How to Understand and Conquer The ‘Quarter-Life-Crisis.’
The Realization.
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I can’t believe I’m almost 24.
The thought permeated in my mind and refused to move out. For a while, I let darkness engulf the living room and listened to the room’s clock softly tick the evening’s life away. Lying on the couch instead of my bed — the darkest thoughts apparently come from the place where you don’t normally sleep — I contemplated everything leading up to my mid-20’s; almost a quarter-century had passed in the time I’d been alive and I hadn’t even stopped to ponder it until that moment. Thinking about it was even stranger: some important historical events — think 9/11 or the Great Recession — were mixed with other scattered life memories like an experimental salad left out by accident.
Middle-school. High-school. College. Learning to ride a bike. Homework. Term-papers. Weddings. Funerals. Family. Friends.
So it’s all come to this, huh?
The living room offered no answers. Instead, it waited in darkness and dared me to make any kind of profound, philosophical discovery. The only discovery I made during that time was the creeping anxiety when I compared some of my friends’ lives to my own. Not only did a number of them have well-paying jobs but some already had houses. If they weren’t about to get married — or they were already married — then they were in a happy, stable relationship according to their social-media-highlight-reels.
I knew these were bad wells to draw from, but I couldn’t even muster the energy to fake contentment.
How Did This Happen?
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So there I lay, comparing my perceived ‘failures’ to the ‘successes’ of my friends. Almost all of them were monetary or physical in nature. I compared my nonexistent relationship status, my low-income job I didn’t care for, and the fact that my idea of a good vacation was going to a Rust-Belt city like Pittsburgh — which I’d done the year before — while others were happy to post their travel-photos from European destinations. I wondered if the material success they had would ever reach me…or even different lanes I could take to get the same thing.
A lot of cultural commentators and scientists are saying this isn’t uncommon. In a fast-paced world where confusion about life is exacerbated by near-documentary-level social media prevalence, the chance to feel inadequate every single day towards people you don’t even know is now on the table.
As the clock ticked more seconds off into the night and crickets joined the night’s existential cacophony, I realized I was being not only shallow…but kind of an idiot as well. Did I really want to quantify success by vacation photos, monetary status, and home-ownership? Was I ready to throw all pretense of figuring things out away, just so I could impress friends and family members with my life when they asked?
I didn’t have a solid answer for that.
Two Years Later.
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I’m over the Quarter-Century-Hump and I’m now beginning the slow slog towards the Mid-Century-Hump —and I’ve been told that’s when things get really scary. I won’t pretend to have all the answers in my quest to obtain a more fulfilled life, but I can share the three things I’ve learned to help move my quality of life forward.
If you or someone you love is currently experiencing a quarter-life-crisis, then I can only hope I can convince you to do the same.
1. Work at Your Own Pace — For anybody who’s heard the line ‘life is a marathon, not a sprint,’ this proves true not just in family-time but in your career as well — whether you have entrepreneurial aspirations or not. If you’re stressing that somebody in their early 20’s already made millions — or billions — and you’re still stuck making a working-class or middle-class income, then you’d actually do well to remove them from your mind completely. This is not to say discount the advice they might give about starting a company or building their brand but only know that you can control you. You can’t control them or anybody else. So once that dissatisfaction rears its ugly head, then you can…
2. Start Planning Your Change of Action — Maybe you’re in college. Maybe you’ve already graduated. Maybe you’ve never gone to college and are considering that it’s time to start. Maybe you dropped out of college because you wanted to start your own business. The only piece of advice in this realm I can offer is my life changed for the better when I started planning my time and efforts effectively.
This involves the scenario of still feeling lost after I graduated college — which, according to information published on LinkedIn courtesy of Censuswide, is a perfectly normal feeling to have. Once I knew what my life’s primary stress was — primarily money, a job with room to grow, and a halfway-decent apartment, then I began to plot the steps I needed to take to get there.
And once I finished plotting the course, I took the first step towards achieving my dreams.
3. Determine What You are Willing to Sacrifice to Get There — The time I once spent going to movies, scrolling through internet-articles, or binge-watching television turned into working on my establishing my brand outside of my normal day job. This is where you find me publishing articles and beginning to construct the framework for the independent website I want to get off the ground. This is where me and my coworkers start to share ideas regarding business and next-level-achievement rather than frivolities. I love a good four-hour football game but sadly, it had to go. Once I stopped waiting for something to happen is exactly when something started happening.
As of right now, through a series of job-hopping misadventures, I have a higher-paying job than I did when I first graduated college. I am also publishing articles and reaching an audience that seems to widen by the day. Little by little, I’m conquering the quarter-life crisis and following the course I charted out for a better life on my terms.
Not social-media terms.
My own terms.
May your own terms prove just as fruitful.
