A milestone tells you something happened. A turn tells you something changed.
I recently interviewed someone who told me about a recent family celebration. She, her boyfriend and her dog had all gone out for dinner together. They chose a restaurant with a furry-friend menu because they were celebrating the anniversary of adopting him.
From the outside it might seem like a silly thing to celebrate but something in her life changed when she got a dog, she wanted to recognise it and created an annual ritual to do it.
That is what milestones have always done. Graduation has a ceremony. Marriage has a wedding. A new baby has a shower with gifts. Retirement is signalled with a leaving party. The milestone is recognised; other people understand what has happened and there is a shared way of marking the moment.
Milestones make a life legible, both to us and to everyone else. They tell us that something happened and that it matters.
The word milestone itself comes from something very practical. A milestone sat beside a road and told you how far you had travelled. And that works well when everyone is travelling along the same road, in the same direction.
For a long time, adulthood worked like that, everyone going down the same path. Education finished, work began, you met someone, married, bought somewhere to live, had children and eventually retired. Different cultures have different versions, but enough people moved through the same milestones that they became a useful way of understanding where someone was in their life.
They gave us a way to judge whether we were progressing too. But the problem is that today the milestones are moving, switching order or being consciously missed.
The Milestones Are Moving
In the US the median age at first marriage is now 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women. Fifty years ago, it was 23.5 and 21. Today, married couples account for less than half of US households, compared with two thirds in 1975.
Italy has a similar story. There were 173,272 marriages in 2024, down 5.9% in a year, while the average age at first marriage has reached nearly 35 for men and 33 for women.
Marriage isn’t just happening later or less often. It now occupies a different place in different lives. It can happen after children, after decades together, multiple times or not at all.
Parenthood is changing too. Fertility in England and Wales is at a record low, and mothers are now older on average. In China 7.92 million babies were born in 2025, down 17% in a year, the fourth consecutive year of population decline. India’s latest fertility rate has fallen to 1.9 children per woman, below replacement level for the first time, although enormous differences remain between regions and between rural and urban India. Parenthood still matters, but it can no longer be assumed to arrive in every adult life.
There’s no longer a clear story of sequential traditional milestones across the globe. Their timing, sequence and likelihood is changing.
Retirement, once one of the clearest transitions in adult life, is now changing too. Some people are stopping completely at statutory retirement age, but others are reducing hours, beginning entirely new careers or just carrying on as before.
This is what Kaleidoscope Lives look like. The pieces of adulthood are still familiar, but they no longer arrive in one expected sequence.
New Milestones for New Kinds of Change
As adulthood changes, we are inventing new milestones to make those changes visible.
Dog birthdays and adoption days now come with dinner. Friendship anniversaries have their own name: friendiversaries. People celebrate marathons and Hyrox challenges. Sobriety is an interesting example. Sober anniversaries have been acknowledged for years, but recognition often happened within a specific community. Now people post their soberversary inviting others to acknowledge it.
These modern milestones have the same three elements as the traditional ones: something changes, other people can see it and there’s a ritual that tells us how to respond.
More parts of people’s lives are being seen, but there are still plenty of changes that aren’t.
The Endings We Don’t Mark
The end of a marriage is one place where this is changing. Divorce used to be a quiet moment but now some people are making it more overt. The Washington Post reported on a woman who celebrated with an “End of an Error” banner, darts thrown at photographs of her ex and a piñata bearing his face. It was obviously an ending, but it was given the kind of public recognition normally given to beginnings.
We have lots of rituals around romantic relationships, but friendship can be one of the most important relationships in someone’s life and last even longer. Yet when it ends, there is no public marker at all. It becomes a private loss you mostly mourn solo.
Psychologists Grace Vieth, Alexander Rothman and Jeffry Simpson talk about active friendship endings, where a relationship is explicitly ended, and passive ones, where people drift or fade away. Romantic relationships come with clear beginnings and endings. Friendships can slowly become not what they were.
Anthropologists have written extensively about rites of passage and the role they play in making change visible. A milestone is hit, it’s recognised and there’s a ritual to acknowledge it.
People still want to feel that they are moving, growing and changing, and to have that recognised. It’s the milestone moments themselves that have changed. Newer milestones are starting to highlight different kinds of life choices and paths. Yet important changes are still happening without any marker at all. Milestones are starting to feel too narrow for the way adult lives are today.
The Changes We Don’t Know How to Mark
In the first piece in this series, I described Kaleidoscope Lives as adult lives made from the same familiar pieces: work, relationships, home, family, friendship, care, but arranged in increasingly different orders and combinations. We may start with similar pieces, but now every life makes its own pattern.
As adulthood has become more individual, the moments that matter are more diverse than ever. Milestones are great for celebrating the ones society already knows how to see. They are less useful for the ones that change a life without ever getting a ceremony.
I’ve started calling those life turns.
Think of it like turning a kaleidoscope, the pieces move, they fall into a different arrangement. Suddenly you are looking at a different pattern.
Lives change like that too. A turn can be planned or unexpected. A turn isn’t automatically good or bad. And some only make sense years later, when you can finally see what they changed.
Sometimes the turn is obvious. You start a business, close one, have a baby or decide you don’t want children. Sometimes a turn can be something you never wanted, or the moment you accept that something you wanted won’t happen.
Other turns are deeply personal. Realising you don’t want what you thought you wanted. Learning to be alone. Some turns are good. Some are awful. Most are harder to categorise.
When people tell the story of their life they instinctively mention turns: a diagnosis, an offer, a failure, someone you met or lost. We don’t call those milestones. They may not have a photograph to mark them or a definitive date attached, but when people look back, these are often the moments when they recognise their life pattern shifted.
A Milestone Marks Something Happening. A Turn Tells You Something Changed.
We don’t need new milestones for every turn a Kaleidoscope Life takes. We don’t need cards for surviving burnout, or a dinner every time someone hits a personal best.
What we need is ways to recognise that adult lives are moving and changing, even when that change doesn’t look like the traditional milestones of progress.
I’m not married and haven’t had children. The recognisable milestones in my own life, moving country and getting promoted were easy for others to understand and celebrate. Yet many of the things that changed me most weren’t. My first holiday solo was one of them. Nobody else understood the significance of the trip or knew what had shifted as a result of it.
Life turns give us a way to recognise changes that may not look significant from the outside, but can change the shape of what follows.
This is the second in my Kaleidoscope Lives series, exploring what happens when adulthood stops following one recognisable sequence and why we need better language for the lives that emerge instead.