The Eras Tour Through Life
Embrace the Asteroid
Eras and Chapters
Taylor Swift built her sixth concert tour—the highest grossing tour of all time—around the concept of an ‘era’. She envisioned it as “a journey through the musical eras of [her] career”. In Cosmopolitan, she put it in terms of ‘chapters’:
What if I did a tour that celebrated all of these different moments in my life and career, where you have chapters divided up by albums and everything changes when the chapter changes?
An ‘era’ and a ‘chapter’ are different notions. With chapters, it is usually not true that everything changes when the chapter changes. The typical narrative chapter is a continuation—a development, a variation on a theme, a twist or turn—of the things that came before. There is a reason for this: narrative chapters are parts of narratively coherent stories, and as such, their unity is both internal, via whatever beginning-middle-end structure they have, and external, as a contributing part of their larger narrative whole.
But eras are not like that. Eras do not derive their structure and import from being part of a larger narrative whole. The grunge era, the dot-com boom era, the pandemic era. While they have beginnings and endings, the beginning need not lead to the ending via some middle progression. The unity of an era is thematic unity. The Mesozoic era (252-66 million years ago) is the era in which dinosaurs existed—that was the main theme. It began roughly when dinosaurs started existing and ended when a giant asteroid killed them all. And while eras can overlap in various ways, one era need have nothing to do with another. The dot-com bubble burst era preceded the 9-11 era, which preceded 2008 recession era, with the one having almost nothing to do with the others (except perhaps aggressive Fed rate cuts from 2001-2003).
Swift’s albums are better described in terms of ‘eras’, not in her confusing language of ‘chapters’ that are not chapters because ‘everything changes when the chapter changes’. 1989’s (2014) hard-hitting pop marked her sharp move away from country music, which was followed by the darker, self-reflective synthpop of Reputation (2017). In 2020 Swift released Folklore, which departed from pop music to adopt the sounds of indie folk. These albums are ‘eras’, each with their own little unities but together unified only by the fact that they are all Taylor Swift albums.
Living Through Eras
Recently there has been a wider cultural embrace of the ‘era’, with people thinking of their lives in terms of them. Personal eras range from superficial and vain to inventive, hilarious, or profound.
Some eras are socially traded and trend on social media: you might be in your ‘villain’ era, embracing a newfound sense of self-protection, saying ‘no’ more often, and rejecting social expectations around being nice and collegial all the time. You might be in your ‘flop’ era, practicing acceptance and self-forgiveness around personal failures or shortcomings. You might be in your ‘healing’ era, acknowledging, removing, and moving on from toxic relationships in your life.
One of the joys of eras is how creative you can be with them. Want to leave parties, evening gatherings, and late work functions earlier to get better sleep? Try the Irish exit era. Want to focus more and be more productive? Enter your monk mode era. Want to embrace chaos and accept looser standards for yourself? Enter your hot mess era. Many academics would benefit from entering their ‘piss off’ era and systematically declining the many requests for their free labor from predatory publishers and university administrators (to name two of roughly one billion sources). I am currently in my ageing Millennial adornment era, embracing more tattoos and jewelry.
People treat personal eras as a kind of self-help tool. Embracing and announcing a personal era can be confessional and liberating. It can help you confront aspects of your life that you might otherwise ignore, be ashamed of, or repress. It can help you set priorities and stick to your plans. It can help you organize your attention, manage your finances, spend less time on your phone, or keep your house clean(er). As Jessica Goldstein writes in the Washington Post, “Why be burdened with the shame of feeling like a failure when you can just say, hey, it’s only a flop era?” Like all eras, this too shall pass. So own the era, ride it out, and then enter a new one.
Selves and Stories
This trend of adopting personal eras sets in relief the influential philosophical idea of the narrative self (developed in various ways by Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, Dennett, Marya Schechtman, and others). Generally, the idea is that self-narrative is an important, perhaps essential, part of our lives. Who you are is best understood as something like the protagonist of an unfolding story. The self is constituted by the way you understand your life as having a past that explains your present and points toward your future. So, what makes you you is the fact that your life takes the shape of a story in which you are the protagonist, where your past, present, and future are unified by narrative intelligibility.
The idea has some appeal. It explains why rupture and radical change threaten our sense of self. They interrupt the story. It also captures why reconciliation, forgiveness, and autobiography can be healing. They restore narrative coherence. Mike Zhao has argued that self-narrative provides many of the benefits we seek from thinking of our lives as having cosmic and purposive meaning, and so we can obtain those benefits even in the absence of such grand meaning.
But the idea is not without its detractors. Galen Strawson argues that the narrative self is neither universal nor necessary for a good life. Strawson sees the disposition to narrativize one’s life as more of a temperament than a requirement, and it is a temperament that, he argues, we might want to avoid. Some people (“Diachronics”) do experience their lives as unfolding stories with continuity and causal connection, but others (the “Episodics,” including Strawson himself) experience life as a series of fairly disconnected present moments without a substantial sense of past-present-future progression.
Strawson argues that narratives impose false structure on our messy experiences, forcing the complexity of life into the clean shape of a story. For Strawson, insisting that everyone must or should adopt a narrative self-conception is empirically wrong and ethically questionable.
Eras and Selves
But how realistic is it to be an episodic monk? The episodic life has at least as many problems as a strongly narrative one. Being aware of how the past has shaped your present and may influence your future is wisdom. Writing your children into the story of your life is love. Reminiscing about the past while marveling at the present is friendship.
Much of our narrativizing about our lives is a product of living in time with memories and an imagination. We live, time moves on, and we must reckon with the past and do what we can to place ourselves gently in the future. Too much narrative self-making will certainly distort things, but a tendency to shy away from structure will alienate us from value, and from ourselves.
