Quarter-life crisis

This 24-year old stumbled upon description of this phenomenon while trying to figure out just where her life took the wrong turn. Thought it might be relevant considering the troper demographics.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10199724/Quarter-life-crisis-Find-me-a-twentysomething-who-isnt-having-one.html

According to the article a "Quarter-Life Crisis" (or "QLC") is a situation where a 20-something discovers that they are not making progress in (perhaps unrealistic) goals such as finding an enjoyable job that offers financial security; buying/building a home; having a relationship with an ideal partner, with plausible prospects of starting a family; and in general realising one's dreams. Instead of making progress in these fields they're unemployed or in a job they don't want to do for many years, single, and living with their parents or renting a flat they don't like.

Some questions:

• Do you think that such thing actually exists, or is it merely a coined expression and modern youngsters just have to toughen up (as many Cracked articles would say)
• If it does exist, then is it more prevalent now than it used to?
• If it does exist, then what are the main causes and what is the best way to handle it?

I'm not sure that it doesn't belong to the Millenials thread, but thought that the topic is distinct enough. If I am mistaken, I apologise (bows).

edited 25th Aug '13 6:48:20 AM by BestOf

I've added a definition of the QLC as described in the article. We would prefer if people could enter an OTC thread without having to click on links or watch videos in the OP, so when you start a thread with a source you should include a summary.

I'd say it really is a thing. Mostly because its quite common for us 20 somethings yto feel like abject failures for completely failing at all those things.

It's definitely there, although there's a mixture of true problems and a bit of a reality check to consider.

I find that the 20-somethings who went straight to college and didn't really ever have to be self-sufficient or have a major source of income often feel reality hit them like a brick wall after college. They get very overly optimistic and not very realistic expectations that now that the hard road of education is done with, they can just plop right down in whatever job it is that they want, and that it will be something they enjoy doing and that it will pay well.

I think all of us living in reality know this really isn't the case. And I totally get that it's one of the most stressful and shitty things to go through, not having a job, or having a really shitty job.

I think that's one of the things that we do need to be impressing on college students though, that when college is finished you aren't going to breath a sigh of relief and shit is going to get easier. College isn't the real world in the same way that high school isn't. Trying to financially maintain real independence as an adult, that's the real world, and it's really fucking hard. If High School is Easy Mode, then College is Normal Mode and Real Life is Hardcore Mode. That's what we need our youth to be mentally preparing for and getting their ducks in a row for. Unless you are resoundingly lucky, you aren't going to pop right out of college and into a good job making good money, especially if you have no job experience or transportation.

Shit, I'm back in the fold now after my own journeys in the private sector, and it sucked. I'm in my late 20's now, so I guess I'm at the end of the curve that most of this forum is currently going through, or about to go through. Humans will always find something to stress out about, so the stress doesn't end when you get that job either. Then you start prioritizing other things. Suddenly I start thinking shit like "Oh geez, I have all the money I need and a stable career, OH SHIT DO I WANT KIDS? AM I GOING TO DIE ALONE? MUST. FIND. MATE. MY TIME IS RUNNING OUT!" and a myriad of other things. But eventually you do need to sit back and realize, life isn't over at 30. You don't just fall over dead with an announcer telling you that you got a game over if you reach 30 and don't have your entire life planned out, start to finish.

And this is one of the advantages of working in the career that I do. Most of the folks I work with are older than me. So in around 8 years of military service, I've got to see people I know go through this and reach 30, I've got to talk to people in their late 30's who've gone through this who are my friends, and hell, I've seen some of my buddies in the unit completely restructure their lives at 40. Most of the folks I know who are 30? They're still just as unstable as me when it comes to their situation, very few of the people I know have a completely stable life with calm waters on a regular basis. They're dealing with employment issues at times, relationship struggles, the works.

I talked to my girlfriend about this last night actually. She's 30, and after getting her degree she spent 6 years on active duty just feeling lost. Work was everything, and while she was building a great career and traveling around the world, it was killing her. She got out and just showed up in LA off active duty and in the reserves, without much in the way of a plan or a job. She's got a job now that pays ok, but looks like the company may imminently go under so she's looking for another one. She pretty much started rebuilding her entire life at 29, and it scares her to death.

I have to partially disagree. Just partially. I believe part of a quarter-life crisis for post-grads is professional stagnation, which leads to feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness.

I've worked with many people on campus who are unbearably sheltered, and it's true that they get a hard reality check when the student loans come piling in and party time is over. More young grads are having to realize that their degree is not going to net them a six-figure salary.

