We all know what it means when someone is having a mid-life crisis. The term has become part of our collective psychobabble, associated with fast red cars, affairs, excessive spending, a new hair color, a nose piercing at fifty. It’s also associated with people who are quite a few years past their twenties, people facing the existential reality that life is a lot shorter than they once thought.
What the mid-life and quarter-life crisis have in common is the uncertainty and insecurity around the core pillars of our lives: career, relationships, finances, health, and the future. They also both occur at the cusp of a significant new chapter, a new developmental phase in our lives when we are forced to answer a number of really unsettling questions. What do I actually want from life? Am I happy where I am now? What am I missing? Will those things I’m missing actually make me happy? How do I get the most out of my years on this earth, or what I have left of it? What results is a period of panic, uncertainty, and the overwhelming urge to do something drastic in our lives so that we can reinstate a sense of control over our destiny.
Maybe you think it’s a bit dramatic to suggest twentysomethings are entitled to these fears. For many of us, our twenties are the period when we should feel the most free and fearless. The world is beckoning to us with opportunities, and our youthfulness and enthusiasm give us an advantage. We are young enough to still have some of our childhood dreams intact; we are optimistic about the future while still having a bit of knowledge and life experience in our back pocket to feel like adults. And yet we are also thoroughly unprepared for what this decade is about to throw our way.
"While it might be comforting to know you’re not alone, I think it’s equally disconcerting to realise you have to forge your own path"
Maybe you’ve already gotten a taste or lived through it. The confusion, the heartbreak, the sense that everyone else has it all figured it out while you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. The changing friendships, loneliness, watching parents get older, worries about money or about finding purpose while the world is changing every moment. The future feels daunting, but the present feels equally chaotic and unstable. While everyone is telling us to enjoy this decade — the period when we are not quite adults, but not quite children either — we are struck by the deeply unsettling feeling that we are completely lost and no one can tell us where to go next, or at the very least what comes next.
The Moment of Crisis
Welcome to your quarter-life crisis. Millions have completed this pilgrimage before you, and you will not be the last. While it might be comforting to know you’re not alone, I think it’s equally disconcerting to realise you have to forge your own path and, regardless of all those who have come before, no one is going to give you the answers. Unfortunately, you are on your own. I say unfortunately, but there is also something so uniquely exciting about the prospect that you get to make your life your own. This discomfort you’re feeling is actually a sign that you are growing into a new version of yourself, undergoing a metamorphosis, and your old skin, your old self, just doesn’t fit any longer. Because there is no rule book to play by, no one can tell you what is right or wrong if it makes you happy.
However, what complicates this crisis are the opposing types of decisions or life paths to consider. On one hand, we face these societal expectations to settle down, have some five-year plan for the future, and progress toward that outcome. Society expects stability and a story they can understand, normally one that follows the traditional blueprint of graduating or completing some kind of study, finding a nice partner and getting married, holding a steady full-time job, having children, getting promoted, retiring, and then dying. That’s a nice story, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who also finds it incredibly suffocating. Not only is that not everybody’s dream (even if that kind of future is what will make you happy), but our generation has the added complication of facing one of the biggest recessions in decades, rising inflation, a climate crisis, a global pandemic, and increasing inequality. Yet we still wonder why we feel less like the adults society expects us to be at this age. When we are unable to find our path the way our parents or those around us have, we feel an increased sense of urgency to have all the answers. That urgency is exactly what creates the quarter-life crisis. Our brains are not particularly great at managing uncertainty, because uncertainty signals the unknown — which, evolutionarily, could mean danger. Think about our ancestors for whom a dense forest was a lot more uncertain, and contained a lot more potential danger, than a flat and empty plain. We prefer outcomes we can predict or can see, and so the chaos of this decade and the decisions we need to make can, naturally, trigger a great deal of psychological stress and discomfort.
"It’s entirely subjective, but each of us has something that feels 'bigger' than us and bestows a sense of meaning to life"
And then maybe we do it — we have everything we’ve ever wanted, what everyone told us we needed to be happy. We are on the right path but feel remarkably unsatisfied. This is also a trigger for the quarter-life crisis. One of our foundational psychological needs is a sense of fulfillment or purpose. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow, best known for his aptly named Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — a pyramid that reflects our most universal needs as humans — believed that purpose and achieving our potential was so important that he put it at the very top of his pyramid. The science confirms it as well. Purpose is good not just for our emotional and psychological well-being, but for our physical health as well. In 2020, a group of researchers dove into the health data of 13,770 recent retirees who had been assessed five times over the eight years after they retired. It was hypothesised that a lot of them, having finished their working lives, would be suffering from a lack of purpose. But what the researchers found was that the retirees who continued to have goals and a sense of direction, or who found greater meaning to their lives, were not only happier, but more physically active and less likely to smoke, drink excessively, or report sleep problems. In other words, a sense of purpose is as psychologically nourishing as it is good for our physical health.
A sense of purpose, in the plainest terms, means we have something personally meaningful to strive toward. This in turn gives us direction, long-term goals, a sense of accomplishment, and a way of organising our life. It may seem obvious, but we find purpose when we align our behaviours and actions with our mission, values, or desires. Someone who cares deeply for others finds purpose as a nurse because it aligns with their deeper desire to be helpful. Someone who values material success above all else finds purpose in seeking to increase their investment portfolio or reputation. It’s entirely subjective, but each of us has something that feels “bigger” than us and bestows a sense of meaning to life.
When we don’t know how to align our behaviours with our mission, values, or desires, we experience the mental discomfort that comes with the territory of a quarter-life crisis and needs to be resolved by changing either our values or our actions. If you value adventure and helping others but are working in a sedentary job that feels very self-serving, you are going to experience a conflict between the value and the behavior. The alternative of being a park ranger or a conservationist or an adventure tour guide would align better and reduce your internal sense of crisis, even if it means shifting directions. If you are in a relationship with someone and it is no longer fulfilling, but you always imagined the kind of love that could burn down the world, you are going to experience conflict. Leaving that relationship for one
that matches your deeper desires would, again, reduce the sense of crisis. That unconscious conflict is what is making you so uncomfortable. It is a feeling of claustrophobia, a sense that you cannot escape the life you have created, perhaps the life you were forced to start working toward when you were only a teenager, or just so happened to fall into. You’re trapped. You’re stuck in your full-time job, you’re stuck in your relationship, you’re stuck in an unfulfilling environment. And this sense of entrapment is often accompanied by depression and panic.
This is the beginning of the crisis. While it’s terrifying to feel like everything you wanted isn’t fulfilling anymore, it also means you are at an important crossroads where you can change everything. You can start over again. In fact, we know that our twenties are perhaps the best time to change. Congratulations! Instead of suppressing these feelings for another twenty-odd years, you have the gift of being able to explore new beginnings when they are easiest. At our age, many of us don’t have children, mortgages, businesses, or the types of familial relationships that keep us tied to one place. We aren’t yet facing the stigma and discrimination that people may face when trying to start a new career at fifty or a new relationship at sixty-five. You are poised for transformation. In fact, I believe this decade requires it.
This text is an extract from Person in Progress by Jemma Sbeg, published by Hachette. Discover more and purchase the paperback or audiobook here.
