Philosopher Nick Riggle wrote a great post over on Substack about “era” as a way of thinking about different times in our lives. Riggle’s The Eras Tour Through Life is, of course, based on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
When we think about organizing in life in frames, we often think of life chapters, but Riggle–along with a bunch of feminist philosophers– worry that chapters can be pretty constraining. Not all life stories have the kind of narrative structure that goes along with chapters. Chapters are also connected with the liberal idea of the self as a career. You know, The Years of Preparation, The Years of Struggle, the Minivan Years, and so on. Chapters require progression, beginnings and endings, and closure and many of our lives lack this. (I talk about this in my very old paper, Feminist philosophers turn their thoughts to death.)
So maybe we should join the Swifties and embrace eras instead?
Writes Riggle, “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.”
“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.”
“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.”
I taught an upper-year philosophy class a couple of years ago on life-stages, and we could have used the Riggle-Swift idea of life’s eras. Many of my students didn’t feel at all comfortable with traditional life-stage talk, partly, I suspect, because they might not be living lives with the usual markers of adulthood–moving out, financial independence, marrying, buying a house, having children, and so on.
What appeals to me about eras is the creativity and the playfulness. As Riggle notes, eras are low stakes.
Here on the blog, I think we’ve all written about our different fitness lives.
Cate’s asked How many fitness lives do we get?
Tracy and I have written about coming to think of ourselves as “adult-onset athletes” and the change of identity that involved. Now, Tracy has moved into her 60s and is thinking about fitness as sustainability.
Me, I’m thinking about this as my time to be an outdoor adventurer and I’m considering endurance, rather than speed and power as my fitness goals. It’s a shift. See From beast to bunny? Sam is thinking about her fitness future and about changing the focus of her bike training.
What I like about the era-talk is that past eras can re-emerge. It’s not a one-way fitness track from competitive athlete to aging aquafit participant, maybe with some pickleball thrown in the middle. I’ve really been struggling with the way people talk about giving up things as they age. I’m a very curious person who likes learning new things. I don’t expect that to change as I get older. I very much want to resist the narrative of life narrowing and slowing down. I’ve written here about aging and expanding one’s world, so I think I’ll talk about fitness eras, instead of chapters with all that implies about endings and conclusions.
How about you?
What’s your current fitness era?
