CONCEPT
Overlapping Transitions
The AI-era condition in which new transitions initiate before previous ones complete — producing a cascade of unfinished psychological processes that compound into permanent liminality.
William Bridges's framework was built on an assumption that held throughout his career: transitions are discrete. A company restructures. Employees go through the ending, neutral zone, and new beginning. The new beginning stabilizes. Between transitions, there is a period of consolidation during which the new identity solidifies and the person recovers adaptive capacity before the next transition arrives. The AI moment breaks this assumption. Capability advances arrive quarterly. Each advance destabilizes the identity configuration that the previous advance had barely begun to enable. Workers initiate new transitions before previous transitions complete, producing a cascade of unfinished psychological processes: endings half-grieved, neutral zones abandoned mid-exploration, new beginnings formed and then immediately dissolved by the next wave. The result is a permanent state of partial processing — the person is always between identities, always navigating the in-between, never arriving at the stable self that would allow them to say 'this is who I am now' with the confidence that the statement will remain true for longer than a quarter.