My major reservations to your posts are that there are more and more college students working part-time and even full-time in their younger years, not for luxuries, but to make advanced payments on loans and to pay rent and utilities. So, I'd say there are plenty of college students who are very much in "Hard Mode" reality. And I do have to nitpick a teeny bit in saying that the military pays for your training, food and shelter, however meager it may be at times. Although I do recall your saying that you went several months without pay due to a human resources error, which seems to be inexcusably common in the military.

I have noticed that military types under 30 are experiencing a certain slowness in their lives. Those who joined the military during the opening phases of the War On Terror pretty much had to hit the ground running, so they don't see the world quite the way civilians do. When you've served on two fronts in the Middle East and you've acclimated to a high-intensity environment, it probably feels awkward and dull to be in your late twenties and just kind of meandering through the final days of your second enlistment. Several of my colleagues reenlisted after about 23 or 24 just to escape the boredom of civilian life. That seems to be a quarter-life crisis all on its own.

When I say "stagnation", what I mean is that these people in their late twenties completed their degree program after years of doing relatively menial part-time work, and they're still doing relatively menial part-time work despite having fairly lucrative degrees. It's not just the artzy-fartzy types who are underemployed. Business, math and science degree holders are also getting hit hard, and I'm seeing a trend similar to 40 and 50-somethings in that 26, 27 and 28-year-olds do impulsive things like marry a person they've only known for a month or travel to some exotic country despite not having the money for it. It's like the older guys who buy Harleys and date blondes half their age. You lose that spark, and when 30 is right around the corner, there exists a lingering thought that you haven't gotten the best mileage out of your life.

Our attitudes toward work ethic and luxuries is forcibly changing, which may partly explain the quarter-life crisis. A couple of decades ago, you could be in your late twenties and more or less be on the way to a decent-paying career and starting a family. With various nations' economies in shambles and student loan debt piling up, many young people are being emotionally drained by the drudgery of poor upward mobility and simply not doing what they said they were going to do when they were teens.

As it was discussed in the thread on millennials, I think our society is often exaggerating how naive and unrealistic our generation is. When I earned my degrees, I wasn't expecting to be a billionaire, and like most other post-grads, I figured I'd at least make enough to cover basic expenses. But because I'm not making ends meet, I have these occasional urges to just say "screw it, I'm selling my stuff and going to visit Country X" because it's on my bucket list. Part of those bucket list ambitions are rooted in this increasingly apparent fact that we are going to die one day, and because of our current economic woes (this rat race going on in the job markets right now), this is hitting current twenty-somethings a bit harder than it has hit previous generations.

edited 25th Aug '13 12:48:54 PM by Aprilla

That's an excellent post on the matter. I know i get this vague sense of panic that if I don't get my life rolling soon, i'm just going to completely stagnate and never go anywhere. This is part of why i'm looking at the military. My current qualifications would make me valuable to them, and qualifications they would give me would be hugely valuable to me, but it feels almost as important that they would rip me out of the rut my life has become, so fixing both present and future problems.

At the same time, of course, i rather don't want to leave my comfort zone, but it feels like if i have to, i just need to go whole-hog.

The clock doesn't stop ticking just because it's a down market.

/ Yes Barky your attitude comes across as a bit grating. No one expected to leave school and be crowned God Emperor For Life. Sure people had unrealistic expectations about their life goals but you could realistically expect to be able to pay the bills. It's not some lofty entitled ambition to want to be able to keep a roof over your head. So when you have trouble doing that I think you can understand the frustration of young people have now a days.

edited 25th Aug '13 6:20:40 PM by joeyjojo

Nowadays? It's not entirely new. My mid-twenties were somewhat over half my lifetime ago, (before a fair number of you were even a gleam in your momma's or daddy's eye, probably) and it occurred even back then. College graduation addresses were full of "You may think that the world is your oyster, that your dreams and ambitions are out the for the taking, ... well, they're out there, but you won't be just reaching out and picking them up. You're going to have to work for them. Those oysters are in pretty deep water."

It was somewhat different; "entry-level jobs" were still widely available, and there were fewer companies who were looking for so-called 'entry-level' workers with three years of experience"; or if they were, they were mostly looking for general work experience— they wanted to know that you could meet a work schedule, that you understood that "I didn't feel like coming in today wasn't an excuse to blow off work (the way you could get away with blowing off class (sometimes). Basically, they wanted to know that you had a good idea of what holding a job meant.

I'm having it fucking hard and I'm depressed every day about it. I feel like I've failed at everything and nothing I do will work out at all.

edited 25th Aug '13 7:03:07 PM by Thorn14

The part that I'm disapproving of are the students who act surprised when they discover these things out of college. It seems fairly simple to me. I just really hate to hear recent grads bitch and complain when they are being really picky about jobs. "Oh I don't think I can do that type of work..." "Oh I don't think that job is the right fit for me.." "Oh I don't think I would enjoy that job."

