Fatherhood and What Americans Get Wrong About Major Life Changes
Health and science writer Brad Stulberg returns to talk with Derek about the various ways people deal with change
Derek is back, and ... he’s a new dad! After several weeks of parental leave, he talks about what’s surprised him about new fatherhood. Brad Stulberg, the health and science writer, returns to the show to discuss the psychology of major life transitions, why Westerners—and, in particular, Americans—are so bad at dealing with challenges to their identity, and his new book, Master of Change.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Brad Stulberg explain the misconceptions surrounding change and resilience and what recent research suggests about healthy ways to deal with change.
Derek Thompson: Brad, welcome back to the show.
Brad Stulberg: Derek, it’s great to be here.
Thompson: And congrats on the book, Master of Change. It’s actually really fortuitous to have you on the show for my first interview since parent leave because I think if I were to condense the experience of being a parent into one very small, very capacious word, that word would be “change.” And here you’ve written a lovely meditation on the psychology of change, the philosophy of change, and what we—and especially I mean we Americans—get wrong when we think about change. I think there’s this sense in modern culture that resiliency in life is about maintaining consistency in the face of adversity.
And this idea is inherent to the concept of grit or little mottos like “Stay true to yourself.” Right? Inherent to those ideas is this notion that there’s a fixed identity that you want to hold on to to weather the storms of life. But life is problems. It’s just one freaking thing after another, and your book, I think, builds around this beautiful idea that our rigid notion of fixed and strong identities is the wrong way to think about making our way through a complicated world.
So with that preamble out of the way, why don’t you scope all the way out and tell us what’s this book about? What is your thesis?
Stulberg: All right, there are two core elements that I think are worth unpacking to set the context for the conversation. The first is: Conventional wisdom on change says that after a disruption or disorder event, we should try to get back to where we were. Most people define resilience as bouncing back, right? This is rooted in a word called homeostasis. It’s a very long-standing scientific term that describes change as a cycle of order, disorder, back to order. Inherent to homeostasis are systems, of which we are one, [that] dislike change. They ought to resist change, and when change occurs, the goal is to return to where they were as swiftly as possible.
More recently, the research community has stepped back and said: Actually, homeostasis is not a great fit model for change. Better is what they call allostasis, which describes a cycle of order, disorder, reorder. And it says that change is the ongoing nature of reality. Change is not something that happens to us, but something we are in conversation with. And the goal is, yes, to get to stability, but that stability is always somewhere new. And I think that the etymology of these words tells the story. Homeostasis comes from “homo,” which means same, and “stasis,” which means standing. So it is stability by staying the same. Allostasis comes from “allo,” which means variable. So it is stability through change. And it’s this beautiful double meaning because the way to stay stable through change is through changing, at least to some extent.
So core thesis number one, we get change wrong. We should be trying to reorder, not get back to order. Core thesis two is this term that I’ve coined called “rugged flexibility.” And it states that the way to go through constant cycles of order, disorder, and reorder is not to be just rugged and strong and robust and rigid, not to be just flexible and always go with the flow, but to marry these two qualities, to be both rugged and flexible at the same time.
Thompson: So I don’t want this interview to be exclusively about fatherhood. I don’t want it to be about fatherhood narrowly, but let’s just apply these concepts to my very young, very inexperienced understanding of fatherhood. It is amazing to me how fast I have felt my own daily priorities shift in the presence of my girl. And this, I think, is a common experience. I think that initially, that shift was pretty discombobulating. To be concrete, I still want to see my friends. I still want to go out and be a little bit irresponsible on a Friday night, maybe have that extra drink with a close friend. I still want to leave the house. But many days, especially when she’s sick, I can’t do that. So it’s like I have this portfolio of values—sleep and friends and date night with my wife—and that portfolio has to be renegotiated or re-weighted in the presence of my kid. So you’re a double degree on this subject. You’re a dad twice over. You’re the author of a book about strength through change. What’s worked for you? How would you apply your model to counseling a first-time father?
Stulberg: The first thing I would say is [to have] an expectancy that it is going to be hard. Right now, you are in the disorder period, right?
Thompson: Oh, yeah.
Stulberg: Order, disorder, reorder. You are in peak disorder. And just having some language for this and being able to name it and say, “Hey, I don’t have to have everything figured out right now.” That’s step number one. The second thing I’d say is realizing that order or stability is not going to look like it was before you had your kid. And that’s OK too. It doesn’t mean that things will always feel chaotic, though they might for the first year. That’s just how it goes. But wherever you end up achieving stability in new routines will inherently be somewhere new. And it is so important to release from trying to get back to the old. You’ll never sleep like you used to sleep. You’ll never consider going out with friends and having that extra drink in the same way you have. Those days are over, and there’s no point in trying to get back to them and holding on to an expectation that you will, because you’ll just constantly be frustrated. So this expectancy around change being hard, around disorder being hard, and around, yes, you will achieve stability somewhere new, but it’s going to be somewhere new.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Brad Stulberg
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
