quarterlife crisis

(..) this phenomenon, known as the “Quarterlife Crisis,” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated; those who should be able to capitalize on their youth, unparalleled freedom and free-for-all individuation. They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

When a contemporary 25-year-old’s parents were 25, they weren’t concerned with keeping their options open: they were purposefully buying houses, making babies and making partner. Now, who we are and what we do is up to us, unbound to existing communities, families and class structures that offer leisure and self-determination to just a few. Boomer and post-boom parents with more money and autonomy than their predecessors has resulted in benignly self-indulgent children who were sold on their own uniqueness, place in the world and right to fulfillment in a way no previous generation has felt entitled to, and an increasingly entrepreneurial, self-driven creation myth based on personal branding, social networking and untethered lifestyle spending is now responsible for our identities. (...)


The mid-life crisis is a kind of ‘Is this it? I had a big plan, I had big ideas. Now I’m 48 and I guess I won’t get to do those things.’ The mid-life crisis is understood as one of resignation. A Quarterlife Crisis will resolve itself by hooking itself into a plan.” What that plan could be, though, might be vague, or feel altogether impossible to create. (...)

Attempts to manage the Quarterlife Crisis might be as banal as drinking a lot, doing a bunch of drugs, sleeping with idiots and myriad other kinds of self-flagellation, but broader attempts are made to find some sense of purpose. An obvious choice for panicking twentysomethings with a post-undergraduate sense of displacement and for the ones that aren’t fulfilled by their jobs is grad school.
(...) So it really depends.”Among the implicit promises made to this generation of twentysomethings was that they would have work that was engaging and creatively fulfilling.

The dissonance between a twentysomething’s pre-career expectations and the dissatisfaction they feel as part of the working world can be hugely defeating. As Kimmel says, “They don’t have much of a life plan about how to move from Point A to Point B. What happens very often is they have very big ambitions, [but] there is a mismatch between their planning for their lives and their ambitions.” He also says that the conflict is made more difficult because 25-year-olds are living “in an economic environment which is the most inhospitable in our history.”

SPENDING MONEY IS as fraught as making it. Multiple degrees, trips to Peru, and keeping up appearances on Saturday night all communicate values and desires, and having no consistent sense of “want” can reinforce the problem, often with trail of debt.

The twentysomething void is, in large part, due to the important evolution of sexual equality, and when sex, relationships, and family-building changes, everything does. Kimmel says, of men in particular, “Part of the Quarterlife Crisis is a kind of malaise that the end of your youth is really the end of fun. And that you’re never going to have any fun again, because you have to work. You’re never going to have sex again because you’re going to get married. Your life is over.” So why bother? Literal and figurative fucking around is infinitely more appealing to men who are still sorting out what they want their lives to look like.“Grown-ups understand that the choices we make also involve choices we don’t make,” Kimmel says. “We have some regrets and we carry [those] with us. Guys don’t get a lot of help in this from each other or from our culture. Culturally we have got to show guys that the other side of this is actually terrific.” He points out that, statistically, married men are happier and have more sex, and that fathers experience lower levels of depression. Still, Kimmel points out that very young marriage has the highest rate of divorce, and that men would do well to spend their unmarried years focused on their own growth, rather than Halo 3.

WOMEN ALSO FIND themselves conflicted, usually more than men, about the trajectory of their twenties as they relate to relationships. Sarah, who is 27 and works at a non-profit, wants to travel and get a master’s degree, but feels conflicted about doing either. “I want to have kids, and every day that goes by, I have this number in my head. It’s 32. It used to be 30. That’s only a few years from now. I’m thinking, if I don’t do some of this stuff now, before I have kids, am I going to be able to do it?” Women are roundly considered to be in biologically ideal form for baby-making in their twenties and early thirties, which are also prime fun-having and career-building years. For women who want all of the things promised by (theoretically) equal education, work and sex lives, the conflict of desires can be catastrophic.

In 1973, the average age for women to get married was 23, and for men, 25. By 2003, the average age for both rose about five years, a significant change that reflects both marriage-free cohabitation and purposefully delaying serious commitment. It also means that twentysomethings are increasingly going it alone in their financial lives, where they would historically be building assets and houses and portfolios alongside their partner. Women, especially, are buying homes on their own. It also means that loneliness and isolation are far more likely, particularly when being separated from the close friendships that make up university life happens without a family or back-up community in place.

THE EMOTIONAL TUMULT reported during, or remembered after, a Quarterlife Crisis has a scarily ineffable quality. This isolation and its private anxiety are pervasive, as is a longing for the way things were in the predictably structured eras of high school and college or university. The directionlessness and resulting immobility is made worse when twentysomethings going through the Crisis compare themselves to their peers, past and present, further convincing someone in the throes of it that they’re not only alone, but the worst kind of failure.

Twentysomethings are also inundated with constant but mostly empty communication, as the increasingly primary social sphere exists online instead of real life. Nothing could be more alienating to someone in the midst of a crisis than a tool like Facebook. Says James, “All sorts of half-forgotten acquaintances and abandoned friendships reappear in this spreadsheet of potential reasons to feel terrible about yourself. If you’re as petty as I am, you spend a lot of Facebook time gauging your own feelings of inadequacy in direct relation to other people’s success. All these people you couldn’t give a shit about a couple of years ago are now these omnipresent benchmarks and counterpoints to measure against whatever you have or haven’t got going on in your life.”

Adair, who is 30, found herself mired in a Quarterlife Crisis and sought professional help. She says, “I worked with a life coach, and he helped me a lot to realize that I was creating a vicious cycle in my life.... It was a cycle with four different phases, and I’ve followed it basically throughout my life. The steps were: I would get really excited about something, something new something different, something stellar, big. I went off to school totally excited and ready for an awesome experience. Stage two would be like ‘Oh, this is it? This is kind of boring now.’ After one-and-a-half exciting and non-stop years, I realized that I wasn’t excited about being there anymore. Stage three would be ‘What am I doing, why am I choosing to do this?’ In that third stage I would inevitably have some type of breakdown, [which] usually consisted of crying and talking through the feelings of emptiness and boredom with a friend or family member. Then I would have kind of breakthrough in that experience and get myself back up. At that point, I went abroad to Seville, Spain.... Now every time I’m faced with a change or new situation or find myself bored, I ask myself if this is a part of the cycle, or is this genuinely how I’m feeling.”

Having so much — youth, ability, independence — can feel like the worst possible scenario. What remains, though, is the potential for the years with anxiety and without direction to be reclaimed. Scheer sees real opportunity here. “If you feel you’re in crisis, this is a great opportunity to draft a five-year plan with steady concrete goals to help you get to where you want to be. Anyone can transform their life in just a few years.”

Michael Kimmel says “There is life on the other side of this, and it’s actually a pretty good one. Growing up may be hard to do, but in the end, the gains outweigh the losses.” In other words: it might just be time to grow the fuck up.