When my parents' generation spoke of adult life, they meant something specific: a job by 22, marriage by 25, children by 28, and a reasonable expectation of staying in the same city, perhaps the same company, for decades. That world is largely gone. What replaced it is more complex and far less certain than anything a single generation has had to navigate before.
Looking at OECD data spanning the last fifty years, what strikes me is that the very concept of a "standard" life trajectory has dissolved. The milestones have shifted, yes. What has shifted further is the assumption that there ever was a single correct sequence in the first place. In its place is something that looks less like a timeline and more like a decision tree, with branches multiplying at every junction.
Perhaps the most dramatic shift of the past half-century has happened in education. In the 1970s, university was predominantly a male domain across most OECD countries. Today, women surpass men substantially in tertiary education. Approximately 50% of women aged 25–34 now hold a university degree, compared to around 38% of men in the same age group.
This matters for the Blobs framework because education shapes when people enter the workforce, form relationships, and take on adult responsibilities. As educational periods have lengthened, and as women have invested more in academic credentials, the downstream milestones have all shifted later.
The numbers are stark. Average fertility across OECD nations has fallen from around 3.3 children per woman in the early 1970s to approximately 1.5 today. Women are having their first child later. In many Northern European countries, the average age at first birth is now above 30. And the forms that families take have diversified enormously.
In the 1970s, the overwhelming norm was a married couple with children, formed in the early-to-mid twenties. Today, 40% of births in many European countries occur outside formal marriage. Solo parenting, blended families, same-sex partnerships with children, and deliberately child-free adults are all far more visible parts of the social landscape.
This is not decline. It is diversification. It does mean that the developmental frameworks built on the assumption of a standard family timeline need updating, which is, in part, what Blobs of Six attempts to do.
The shift from manufacturing to service economies, accelerated by digitalisation and the gig economy, has transformed what "work" means across adulthood. Women's workforce participation has risen to around 70% in many OECD nations, a profound change in the texture of adult life. The wage gap persists (at approximately 11.9% across OECD), but it has narrowed, and the expectation that women will build careers alongside family is now close to universal.
Meanwhile, the concept of a single employer or even a single career path across adult life has largely given way to portfolio careers, repeated retraining, and the ever-present possibility that the role you hold today may not exist in ten years. This creates both freedom and anxiety. The Germans have a word for it, Multioptionsgesellschaft, the burden of too many choices, and it affects every Blob from Young Adult through Anchored Adult.
Life expectancy has risen significantly, more than a decade in many countries over the past fifty years. This is one of the core arguments behind the Blobs framework: if you are likely to live into your late 80s, the developmental architecture of life needs to reflect that.
But the health picture is not uniformly positive. Rising rates of anxiety and depression, particularly in younger and middle-aged populations, tell a story of wellbeing that doesn't track neatly with longevity. Suicide rates among men in their 40s and 50s remain alarmingly high in many OECD countries. The twenty-first century has given us longer lives. It has not automatically given us better ones.
For all the ways life's beginning and middle have changed, the end remains. What has changed is when it comes, and increasingly, what it looks like. Understanding where you are in the arc of your life is not morbid. It is practical. The milestones we plan around shape the choices we make. Knowing they have shifted frees us to make choices that match the life we're actually living, not the one our grandparents planned for.
The Blobs of Six framework was built to reflect contemporary patterns, not the milestones of 1974. If something in these pages feels more accurate to your actual life than what you were told to expect, that is exactly the point.
When you compare the trajectory you were implicitly promised growing up to the one you are actually living, what is the biggest gap? And does that gap feel like failure, or like something else?