I spent years reading everything I could find on how human lives unfold. Erikson, Levinson, Piaget, Steiner, the Vedic ashrama system. Good work, all of it. But none of it quite matched what I was actually seeing, in Germany, in China, in Sweden, in the United States. People with similar backgrounds were hitting the same walls, asking the same questions, making the same turns, at roughly the same ages. The existing models grouped decades together into blurry stages, or stopped at 60 as though nothing much happened after that. So I built my own. I call the stages Blobs.
What is a Blob?
A Blob is a six-year window of life. Not a rigid stage with a start and end buzzer, but a roughly six-year period during which a particular cluster of changes, pressures, and questions tends to appear. The edges are soft. The pattern is real.
The number six is not arbitrary. Schooling in most countries begins around age five or six, marking a clear shift in a child's world. Puberty spans roughly six years. The stretch between finishing education and making your first real adult commitments, a job, a home, a relationship you are serious about, clusters naturally into a six-year window too. Again and again, when I looked at how life actually moves rather than how theorists said it should, six years kept appearing as the natural unit.
Four Blobs make a season. There are four seasons: Spring (1 to 24), Summer (25 to 48), Autumn (49 to 72), and Winter (73 onward). Sixteen Blobs in total, from the first year of life to the last chapter of it.
Why Not Seven Years?
The seven-year model has a long history. Rudolf Steiner described life in seven-year stages in 1924. The Vedic chakra system maps spiritual development across seven-year cycles. Popular culture added the "seven-year itch." These ideas have staying power, which does not make them accurate.
The biology does not support a seven-year rhythm. Cells renew at vastly different rates: red blood cells last four months, neurons last a lifetime. There is no single renewal clock running on a seven-year cycle. The social patterns do not support it either. Steiner's model was built for a world where people died at 60. The Vedic matrix ends at 49 for the same reason. These were not oversights. They reflected the reality of their time. They do not reflect ours.
When I looked at contemporary patterns, education, family formation, career development, retirement, the six-year window kept fitting better. Not perfectly. But closer to how life actually moves in post-industrial societies today.
The Three Forces Behind Every Blob
Your body sets the pace.
From the explosive growth of early childhood to the hormonal shifts of adolescence, the slowing metabolism of your forties, and the quieter cellular changes that arrive in later decades, biology writes the first draft of every stage. You do not choose the timing of these shifts. They happen to you, and they shape what each Blob feels like from the inside.
Your world shapes the story.
Where you were born, how you were raised, the economy you entered, the culture that told you when to marry, when to retire, what a successful life looks like. These forces bend your personal timeline in ways that are easy to miss until you compare notes with someone who grew up somewhere very different. The Blob is the same. The cultural flavour of it varies enormously.
The unexpected rewrites everything.
An illness, a redundancy, a move to another country, a loss you did not see coming. No model can predict these moments. Every life contains them. The Blobs describe the underlying pattern. What happens inside that pattern is yours alone.
The Scholarly Foundation
The Blobs framework draws on a tradition of developmental psychology that stretches back decades. Erik Erikson mapped eight stages of psychosocial development, each defined by a central tension, generativity against stagnation, integrity against despair. Daniel Levinson tracked the seasons of adult life through detailed biographical interviews. Bernice Neugarten introduced the idea of the social clock, the culturally shared sense of when things should happen and what it feels like to be ahead of or behind it. I read all of them. I found them genuinely useful and genuinely incomplete.
Most of these models were built when life expectancy was shorter, gender roles were more fixed, and the concept of emerging adulthood, those years between 19 and 24 when you are no longer a teenager but not yet a settled adult, did not exist as a recognised category. Blobs of Six tries to update the picture. It draws on this scholarship, on OECD demographic data, on contemporary neuroscience, and on years of observation across cultures. It is not peer-reviewed academic research. It is a personal synthesis, offered as a mirror, not a verdict.
A Global Perspective
One of the most striking things I noticed, living across six countries over several decades, is how little nationality changes the underlying developmental pattern. A middle-class professional in Aachen and a middle-class professional in Beijing will often hit the same milestones, ask the same questions, and face the same reckoning, within a few years of each other. The cultural details differ. The rhythm does not.
This does not mean all lives are the same. It means there are human patterns that run deeper than culture, and that understanding them can make your own transitions feel less like personal failure and more like something millions of people have navigated before you.
How to Use This Site
The simplest way to start is to find the Blob you are currently in and read its page. Not as a checklist of where you should be, but as a description of what tends to happen in this window and what it tends to ask of people. Notice what resonates. Notice what does not.
It can also be useful to read the Blob just before yours, to understand what you have just come through, and the one just after, to get a sense of what might be coming. The framework is most useful not as a fixed map but as a set of questions: what is this stage asking of me? What am I still carrying from the last one? What might the next six years require?
Which Blob are you in right now, and does the description fit? I would genuinely like to know. Leave a comment or write to me directly at blobsofsix@gmail.com.