’ve mentioned, is a famous longitudinal study that followed the lives of hundreds of men from the time they enrolled at Harvard in the 1940s to their deaths, decades later. Adam Newman (a pseudonym) was one of the men tracked by the Grant researchers. When the researchers first encountered Newman, he was one of saddest and most hapless men in the study. He came from a loveless home. His mother, his sister reported, “could make anyone feel small.” When, as a boy, he would throw temper tantrums, she would tie him to his bed, using his father’s suspenders. He never spoke about his father’s death, which happened when he was seventeen.
He earned excellent grades in high school, became an Eagle Scout, and was ferociously ambitious in college—to prove himself to his domineering mother. He had few close friends. Most of the Grant Study interviewers found him aloof, rigid, self-centered, selfish, and repellent. He was quite religious, but in a legalistic sort of way, attending Mass four times a week and being harshly judgmental toward anybody who didn’t meet his impossible standards.
He went on to med school at the University of Pennsylvania, married during his second year there, and wound up running a fifty-person biostatistics department at NASA. His career progressed nicely, and his marriage was both devoted and unusual. Both he and his wife regarded each other as best friends and both said they had no other friends at all.
At forty-five, he had become a stern father, dealing with two rebellious daughters. He pressured them to achieve excellence, just as he had. While he was in his forties, one daughter called him an “extreme achievement perfectionist.” She later told the researchers that he had permanently destroyed her self-esteem.
As he aged, though, he began to grow more emotionally open and self-aware. In college he had insisted that his relationship with his mother was outstanding. In middle age he confessed that when he thought of his mother, he wanted to vomit. “All my life I have had Mother’s dominance to battle against,” he now admitted.
His life took a radical turn in middle age. He came to realize, as he put it, that “the world’s poor are the responsibility of the world’s rich.” He quit his job, moved to Sudan, and used his facility with statistics to help local farmers solve agricultural problems. At this point in his life, he wrote, his daughters had taught him that “there was more to life than numbers, thought and logic.”
Then he returned to the United States and began teaching psychology and sociology at a local college, mentoring the next generation. From age fifty-five to sixty-eight he worked in city planning—which had been his childhood interest—helping cities in Texas manage their growth. By the end of his life he had become gentle and kind. When he was seventy-two, research director George Vaillant came to visit him, and Newman spoke cheerfully with him for two hours. When Vaillant stood up to leave, Newman said, “Let me give you a Texas good-bye!” and engulfed him in a bear hug. Vaillant concluded his interview and wrote in his notes, “I was entranced.”
Most of the action in Newman’s life happened during the second half. The later Newman didn’t even realize how much he had changed. When he was fifty-five, Vaillant sent him the transcript of an interview he had given while in college. Newman wrote back: “George, you must have sent this to the wrong person.” There was absolutely no way that the guy in those transcripts could have been him. But it was. He simply didn’t recognize any of the stories and facts he had related three decades before. He had reinvented his own consciousness and reinvented his past to fit the person he now was.
During the generative life task, people try to find some way to be of service to the world. One either achieves generativity, Erikson argues, or one falls into stagnation. Vaillant defines generativity as “the capacity to foster and guide the next generations.” I like that definition because it emphasizes that people commonly tackle the generativity task at two different points in their lives. First, when they become parents. Parenthood often teaches people how to love in a giving way. And later, when they are middle-aged or older and become mentors. They adopt a gift logic—how can I give back to the world—that replaces the meritocratic logic of the career consolidation years.
Many people adopt the generative mindset when they get promoted to a leadership position. A person moves from being a teacher in the classroom to being an administrator in the front office, from being a reporter to being an editor, from working in a small department in an organization to managing a large division.
Often these promotions take people away from the core task that caused them to fall in love with their profession in the first place. Teachers go into education, for instance, because they love direct interaction with students. But people generally accept these promotions because they believe in their organization’s mission, because they feel a responsibility to steward the organization, because they sense that in order to grow in life, they need to keep moving toward larger and larger states of consciousness—and, of course, because the leadership jobs usually pay more.
Sometimes it takes a while for people who move into these leadership jobs to switch consciousness. In their book Immunity to Change, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey describe a business executive, Peter, who was supposed to be managing a team but was stuck within that me-centered career consolidation consciousness. His values were these: I want to do things my way; I want to feel pride of ownership in our projects; I want to preserve my sense of myself as the super problem solver here. He couldn’t even see that he was being dismissive and domineering toward those around him, and making them miserable.
Eventually the people around him delivered the hard news: He needed to change, to become more open to new ideas, to listen better, to delegate authority. He had to rise above his loyalty to his self-image as a solitary hero and develop a higher loyalty to the organization. A generative leader serves the people under him, lifts other people’s vision to higher sights, and helps other people become better versions of themselves.
The generative person often assumes the role of guardian. A person with this consciousness is often leading or serving some institution, whether it is a company, a community organization, a school, or a family. A guardian has an in-depth respect for the institution she has inherited. She sees herself as someone who has been entrusted with something, has taken delivery of something precious and thus has a responsibility to steward it, and to pass it along in better shape than she found it. A person with this mindset is defined not by what she takes out of the institution but by what she pours into it.
At this moment in maturity, such a person fully appreciates that she didn’t create her own life. The family she grew up in, the school she went to, and the mentors and friends and organizations who helped her all implanted certain values, standards of excellence, a way of being. She is seized with a fervent desire to pass it on.
Philip M. Lewis writes that as a younger professor, he felt bad about himself when his students looked bored. Their approval or disapproval defined his experience of teaching. Later, functioning at a more generative level, he realized that there are simply pieces of information in any domain that have to be taught, even if they are dry, if one is going to honor the subject. He became willing to bore his students in order to meet the standards of good teaching, to honor the subject and serve the institution.
