Yes, it is a thing.
I recently can be found constantly talking about how I’m in the midst of a quarter-life crisis. My friends laugh at this and claim there is no such thing, but I am writing this because I believe, there is indeed such a thing as a quarter life crisis, and most of us are probably going through it.
I decided to turn to my dear friend Google to see if quarter-life crisis was a real thing, to my friend’s surprise, it is. Google defines says “The quarterlife crisis is a period of life usually ranging from the early twenties to the mid thirties, in which a person begins to feel doubtful about their own lives, brought on by the stress of becoming an adult. The term was coined by analogy with midlife crisis.”
In our 20’s we are struggling to figure out who exactly we are, and who we want to be. We are old enough to realize the type of person we may be, but are starting to question if this is who we want to be. Our eyes are suddenly opened to the reality that we are entering adult hood, and that is quite frightening.
We are also trapped into a field of study. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has questions their major at least 5 times, thought about switching but realized the hassle of that wasn’t worth it. Than we start to question how the heck whatever we are majoring in will help us get a career, and if that job is even something we want to be doing for the rest of our lives. We’re imagining our lives 10 years from now and realize we really don’t want to be stuck with a job we hate.
On top of questioning our career path, we start questioning basically everything in life. Our friends, our goals in life and where we want to be in 5 years.
You also are in the difficult time period where you have to have experience to get the jobs and internships you want, but you don’t have any experience, because every place wants you to have experience. But how are we supposed to gain experience, if nobody wants to hire us because we have none?!
You know you’re going through this time when your friend group is shrinking. In High School you had 15+ friends, freshman year of college you were basically friends with the entire floor in your dorm. Now we are lucky if we can name a handful of good friends.
You start to realize more about your older family members than you ever did before. For example, a boy breaks your heart and you think to yourself “ah, this is why my aunt has been single for so long, and has no intention of ever getting married.”
We have to cook for ourselves, do our own laundry, work 4 jobs and succeed in classes. We are trying to manage a social life and having fun with your friends on top of the immense work overloud, studying for exams and being on the Eboard of clubs. Because, you know, that looks good on a resume.
But we will get through this quarter life crisis.
We are still young. We are only in our 20’s and we don’t need to have it all figured out yet. As a matter of fact, we may never have it all figured out, and that’s ok. We all just need to take it one step at a time, stick it out and we will come out better than ever.
