Quarterlife Crisis

Came across this and found it to be an interesting read..!!

Written by Kate Carraway. The following are snippets picked from the article. Visit the website to read the un-edited version.
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Browsing through the Facebook photos of friends/ colleagues posing with their spouses and babies, simultaneously judging them and feeling a deep pit of jealousy, and a strange kind of loss. “When did this happen for them?”. Wondering what it is that’s wrong with me that I can’t quite seem to understand.

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.

IDENTIFIED FOR THE first time in 2001, the Quarterlife Crisis has been written about most notably by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner in the New York Times best seller Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. 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. Marc Scheer, who is a career counsellor and educational consultant, 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.

The Quarterlife Crisis is a kind of anticipatory crisis: ‘How is my life going to turn out? I don’t have a clue; I don’t have a map; I don’t have a vision for it.’ 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.

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. 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. Men don't feel the same pressure. They don’t have that kind of timeframe.

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.

A lot of friends are settling down and getting ready to take the next steps towards marriage and families and it makes me question why I am not doing the same, and I realize that the amount of effort they put into finding a partner and getting married I put into my career. So how could I possibly have time for both?
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Note to self: Its f***ing time to grow up!!