A couple of weeks before I turned 20 in May, I was hit with a sudden feeling of anxiety and helplessness. After two decades of frivolity and neglect, I was inexplicably forced to face the fear many of my peers had whispered about: the quarter-life crisis.

In comparison to our parents’ or even our grandparents’ generations, the quarter-life crisis is hitting us early. My grandmother was 19 when she married my grandfather, and they had their first son (my uncle) when my grandmother was 21. She continued to have four more kids in the span of 10 years. Before she was 35, my grandparents’ hub of two had expanded to a family of seven.

In her eyeweekly.com article, ‘Welcome to Your Quarterlife Crisis,’ Kate Carraway defines it as a recent phenomenon that has sprouted from an ‘unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction.’

Twenty-somethings are changing the realm of what society used to expect of us. No longer tied down to 9-to-5 jobs, monogamous relationships and a desire to settle down, the course of the quarter-life crisis has sped up. It has snowballed us into a stage in which we’ve prioritized the act of self-indulgence and uncertainty. Most undergrads would rather be unemployed than sit at a desk and slave away at a job they don’t love.

The quarter-life crisis has prompted us to examine and face the disintegration of our identities. All while trying to move forward in a society that prides itself on productivity and relentlessness.

‘The emotional tumult reported during, or remembered after, a Quarterlife Crisis has a scarily ineffable quality,’ Carraway writes. ‘This isolation and its private anxiety are pervasive, as is a longing for the way things were in the predictably structured eras of high school and college or university.’

Danielle Carrick, a senior photo illustration and economics major, believes she’s experiencing elements of a quarter-life crisis. ‘I’m apprehensive about my future and can’t picture where I’m going to be, where I want to be and where I should be,’ said Carrick, a staff photographer for The Daily Orange. ‘For the first time in all of my life, I can’t say where I’ll be. It’s nerve-racking.’

This sense of ‘life limbo’ is not unwarranted. Nurtured in an environment in which who we are is determined by our careers, the idea that we’re riding shotgun with no steering wheel is frightening. Our security blankets have been pulled out from under us. The reliance we had on our parents is quickly wasting away as we begin to dive into adulthood.

Or perhaps this whole construct of the quarter-life crisis is just a façade that every twenty-something must be forced to deal with. Maybe the lightning-speed technology, social networking and the ability to share our emotions with strangers make us feel more vulnerable to the ideology that this hint of ambiguity will continue to plague us for the rest of our lives.

Whether it’s real or not, the idea that we twenty-somethings are experiencing our version of a mid-life crisis is startling. But I think it’s important to recognize that there is an urgency to capture and hold on to the energy of youth. A fleeting sense of independence that can only be experienced in our twenties. 

Angela Hu is a junior magazine journalism and English and textual studies major. Her column appears weekly, and she can be reached at ajh01@syr.edu.

 

Published on November 10, 2010 at 12:00 pm