Elisabeth Camp, who has also been critical of the narrative self, points out that narratives are part of the broader genus of frames:
frames are representational devices that crystallize perspectives, guiding intuitive cognition by orienting attention, explanation, and response in terms of a focal principle. We use frames to express, communicate, and negotiate perspectives…(“Stories and Selves: A Twisted Love Story About the Meaning of Life,” p. 168)
Frames are a way of structuring perspective and orienting our attentiveness and responsiveness. In doing so they structure our ‘intuitive cognition’: how we think and act and react in the moment. Camp points out that different frames have different strengths and weaknesses. In addition to narratives we can frame our lives in terms of metaphors—“I am a butterfly” or “I am a bulldozer”—and identity labels, like “Mom” or “queer” or “doctor”. (For everything you need to know about labels as frames, see this very cool paper by Camp and Flores.)
Personal eras are another kind of frame. They are a bit like narratives but without progression from beginning to end. And they are a bit like labels but without as much built-in social structure, and with the built-in assumption of being temporary—at some point the era is over and a new, potentially disconnected era begins.
Compare the ‘wild times’ narrative, the ‘party animal’ label, and ‘my partying era’. Someone who is into partying a lot might use each frame to organize their life. The ‘wild times’ narrative construes all the partying as part of a larger life story that will require integration with the pre-partying days and resolution into the post-partying days. Narrative content has to fill in the transitions and ideally make the past, the partying present, and the future into a coherent story. The ‘party animal’ label offers a way of thinking about one’s identity that organizes and stabilizes one’s agential self-understanding. The ‘my partying era’ frame organizes agency not via stabilizing one’s identity but by setting up a life-structuring theme, set by the flexible end of partying, where one can see one’s many adventures and exploits as so many ways of riffing on the theme. One might resist adopting, even playfully, the ‘party animal’ identity label.
Thinking of oneself as being in a partying era, a healing era, a flop era, or a villain era suspends the demand for narrative coherence and replaces it with something lighter and more fluid and provisional. An era does not need to justify itself by what came before or what comes after. It does not have to pay off or resolve into some other chapter. Nor does it need to frame our agency by framing our selves and structuring our identities. It only needs to hang together thematically for a while and then…embrace the asteroid.
Eras and Agencies
As such, eras structure our agency a bit like the way games do.
C. Thi Nguyen argues that games offer a special way to cultivate our agency. In ordinary life, we pursue our everyday ends—getting a promotion, maintaining friendships, raising children—using whatever means are efficient and effective. But in games, we adopt temporary and artificial ends. As Nguyen puts it, in games we adopt ‘disposable’ ends, and we accept arbitrary constraints on how we can pursue those ends. In basketball we accept the end of getting the ball in the hoop, along with elaborate restrictions on how we may do so: we can only dribble, we cannot hold the ball too long, we must stay in bounds, no ladders or Go Go Gadget super arms, and so on. Nguyen argues that the value of games lies in the forms of agency they make available by framing our agency in terms of in-game ends and arbitrary restrictions. Games allow us to sculpt our agency, try on and tweak our capacities, and experience the rewards of striving that the game promotes.
But Nguyen draws a fairly sharp line between games and life. In games, we adopt these “disposable ends” provisionally and playfully, knowing they are not our real ends, which are not disposable. Once the game is over, we abandon them and can “drop them in an instant”. Life, by contrast, is where our real values and authentic commitments live, with games offering their “agential modes” as a playful contrast.
But personal eras seem to scramble this contrast. The ends adopted in a personal era are real and genuinely matter, but they are often provisional, creative, and playful in exactly the way game ends are. When you enter your Irish exit era, you really do care about leaving parties earlier and getting better sleep. When you enter your villain era, you genuinely want to protect yourself and say no more often. These are not pretend goals. But like game goals, they are temporary, bounded, come with self-imposed constraints and focal points, and can be dropped fairly liberally. If that’s right, then ‘agential fluidity’ seems to be a distinctive feature not only of games but also of personal eras.
What personal eras offer, then, is not an escape from seriousness but a way of experimenting with it. Like playful labels, they offer a frame that lets us care without construing everything we do in terms of a single coherent story of integrated ends. But instead of organizing the self, eras thematically organize our ends. They let us try on forms of agency with genuine but temporary, experimental commitment. But whereas in games this commitment is “disposable”, with personal eras it is provisional and experimental. Eras give us a taste, an internship. Unlike games we do care about the ends, but like games the value of adopting personal eras lies less in achieving those ends than in experiencing what it’s like to be that kind of agent.
The Era of Eras
I think this helps explain why eras are on trend. Many of us live in conditions where long-term narrative planning is brittle, where careers fracture and branch like lightning, identities shift, and the uncertain future resists tidy plotting and integration. For many of us in this world, thinking of our lives as a narrative is increasingly unwise. Eras lower the stakes without draining the meaning. And in lowering the stakes, they make room for a much-needed playfulness and flexibility.
From a narrative point of view, that may sound like giving up on seriousness altogether. But it is not. Eras offer something neither narratives nor games can, namely, the freedom to invest yourself fully in provisional or experimental commitments. Personal eras are not games or identities, and they are not narratives. But you are also not writing a chapter that must cohere with all that came before and lead purposefully toward what comes next. You are living through a time that has its own practical logic, and when it ends, you do not need to justify the transition, reinvent yourself, or force the pieces into a larger story.
“I thought you were in your villain era,” a friend asks.
“Yeah, I was,” you respond, “but now I’m in my nice guy era.”
And so you are. The era was real. You really were pushing back and owning your time. And then the time was over. Not because it progressed or resolved into a new chapter, not because it had to be redeemed by a larger story, but because eras end and new ones begin. Hello nice guy.