No shit assclowns, that isn't the point of a job. If you can get those things, then frigging awesome! That's great! But that isn't the point of working, the point of working is to keep a roof over your head. I feel like there are a lot of grads out there who are perpetually unemployed not just because of our shitty economy, but because they are only applying for jobs that they want, when the reality is that they just need any job that will keep them afloat for the time being. Like they skip out on jobs that they have a shot at because they don't want to do it, so they don't even apply. Then they complain when they aren't trying as hard as they could. I'm not saying I'm frowning on the fact that a college grad skipped on Mc Donalds, I'm talking about not shotgunning resumes out to every single job out there that looks like you could land it which pays enough to try and support yourself.

I see that shit all the time in the Jobs thread here in OTC. I've ranted about it enough to where I've just stopped doing it. When I lost my state job before I came back to being active duty military, I was a fucking mall cop for a year and a half. I didn't go "Oh boy! That sounds like it might not be so bad!" it was more like "Hey, I need a job and think I can get this job, so I'm going to apply for it." And that job was degrading, shitty, and with a horrible company(Allied Barton) but it kept me fed, which is the reason we work in the first place.

Now obviously any college student who thinks they can take out a mortgage within a year of getting out of college is a fool, and I don't think you're disagreeing there that some folks have really unrealistic expectations, but there's a difference between being poor and being well off. It was years before I would consider myself "well off", which honestly was until recently when I came up in rank and came back to the military fold completely instead of just as a guardsman. It took years of struggling and a few shitty jobs and a stretch on unemployment before I got where I am.

What I'm basically saying is, yes college grads, you're probably going to still be on the starving college student diet for a while after college. You don't just hop into a job that pays enough to where you aren't going to struggle financially at all. I spent years of having to play financially catch-up with bills being late and barely having any cash to live on. I'm not terribly sympathetic that college kids end up in that same boat despite having a degree. College students are essentially facing the same problems that kids who went straight into the workforce and didn't go for college are dealing with, the only difference is the college kids seem way more surprised about it than the folks who went straight for the workforce and have been trying to use experience to pad their resume over education.(both of which have pro's and con's, I think we all know that experience and education open a lot of their own separate doors)

It doesn't help that we were constantly taught "Get a college degree in what you want and you can have a career you love!"

College also doesn't prepare anyone for real life. So what the fuck can grads even do?

edited 25th Aug '13 7:15:41 PM by Thorn14

I'm Sorry bro. I really am.

I think I get where your coming from. But I take issue with your image of College kids as slackers and pampered. Many of them they played by the rules and studied and work hard to get their degrees and are now financially worse off than someone who got a enter level job out of high school because of it.

It doesn't help when some talents are considered by many to be worthless. My strongest point is my imagination. Unfortunately, imagination is really not what most companies are looking for. And it's not really useful for coming up with new ways of doing something.

Our generation should have been taught that what matters the most is money. If you have money. You can live a good life. If not, you are fucked. So don't learn what makes you happy, learn what makes you the most possible money.

And what if you end up doing something that makes you completely miserable? Yes, don't turn down a good job because it isn't what you love, but don't avoid what you love because you can't be rich off it.

edited 25th Aug '13 7:40:55 PM by Zendervai

Barkey keeps saying that he's talking about some college students - not all of them. He has a bit more nuance that you would think from some of the replies he gets.

I would recommend to every student who can afford it (even if it means applying for student benefits/welfare/whatever) to try to live on their own while they're studying. I know it's not as convenient as living with your parents but it really does teach you stuff about independence and responsibility, and if those lessons don't seem worth the fuss to you maybe you'll find some things about living on your own enjoyable - such as the aforementioned independence and perhaps solitude.

Now, naturally, my experience doesn't compare to everybody. When I moved to live in a different city from my family for the first time I was 16 and desperate to get out because I had 5 little brothers and no privacy or time for myself at all. I had to get to a place where I could be an entire day on my own. So obviously my drive to become independent wasn't the same as most people but my point is that if you're motivated you can learn to live on your own and you probably will enjoy it when you're used to it.

Of course it goes without saying that many (most?) of the students living with their parents simply don't have the option to live on their own - they can't get support to pay the rent and/or they can't work while they're studying. Everything in this post is directed at the people who do have that option.

