If you are in your late teens or early 20s, you may or may not be having a crisis relating to your existence. Some of us go through it longer than others, some of us are fortunate enough to have something massive happen to us to get us out of it. Maybe it’s a lifelong journey, or maybe it’s a short-lived one. Either way, there are some surefire ways to tell:

1. You ask yourself who you are or why you're here at least five times a day.

This one’s pretty much a given. You can’t really utter the word without giving a thought to your existence.

2. You spend more time than is healthy on social media.

I’m sure we’ve all spent one too many hours scrolling through our Instagram feeds and comparing ourselves to bigshot stars and celebrities and wondering why our lives can’t be more like theirs. This habit, without a doubt, never ends up pretty and almost always leads to a downward spiral of wallowing in self-pity and doubting ourselves and questioning where we went wrong or where we’re going with our lives.

In fact, studies show that “Instagram is the most damaging social media platform when it comes to young people's mental health,” obviously for good reason. Being in bed and wishing we had this girl’s body or that guy’s car or the IG-famous couple’s love life is one of the most detrimental things we have been doing to ourselves since the very conception of technology. Simply put, we want what we can’t have. Even if we had all those things, a part of us would most likely still feel like something is missing; part of us will always be begging and beseeching for something more; part of us will never be fully gratified.

The point is to learn to be content with what we have so that we won’t feel that envy when it tiptoes into us from our timelines. Maybe then we’d feel better about ourselves, about our existence, and about our purpose in the world.

3. You drink a lot of coffee.

It may sound kind of odd, but doing this can be a grave sign that you’re facing a sense of loss of direction of your life and navigating through seemingly uncharted territory. According to Inc.,

• Now that we're over-stimulated and unable to calm down when we come home, we turn to depressants, like alcohol, sleeping pills, or anti-anxiety medication, to achieve balance…
• This back-and-forth between stimulant-induced anxiety and depressant-induced drowsiness places an enormous burden…

The correlation might not make immediate sense, but it’s known that relying on any stimulant or substance usually connotes that there is a much larger problem at hand. Like Inc. suggests, it would probably be for the best to just “choose moderation."

4. Your parents/guardians pester you about you're gonna be and what you're gonna do in life.

I think I’m speaking from personal experience here and for a lot of people like myself when I say parental pressure can be one of the biggest contributing factors to self-doubts, self-questioning, and overall low self-esteem. You don’t wanna feel like you’re a disappointment to your care providers, but all the energy and worrying they put into you pretty much does the job and ultimately crushes your entire spirit and sense of being. It can leave you feeling lost, alone, scared, and in crisis. But once upon a time, they had to go through all this, too, and figure out who they wanted to be to get to where they are today to have you to nag; they just don’t like to admit it.

5. You don’t want to be by yourself, but you don’t want to be with people, either.

There’s nothing that will drive you crazier than you yourself not even knowing what you want in life – that’s pretty much where we all are right now – but it can be especially bad when it comes to social situations. You don’t want to stay home all day, but you don’t want to go out. You don’t know what it is you want to do. These conflicting sides will eat at you until you start to feel like you’re losing it.

Am I an introvert? Am I an extrovert? Who even am I?

You probably didn’t have the full-on obsessive teenager experience if you never once freaked out about your Enneagram Test and how freakishly accurate it is. I remember going crazy my freshman year of high school when I was met with all these new faces and every one of them told me I was quiet, shy, and reserved when I always thought I was loud, courageous, and outgoing. It didn’t take me the whole year to realize I could easily be both, it just depended on the situation and my environment.

Who cares if sometimes you want to isolate yourself and other times you just want some company? Or if most of the time you can’t decide if you want either, both, or neither at all? I learned to tell those people off and get them to stop trying to define me because in the end, only I knew who I was – and no matter how many times in my life I’ve wondered who that person was – no person could ever tell me they know me better than I know myself.

What people say and how people feel about you at first, how crazy they make you feel for not knowing what you want in life will affect you, but as long as you know who you are and you’re comfortable with all the different layers you encompass under the different circumstances, it can’t get to you, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting so much and yet nothing at all, and I hope in knowing this you find some of the brunt of your crisis is lessened.

6. You prefer having or do have a small circle of friends.

Having a few friends by choice can be a huge indicator that you’re having an existential dilemma, at least for me. That “choice” usually stems from something much bigger, something like a myriad of trust issues that have transpired due to a history of being used and abused and mistreated by ex-friends and therefore made it difficult to ever get close to anyone else again, so you pretty much have no clue where you’ll end up or who you’ll end up with and have a whole compilation of fears about every single person you’re involved with now and every friendship and/or relationship you’re in now, rendering you afraid of essentially every bond you make.

Sound familiar? So now you’re at a point in life where all you want is to meet and surround yourself with like-minded individuals, but once again you also have absolutely no idea how to find them or where you’ll begin your search. All bringing you back to the million-dollar question: why am I here? Who are my true friends? Do I even have any? (Those are just some other ones, but if you find you’re asking yourself those questions a lot, I hate to tell ya, but…)

7. Your style and interests all over the place.

Luckily, that’s not so bad. And probably a lot more common than I’d reckon. But if your personality is set up anything like mine, again, it can be a challenge to meet people whose interests are compatible with more than just a couple of yours, and almost impossible finding at least one person who parallels all of yours.

I struggle myself to come across others that are just as multifaceted as myself, mainly because most people are usually so set in their ways and caught up in their own fixations with their minds so made up about things that they don’t want to learn to see it any other way and they shy away from the unknown. It’s rare that you meet people that are as open-minded, unstructured, nuanced, and exciting as you are, and that can be a little daunting when you’re the complete opposite of boring and basic.

Fitting in didn’t ever rank much importance to me, and generally I’ve always taken pride in standing out by being what I call a “wanderer” and I’ve never felt a need to label myself or fall under a certain category or stereotype, but not knowing your place in the world or where your home is or who you belong with can be unsettling and just plain, well… terrifying.

Yet still, I try to aim high and not think of my place as one where I have to settle for anything lesser or for anyone mediocre when I am anything but. It does great justice realizing the significance of pursuing great things and great people that complement you – not just parts of you, not just you in bits and pieces – all of you.

8. You’re just not the best decision-maker.

Either you’re indecisive as hell or you’re impulsive as hell, there is no in between. Let’s face it, making choices is not easy for you so you end up taking too much time or rushing it altogether. When you aren’t so sure of where each of the options in your worst-case scenarios will take you, you don’t even bother to question them, or you end up overanalyzing them completely.

This is a dead giveaway that someone’s either doing too much soul-searching or not giving enough of a crap about life to even care to anymore. The beautiful thing about “ugly” mistakes is that they’re still yours to pull lessons from, even if they were made at a time of uncertainty or out of irrationality. You’ve still got a lifetime to sort out how to go about making the big decisions, and yes, a lifetime is long and scary, but maybe you’ll find learning a lot along the way is one of the biggest motives to keep on keepin’ on.

The great thing is, you’re here for a reason. You may not know what that is just yet, and you don’t have to. Most of us – if not all – are still searching. Just know that it’s out there and it’s calling your name. After all, it was Kierkegaard – the father of existentialism himself – who said, “life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Stop trying to solve it, go out and start experiencing it.