Life Transitions

Disclaimer: This short note is to enhance general knowledge and should not in any way be taken as professional advice specific to any individual’s unique situation. Contact points for social services are available at your nearest Family Service Centre on an islandwide basis. Please feel free to call or walk in for assistance, you are always welcome to come by and talk with us.

The life course perspective looks at the brief lives of human individuals, using time as a linear dimension. It emphasizes the diversity of life experiences that individuals go through. At this point we will take a look at its major concepts.

A life event is “a significant occurrence involving a fairly abrupt change that may produce serious and long-lasting effects”. A mid-term change in class teacher may be a life event for a child. Other occurrences will be life events for a young adult who is a college student. Having life events is normal. (point)

A transition is “the change in roles and statuses” that occurs as a result of life events. Transitions are also normal. The developmental change in an individual who moves from school/part-time work to full-time work is one such normal transition. (line)

A turning point is a special life event or transition that produces a “lasting shift in the life path (also known as life course trajectory)”. Life events and transitions become turning points when they “close or open opportunities, when they make a lasting change on the individual’s environment, or when they change a person’s self-concept, beliefs, or expectations”. (point/line)

The life course trajectory is, as said, a life path. It is a “long-term pattern of stability and change in a person’s life, and usually involves multiple transitions”. Trajectories can be drawn up for work, health, education, and family, and these in total make up the individual’s life. (line)

(Quotes from the above are from the first chapter of Dimensions of Human Behaviour: The Changing Life Course, 2nd edn, by Elizabeth D. Hutchison. Sage Publications 2003.)

What distinguishes the life course perspective from the well-known psychology theory of developmental stages is its focus on human agency in making choices, the deliberate acceptance that chronological age is not necessarily an indicator of life stages, the other deliberate acceptance that the order, length, and pace of life stages are not universal though they can be broadly generalized, and the importance of linked lives (family, social networks) in affecting an individual’s life paths. What it shares with developmental theory is its acknowledgment of time as a common leveller. You can’t run away from time, both say.

Or so you think.

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I think that Singapore has lost this sense of time. We grow up, learn our maths and our sciences, learn our languages and mother tongues, get streamed, pursue some form of further education in yet more specialized subjects, get a job, buy a house and thereafter seem to do nothing at all but wait for death. In these stark terms of economic production we pursue the eternal; by describing the modern history and the future of Singapore as one of overcoming constant economic struggle, our linear dimension has become wealth instead of time. This has become our Singapore Story by default, our living legend endlessly reproduced in all our unthinking workers’ lives.

Now, dissatisfaction may be part of the human condition - “the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted”, says the character Dream in Neil Gaiman’s famed Sandman collection. But how dissatisfied can you get with a life’s time, when no one ever outlives it? :) We can only make the best of what comes. There is something very reassuring about knowing that some things shall eventually pass, in the dimension of time.

We grow up, get educated, get a job, buy a HDB flat, and then die.

Is this Dream the choice that you have, with all your heart, made? Or have you just gone with the flow?

“We are particularly prone to ignore information that is contrary to our hypotheses about situations. Consequently we tend to end our search for understanding prematurely. One step we can take to prevent this premature closure is to think about practice situations from multiple perspectives.”

- Gambrill, in Hutchison p. 84