Of course I'm fortunate because I live in a welfare state so when I moved to live on my own I actually had enough money every month to survive. Not that I had lots of it - I depended on the student loan to cover rent and food and other basic living expenses. Now I'm carrying that debt and it's still accumulating but I think I'll be able to handle it if I can get a job within a year or so from graduating. (But that's beside the point.)

I guess what I was trying to say when I started this post is that you should look for opportunities to accumulate life experience - the skills that you need to get by on your own.

I don't want to sound like I'm suggesting that most young people don't have any of that experience or will to get it; again, I'm not talking to all of you. If you can live alone you should try it, is all I'm saying.

edited 25th Aug '13 7:46:12 PM by BestOf

Better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable.

The only school I can afford is a community college that I live 8 minutes away from. Soooo.... Its good advice but few can afford that shit (And I hear living in campuses are just money sinks anyway)

Also another thing I think my generation hasn't realized is how much competition there is now thanks to the global economy. I discovered a site where people ask for jobs for photoshop or design, sounds neat, till I discovered that every single "bid" were from people with 10-20 years of experience and even in completely different countries.

How the shit is a college grad supposed to compete with that?!

edited 25th Aug '13 7:49:46 PM by Thorn14

While it is true that much of this might have been avoided if young people made the "right" choices in their college years, the question remains as to what can a person do when they have already hit 25 and found out that they are not on the right track. This, I think, is the essence of the crisis - "It is too late now "

At least college grads have a degree. I can't count the number of office jobs that wouldn't even interview me because I didn't have one.

I guess you could say I'm suffering a QLC of sorts. I've just been sorta doing nothing for the last two years and don't really know what I should do. I'd really like to go back to school but all my college/uni friends are either switching majors/dropping out/can't find work and I don't see how I'd be much different.

It's something very erroneous that people need to stop saying to our youth. It isn't realistic.

And I really do get where you're coming from Thorn. There was a point in time where I wanted to go grab my dream job in between when I first got off active duty and when I came back and was working in the private sector. Eventually I was such a stressed out wreck from having no financial stability that my opinions shifted. I went from "I just want to find a place that values me where I enjoy myself!" to "I will slit throats if I have to to find a job that pays me well enough to be financially stable and has long term viability that I feel secure I'll be there indefinitely."

I got, and have stayed, very ruthless in that particular arena because of how horrible that desperation felt for me. I do enjoy what I do, but that wasn't the main priority. My main priority was that I would essentially do absolutely anything to have some sort of job that would pay my bills enough to where I was comfortable. It wasn't about surviving, it was about living. That was the goal. Surviving means you're scrabbling paycheck to paycheck, and barely managing to get your essentials taken care of. Living means you actually make enough to put some away, buy stuff for yourself, and take a vacation from time to time.

Surviving isn't hard, after a while you learn to knuckle down and make your money really stretch. But just surviving is miserable, and I figured my shit out and decided I would do anything to be employed in such a way to where I could actually start living. When I was doing security I was barely scratching by my rent, car payment, cell phone and gas, and as far as food goes I was stretching 20 bucks at the commissary on base for a week or two at a time, living off 39 cent cans of ravioli, corn beef hash, hormel chili, and top ramen. I was so absolutely miserable from that period of my life that I knuckled down and was determined to get somewhere where I wouldn't be poor, and ultra determined that I would be fiscally responsible in such a way that I would never be poor again.

And after grinding like that for 2-3 years, that's finally happening for me. I'm getting 4400 a month after taxes, and I just paid off my car and got the pink slip last week, so my insurance went down and my car payment is gone, and I'm going to be debt free in about 3 checks from now. After that I'm going to squirrel away cash until I have enough money in my savings account to prop myself up for a year if something really bad happens due to military cuts. I waded through a lot of shitty times and depression over that period of time, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. You just have to press on and push through it all, persistence really will win out in the end if you grind long enough and do your best to plan properly.

A friend of mine is going through this now. He works at Best Buy, doesn't make very much, and is having some major depression issues from it. My roomate asked me to tell him how I dealt with it, and I really didn't have any advice for him. I seriously just put one foot in front of the other for 3 years, with stubborn and defiant hope/faith that things would get better for me. There wasn't really a coping mechanism for it.

Just remember though, once financial burdens are eased up, all that does is give your mind more real estate to stress out about other things. Do your best not to fall into that trap. Once you aren't worried about your career, your brain will start worrying about things like falling in love, or buying a house, or starting a family, or traveling, etc. Don't fall into that pit, every time you take a step forward, you need to never stop thinking about and actively appreciating those steps. Never take that progress for granted and stress out on other shit.

edited 26th Aug '13 10:44:00 AM by Barkey

Didn't you get your nice new job from the help of a friend?

