The Quarter-Life Crisis Is Real
Why the late twenties and early thirties are the worst time of life.
We have all heard about the midlife crisis at least once, but what about the quarter-life crisis? Although the latter is still a lesser-known phenomenon when compared to the more common and popular midlife crisis, it is indeed real and a problem that several young people have faced.
According to a 2017 LinkedIn survey, 75% of people between 25 and 33 have experienced a quarter-life crisis. These numbers are sobering, and bring to light a life obstacle that can no longer be ignored and that everyone should be aware of.
So, let’s delve into the quarter-life crisis by understanding what it is, its causes, and how it can undermine one’s happiness.
What is the Quarter-Life Crisis?
The expression “quarter-life crisis” was brought to the fore by Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. In this book published in 2001, Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner describe the challenges young individuals are called to face regarding careers, finances, relationships, and living arrangements.
Specifically, Robbins and Wilner along with other 100 peers depict the period following college graduation as unstable, stressful, and anxiety-provoking. These conditions may lead to feelings of indecisiveness, helplessness, and panic, which underlie one’s happiness and stillness.
Defining such a personal phenomenon is a challenging task. Consequently, there is no standardized definition, although the most popular definitions sound like the one below adopted by Bradley University.
“[…] the quarter-life crisis is a period of uncertainty and questioning that typically occurs when people feel trapped, uninspired and disillusioned during their mid-20s to early 30s” — Understanding the Quarter-Life Crisis
The 4 Stressors Behind the Quarter-Life Crisis
Bradley University summarized the most common and relevant causes of the quarter-life crisis with the following four stress-provoking elements:
- searching for a job for the first time or planning one’s career
- living alone for the first time and fully embracing the adult life
- finding a long-term partner and establishing new friendships
- making long-term personal or professional decisions, such as buying the first house
All these causes are decisions and experiences that each individual is usually called upon to make in their late 20s or early 30s. In other words, the stress produced by the weight of the changes and decisions one has to make in that period of life is the real cause of the quarter-life crisis.
How Does a Quarter-Life Crisis Feel?
Analyzing Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties, 12 recurring elements experienced by young individuals coping with the quarter-life crisis emerge. Let’s address them all:
- confusion about one’s identity
- insecurity regarding the present and future accomplishments, especially in the short term
- a strong sense of nostalgia for the old college or university life
- going through a process of reevaluation of close interpersonal relationships
- feeling “not good enough” because of the inability to find a satisfying job for one’s academic and/or intellectual level. Otherwise, settling for a job but experiencing a sense of disappointment
- tendency to have strong opinions
- feeling lonely and socially isolated
- finding social interactions boring and avoidable
- a sense of stress due to one’s current and future financial situation
- frustration in relationships, the world of work, and finding an appealing job or career
- believing that everyone is doing better than you
- a desire to have children
As precisely emphasized in the book, all those feelings tend to occur shortly after a young individual enters what is socially referred to as the “real world”. In particular, the quarter-life crisis usually affects highly educated professionals the most.
This can be explained by what was discovered in a study conducted by a collaborative group of US and UK researchers. In fact, time and work are what concerns young individuals facing a quarter-life crisis the most. Particularly, words related to time (“night”, “weekend”, “morning”, “early”, “day”) and work (“work”, “working”) are the ones with the highest frequency and correlation strengths in their tweets.
So, one’s job appears to play a key role in this phenomenon. A reason can be found in the fact that the skills young individuals have spent so much money and time earning seem to be insufficient to deal with the real world. This causes them to fall into career stagnation, which leads to severe social, personal, and financial insecurity as a result.
In other terms, adult life comes with responsibilities that many young individuals report they are unable to handle. Therefore, the real world appears to be tougher, less forgiving, and more competitive than expected.
The 4 Stages of the Quarter-Life Crisis
According to a Harvard Business Review article, the quarter-life crisis usually involves the following four steps:
- feeling trapped in some form of commitment (e.g. a relationship, a job, a business)
- after ending the commitment, now feeling lonely or isolated
- beginning an internal exploration journey that leads to trying new experiences and exploring new ideas
- finding out of the crisis, much happier and with a greater sense of purpose
It is also pointed out that “it feels horrible at the time, but research suggests that going through this crisis is extremely valuable as we age”. This is because individuals who went through it already know how to deal with higher stress levels that typically occur during their 40s and 50s. Thus, even though the pain of being a young adult feels sometimes terrible, learning how to cope with this stressful situation can improve one’s life in the long run.
Conclusion
Although not being as popular as the midlife crisis, the quarter-life crisis is equally troubling and worthy of further investigation. An increasing amount of people during their mid-20s to early 30 are experiencing a feeling of disillusion. They believe they are confined, with no inspiration and future.
This is undoubtedly a questioning quandary that can affect one’s happiness.
This is why it is so important to be able to recognize it, and here we delved into this phenomenon, understanding what it is, its causes, its consequences, and why it might eventually help people live a less-stressful life in the long term.
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