A generative person gives others the gift of admiration—seeing them for the precious creatures they are. She gives the gift of patience—understanding that people are always developing. He gives them the gift of presence. I know a man who suffered a public disgrace. In the aftermath, one of his friends took him out to dinner every Sunday night for two years—the definition of a generative act.
There can be a kind of loneliness to a person in this consciousness. As a co-founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, I interviewed hundreds of community builders—people who led youth programs, food banks, homeless shelters, and the like. They were deeply satisfied by having the chance to help others, but they often noted that no one was actually there to serve them, to minister to them in their weak and exhausted moments. The person who seems strongest in any family or organization can also feel alone.
I would also say that these people were as ambitious, or even more ambitious, than the young adults who were just starting out on their careers. The needs of the world are so many, they often told me. I can’t let people down. In my experience, selfless people are as prone to burnout as selfish ones—maybe more so.
The final task Erik Erikson wrote about was the struggle to achieve integrity or endure despair. Integrity is the ability to come to terms with your life in the face of death. It’s a feeling of peace that you have used and are using your time well. You have a sense of accomplishment and acceptance. Despair, by contrast, is marked by a sense of regret. You didn’t lead your life as you believe you should have. Despair involves bitterness, ruminating over past mistakes, feeling unproductive. People often evade and externalize their regret. They become mad at the world, intent on displacing their disappointment about themselves into anger about how everything is going to hell.
People in this stage often have a strong desire to learn. The lecture halls of the world are filled with senior citizens who seek greater knowledge and wisdom. The explanatory drive that was there when they were babies is still there now.
Wisdom at this phase of life is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths—contradictions and paradoxes—in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. The psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg wrote, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”
When I interview people engaged in this life task, I often find that they derive great satisfaction from everyday actions—tending a garden, sharing breakfast with friends at a diner, visiting familiar vacation spots, the contemplation of everyday beauty. A dying man told me that he had never before so much enjoyed walks in nature.
You would think this phase would be a solitary phase, sitting alone in a room and reviewing your life. But it is an incredibly social phase. The psychologist Laura Carstensen finds that as people get older, emotion often takes the place of rational thinking. People feel free to cry more, are more adept at pulling differentiated emotions into consciousness. The awareness of death tends to make life’s trivialities seem…trivial. “Cancer cures psychoneuroses,” one of Irvin Yalom’s therapy patients told him. “What a pity I had to wait till now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.”
The historian Wilfred McClay’s mother was a brilliant mathematician, lively, highly verbal, a reader, a teacher, a conversationalist. She was hit by a stroke that rendered her unable to talk. At first, she thought a life like this was not worth living, and wept bitterly. But gradually a change overtook her. As McClay remembers it, “An inner development took place that made her a far deeper, warmer, more affectionate, more grateful, more generous person than I had ever known her to be.” She and her family devised ways to communicate, through gestures, intonations, and the few words she still possessed. She clapped and sang. “Most surprisingly,” McClay notes, “my mother proved to be a superb grandmother to my two children, whom she loved without reservation, and who loved her the same way in return.” Her grandkids saw past her disability into who she was, and could not have known how they made life worth living for her. Being around her was a joy.
My hope is that this focus on life tasks can help remind that each person you meet is at one spot on their lifelong process of growth. We are often blind to how much we are changing. The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.” We are also often blind to the fact that a change in life circumstance often requires a renovation of our entire consciousness. As Carl Jung put it: “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
Like all templates, the theory of life tasks is useful in prompting you to pay attention to your life, to see where your life fits the pattern and where it doesn’t. But overall, I have to say I recognize myself in this evolution. When I was in high school, I was in that interpersonal phase. Senior year I fell deeply in love with a woman, but it was a desperate, need-based love. When she dumped me, it was crushing. By midlife I was certainly involved in that career consolidation life task, and became familiar with how it seals you up. Today, I wish I were purely in a giving, generative phase, but if I’m honest, I think I’m sort of in between career consolidation and generativity. I do seek to serve, but I still pay too much attention to the metrics of success. A few years ago, I wrote a book on how to live your life for others, then spent the weeks after publication checking my Amazon rankings! I go into a dinner party determined to listen deeply, but then I have a glass of wine and start telling stories about myself. I have a civil war going on inside, evidently, between my generative consciousness I aspire to and that little Imperial ego that I can’t quite leave behind. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Periods of transition between tasks can be rough. When you’re locked in a task, you’re embedded in a certain mindset. When that mindset stops working for you, you have to let it crumble inside you. “All growth is costly,” Kegan writes. “It involves leaving behind an old way of being in the world.”
It’s a process of disembedding from one mindset and then re-embedding in another. An infant believes, I am my parents, but then around age two realizes: I am not my parents. I have parents. A teenager may be so embedded in the interpersonal consciousness that she believes, I am my friendships. But later she realizes: No, I am not my friendships. I am a person who has friendships. It’s not that friendships suddenly become unimportant, but what was once ultimate becomes relative. I treasure my friendships, but my entire existence today is not riding on whether this or that person likes me.
I have friends in their fifties who suffered severe life crises when their kids left home for college or work. Their vision of themselves was as active parents; parenting structured their day-to-day; and then, suddenly, all that was gone. They floundered for a bit until they found the next task. I have friends facing retirement who are terrified that without their work, they will lose their identity. They’re not quite ready for the fact that at some point they will have to leave their résumé behind. It’s not going to be who they are anymore. That requires a new construction of reality. As the saying goes, they are not going to solve their problem at the same level of consciousness at which they created it.