Because all too often I'm seeing the solution being "Know someone."

No, I just had to get my foot in the door.

In my particular case, I joined the Guard. I ended up in one of our full time guard positions for a while, then the state went broke again and me and two other people had to be let go because our positions were cut by the state. That's when I went on my 3 years of a mixture of private sector jobs, unemployment, and trying to volunteer for deployments or missions wherever possible to bring in extra cash.

Getting into a full time slot with a guard unit is often very competitive, especially in this economy because they are good jobs. When a new slot opened up, I went for it and competed against 6 other people, some of whom were also highly qualified, but I was chosen and essentially got my job back, although that happened after not being chosen for 4 subsequent slots. It took a few years of persistence to come back into the fold and it was highly competitive. I stuck around and stayed in the minds of my leadership by getting facetime at the base and coming by to use the gym, volunteering for absolutely every duty I could, and just generally hanging around whenever possible. I know that isn't quite the same situation as being assed out with no networking or connections, but it still did take quite a lot of work. One of the guys I beat out has a masters degree and is an MMA fighter, he's essentially one of the smartest and fittest of us all, and I'm surprised that they chose me over him.

During this process I also was beat out for a position in a Do D police department by someone with more experience than me, and I was about to be sent to the sheriffs department police academy and successfully had a slot as a deputy, but budget cuts hit and my position was taken away before I went to the academy, so I was assed out of those too.

The point is, you have to just be persistent. Keep grinding away at it and put one foot in front of the other, you have to keep that momentum going and never give up or just hit a slump and stop trying. If you keep punching that brick wall long enough, you'll eventually get through it, though proper planning and networking does speed that process up.

edited 26th Aug '13 11:43:22 AM by Barkey

Okay, a few thoughts on the article linked in the OP.

What immediately caught my eye was the curious category the Daily Telegraph put this article in. This is supposed to be about twentysomethings (clunky word, but English doesn't seem to have a better one) of both sexes, so why is it filed under "Women"? In fact, why is there a "Women" category at all?

It only gets more disturbing on further inspection. There is no accompanying "Men" section. Moreover, "Women" has subsections on "women's politics" and "women's business" (note the implication that these things are only relevant to a woman if they're about women specifically) as well as private life and parenting. The message? Men Are Generic, Women Are Special - and women should stay at home and worry about their own private little problems, while the men are out doing important stuff like "Finance", "Culture" and "Tech". I find this extremely sexist and patronising, and I'm a bit shocked that the Telegraph, supposedly a respected newspaper in a modern Northern European nation, gets away with it.

But I digress. Back on topic...

The single funniest line from the article itself has to be this snippet from a Damian Barr quote: 'Their parents didn't have to fight for their first job in a depressed global economy.' Excuse me? If you're 20-25 years old now, and your parents were 30 when you were born - a perfectly normal and reasonable age to have kids, methinks - your parents entered the labour market sometime in the early-to-mid-'80s. Was there a 'depressed global economy' then? Yes, yes there was. Did they 'fight for their first job'? Hell yes they did. My mum once showed me the hundreds and hundreds of applications she sent out after graduating, most of them for jobs that had very little to do with her chosen field (granted, her chosen field was sociology, but still).

Barr is probably confusing our parents' generation with the generation just before it - the baby boomers. This is the generation that came of age in the late '60s and early '70s, when the labour market was much easier and the welfare state was at its most generous. (It's also the generation that's going into retirement now, making pensions and healthcare harder and harder to fund). The period from 1945 to 1975 isn't referred to as les trente glorieuses for nothing, but by the time our parents even finished secondary school, it was long over.

Also, if the article is supposed to be about twentysomethings, then why on earth is the word 'mortgage' in there? Homeownership is something you can start thinking about when you're 35 (assuming you're in the lucky segment of the population that will ever be able to afford it at all - but hey, the article seems to be entirely about middle-class, university-educated people, so that's a pretty safe assumption). Until then, rent a flat and don't whine about it.

In general, I don't get what the concept of a "quarter-life crisis" is supposed to contribute to any discussion. What does it even mean? Reading the article, I get the impression that it's a very broad, and thus very vague, umbrella term for any kind of anxiety felt by people in their twenties: from legitimate worries about money and jobs to pure Wangst from people who don't have a thing to complain about. I don't think we need a word for that.

edited 27th Aug '13 4:51:51 AM by MidnightRambler

That's fairly common — even The Guardian has a "Women" section.

One reason is that mothers of twentysomethings are more likely to read it than fathers... in the editors' minds, that is.

edited 26th Aug '13 2:30:37 PM by Euodiachloris