roy

Ben posted this question on his Crapga:

what is a quarter-life-crisis anyways? is it just the uncertainty of not knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life? if so, what happens if you never figure out what you really want to do? does the quarter-life-crisis last for your whole life??

I guess since what I was largely going through over the past few months was a quarter-life crisis of sorts, I'll try to answer this question based on my own experiences. If this comes off as trite and obvious, apologies. Because this is also a really long issue, I will tend to overgeneralize some points, but it's only to get my point across.

A quarter-life crisis is simply the friction during the transition from the college into the real world. Colleges tend to breed a sense of security and stability - you're surrounded by people of similar age who are going through pretty much the same issues. This lends to intensive interaction with your peers on an almost 24-7 basis. It's not that college students are unaware of their futures, it's just that it's much easier to drown away those concerns when you're hanging out with friends all the time. Even the friendships I had during freshman year were incredibly intensive - I felt like I got to know a lot of people really well (at the time) given the proximity of our living quarters. But of course, the moment we started living elsewhere, those friendships broke apart.

On the other hand, the real world is significantly different. We are diluted into a huge working force with people of varying backgrounds and ages. [An aside: colleges are absolutely wonderful in their ability to breakdown socioeconomic barriers - it's much easier in college to hang out with people you would never hang out with in the 'real' world - my suitemates from junior year were some of the most unique group of acqaintances I ever had.] It becomes much harder to relate to people at work, and instead of the large number of shallow acquaintances we once had in college, we try to forge more significant relationships with individuals (quality over quantity). Of course, people are fallible, and when these few relationships start falling apart, we take it harder on ourself. It's almost a vicious cycle - the lack of friends forces us to rely on fewer friends for that support we had in college - but when those fewer friends dissappoint us - we feel very lonely.

Ultimately I think the emotional impact of the quarter-life crisis is largely the move away from intense interaction more towards isolation. Could this be the reason girls get married so quickly after they graduate? It seems there was a huge number of people who got married roughly 2-3 years after they graduated. Could this also be the reason why there's such a high divorce rate (total speculation)? What if these marriages aren't the true product of an understanding of the commitment and love required between two people, but rather the result of loneliness?

The second part of the quarter-life crisis is the unrealistic expectations we have for ourselves as professionals when we first join the workforce.

Let's face it - almost nobody does what they want to do coming out of college. We all come out and start working at some job worth roughly $50K/year, trying to get on our feet. We're happy to be employed and be doing something. When my dad first started working in the real world, lifetime employment by one employer was not an uncommon thing - to be switching jobs every few years was unheard of. But is still the case?

One of the downfalls of the free labor market is that it does allow for downsizing to occur on a rapid scale. We are expendable, and it's no longer looked down upon for companies to lay off workers. Job security is a thing of the past. I'd be surprised if any of my friends who have jobs now were still working at the same job three years from now. Even people with high-paying jobs end up moving from place to place.

College breeds an idealism - we come out believing we really can have an impact and that we can change the world. However, we mostly lack the skills to do so, so we have to take these low-tiered jobs to gain more "experience." The discrepency between what we think we can do and we really can do can be extremely depressing.

I think the third part of the quarter-life crisis has to do with the ability to get closure. Your academic career is largely quite measurable - in fact, you can measure to the nearest hundred value of a number how successful you were during academics. You are told what to do, and you work hard for one goal over a period of a few weeks to get that number on an exam. You (Notice I'm no longer using 'we') feel a real sense of accomplishment when you get that A on the paper.

Metrics for success in the real world are harder to measure. I can never tell when my bosses are unhappy with my work, and the amount of work politics that I have to navigate makes it much harder for me to feel like I've done something good. Furthermore, there's never any sense of "completion." There's always something more that has to be done, so I've lost that feeling of "Wow, I did _____ and I feel good!"

The combination of isolation after experiencing intense relationships, the complete blow to one's self-ego when one realizes that we really aren't capable of changing the world in a great way, and the inability to gain satisfaction from the work we are given ... I think these were the three things that affected my quarter-life crisis.