- U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized Your Were Living the Wrong Life
- Bloomsbury (2007)
What if you decided to chuck it all one day and do a complete u-turn? What does it take to make such a bold move? And are you better off once you make it?
After reading Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce, Interface founder Ray Anderson thought about his "legacy" and realized his international carpet company was leaving a big mess for future generations. The business did a complete green about-face and elected to reduce his company's waste and dependency on petrochemicals. Like the most fervent u-turners Bruce Grierson profiles, Anderson morphed from corporate polluter to expert on sustainable commerce.
Grierson, a Vancouverite, does away with the concept of the mid-life crisis. The seeds of change are sown long before the actual shift, he contends. And although his subjects like to tell their story as one of a lightning bolt of inspiration with a complex narrative arc (for the sake of good storytelling), he sees it as more of a gradual shift in perception.
Bruce Grierson spoke to The Tyee recently about midlife crises, terrorists, Adbusters, green execs and America's crisis in confidence. What follows are excerpts from our conversation.
On recanting your life
"When I was working at Adbusters about seven or so years ago, I decided to write a compendium of a bunch of little profiles about people I called "recanters" 'cause they'd decided that what they were doing was indefensible. They suddenly, almost in that classic overnight sit up bed moment said, 'What the hell am I doing?' They flipped. Today, they decided to stand against everything they stood for yesterday. And that became the rest of the trajectory of their life."
On his grandfather's flip flop
"A few years passed, and I started working on what I thought was going to be my first book, about my grandfather who was a medical missionary to North Korea. He's a fascinating guy. He's actually kind of famous with the kinds of people who study missionaries because he was one of the very early medical missionaries to that region. I call him the Korean Bethune. We think he's the guy who brought basketball to Canada.
"He left a whole bunch of journals because he kind of fancied himself a writer. And when reading one of them, I came across this description of how he converted. He was this completely cynical, secular guy studying medicine at Dalhousie, and one day he went with a couple of friends to a lecture held by a Christian fellowship guy who had come to the campus to spread the word. My grandfather was so scornful of this kind of thing that he and his pals went expressly to heckle the guy, and something happened to him on that day, you know, that just changed him, in this incredibly startling way. That is, it just sounded like he was possessed by something outside of himself. When I read that, that's when I kind of made the connection with this and those other stories [from the Adbusters feature on recants].
"I dropped my poor grandfather at that point. But what I found really compelling in that original project [and with the recanters] was the actual psychological machinery. The same impulse to sort of "do good" and "be good" and feel virtuous is present in both cases."
On non-religious conversions
"I decided that enough has been written about religious conversion, there's a whole literature on it. So I decided to categorically ignore those except for as a point of comparison and concentrate on these other kinds of conversion.
"The personal connection was coming across the diary of my grandfather's, and it made me wonder, how could that happen in our family? And could it potentially happen to any of us? You know, under the right circumstances. Why them and not us? And that's a question that comes up a lot in the book. Why these people and not some others?"
On re-religion
"[All of the u-turners] followed the typical arc of becoming enlightened, and rejecting their religion at age 15 or something, but then returning to it. That can't quite possibly be coincidental it comes up in way too many cases for it to be coincidental. But then you wonder, or so you think, does this mean that there is a heritable element to this conversion moment?
"Are you picking it up from your parents? Or, the other option is that when you have been raised with a religion and you lose it there's a kind of a meaning vacuum there that you have to then somehow fill with something else. Whether that becomes a social justice impulse or something else."
On Bin Laden's right hand man
"The New Yorker profiled Adam Gadahn a couple months ago. He's Osama Bin Laden's right hand man. But he's this guy who came from a really benign upbringing in Oregon. His parents were kind of neo-hippies, they lived on a goat farm and his brother and sister, well, I think one of them is an accountant and the other's an aesthetician. And yet he became this radicalized Muslim and you wonder, why him and not his siblings? I mean it's just so interesting. There's no real answer to that."
"You look at things that happened in his life. Did he run into any particularly charismatic person at a time when he was particularly vulnerable? And then there all sorts of theories about how kids have to find their niche within the family, if other kids are doing really conventional things, well then maybe Adam has to find a more rebellious role. But to find just an extreme way to express it...it's unreal.
"Then you wonder, well, he's young man. Is it just a weird phase or is he dug in on it? But he seems to be dug in on it, too, so that's one sign that it's kind of a real event, as I describe it in the book, rather than something that you're flirting with."
On how the midlife crisis isn't inevitable
"A u-turn is definitely not inevitable. The whole feeling about midlife crisis is that it's this inevitable thing and it happens at age 37 and everybody goes through it. And I think my sense is that the idea of the midlife crisis has sort of come under revision. It's not this dire and inevitable thing that happens but it still happens to a lot of people but it manifests differently. The old way we thought about it was that we had this sudden moment when they think 'My God, I'm lost and there's no hope.' I think now the feeling that the positive psychology movement perspective is that now when it happens to people it's 'I'm lost but this may be a good thing because there is maybe a change that I have to make.'
"It used to be kind of a push away from this horrible self you've become and now I think it's become a pull towards this better self that you could be. So it's framed as a much more positive event than it used to be.
"[In the old kind of mid life crisis] there was a need to express this restlessness. But now I get the feeling that the midlife crisis is not so much out of desperation but it's way more purposeful and way more positive."
On the new midlife crisis
"Take The Purpose Driven Life. For a while there, it was selling a million copies a month. Author Rick Warren said the book was not necessarily for really religious people. He called it a non-denominational book that urges people to explore what they were put on this earth to do. A lot of the Promise Keepers and so on were the ones driving up the book sales but there were people drawn to that idea who weren't particularly religious.
"What was I put on earth to do? And I think you could see the same kind of hunger for meaning in the sales of Po Bronson's book, What Should I Do With My Life? It was a huge bestseller for the same kinds of reasons. People feel at midlife that they're not quite exploiting their unique attributes."
On the fake lightning bolt
"I think the notion that lightening hits and you just know immediately is bogus. I think that a u-turn has been brewing for a long, long time."
"When people tell the narrative of our own lives, there's a turning point, and narratives almost always have turning points. So people will say it was the day that I opened the letter, etc, and these are rarely epiphanies you have at the time they are often the kinds of things you impose on the narrative later to make it a better story.
"All that said, some of the people in the book, their moment was so powerful, you know [green entrepreneur] Ray Anderson's burning spear sensation [when he thought about his carpet company's massive ecological footprint], that they knew it at the time."
On why women have fewer mid-life crises
"This may be a gross stereotype, but women internalize their cognitive dissonance a bit more than men. So they would take their conflict in and become depressed about and no one really knows about their midlife crisis. Men externalize everything they are going through and you see exactly the change that's happening in men. So, it's probably happening to the same degree to men and women but for different reasons. You just see it more visibly in men.
On America's 'mass u-turn'
"I had to bite down hard when I wrote the one chapter: Is America ripe for a mass u-turn? The premise there is that people are vulnerable to massive change in low moments. And you could say that's its sort of a low moment for America in a lot of ways. It seems that America's classic confidence is wavering a little bit. It is a time of real instability and those are the moments, at least on a personal level, when people become receptive to change. It is that whole metaphor of gradual change that you cannot detect until it happens. It looks like a sudden phase change but it isn't."
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