Mindful Ink

Another guest post! I’m quite fond of getting various points of view and new voices here at Scholastici.us, and this week Amy Brown offers us some advice on the Quarter-Life crisis. Having gone through one of these myself, I can speak to the veracity of her claims. Times, they are a-changin’, fast, and individuals are not always going to easily fall into the rolls that they were once supposed to. All I can offer here is: Hope Your Road is a Long One…

You suck. How many times has that thought crossed your mind? How many times have you had a sense that everyone is doing better than you are? I had a quarter-life crisis (QLC) when I turned 23. I work as a supervisor in a call center and I go to school full-time. When I had my 23rd birthday, I was unimpressed with my list of qualifications.

I couldn’t believe that I graduated from high school almost five years ago and still was only a sophomore in college. A guy I graduated with just finished his student teaching and is looking for an actual job as an art teacher now, another girl has her first job in a hospital as a nurse. I work in a job that requires a high school diploma.

After spending a few weeks in my crisis, I finally recovered and am now energized and excited to move on with my twenties. My quarter-life crisis began as unproductive and less meaningful than a bowl of Cheerios. Listening to my boyfriend tell me, “But look at all of the things you have done,” was not what I needed to hear. I needed a better how-to guide on navigating the quarter-life crisis. So, drawing from my own and others’ quarter-life crisis, here is a how-to on the quarter-life crisis:

Put Yourself on Autopilot

Put yourself on autopilot when your crisis hits. Go to work, to school, and go home. You don’t need to take on extra responsibility, but don’t go crazy and give up on your job just yet. Acting impulsively will magnify your QLC. If you are having a crisis related to your current lifestyle, losing that lifestyle financially will make a much bigger impact than the existential issues themselves.

If you are having the QLC, don’t make any kind of big decisions. Don’t buy a car, don’t move out of your apartment, don’t quit school, don’t quit your job. Despite the guidance given by all the productivity gurus, its okay to stop going to the gym for a while. It’s okay to watch House MD reruns and eat ice cream. Don’t let the impulses to do those things interrupt your actual life during this time, though.

Find a Muse

Find your inspiration for what you want to be. Don’t find a person to idolize, find a community. When my crisis hit, I started reading blogs of productivity gurus daily. I found Study Hacks (Cal Newport’s blog) after reading his book. I found Scholastici.us though Study Hacks, I found Lifehacker through Schlastici.us, I found HackCollege through Lifehacker. Read a book, read a magazine, read a blog. Find links; find other people that want to know the same things that you want to know. By subscribing to four RSS feeds, I really felt like there were so many other people out there that were in my situation. Knowing you’re not alone in the QLC endeavor is underrated.

On the converse of this, I also had a great example of what I didn’t want to be in my life. I had a group of friends that had all moved into a house together and were becoming a vortex of stagnation, triviality, and pollution. Seeing their situation gave me small ideas on what I didn’t want to turn into. I wanted to move forward, and I took a summer class. I wanted to be concerned about the bigger picture of my life, and I brainstormed all kinds of long-term goals. I hated their messy living quarters, and hired a cleaning lady.

Choose good models of what you want and don’t want. Both will give you ideas for your own life.

Don’t Run

Don’t run away from whatever thoughts you may be having about the QLC. It’s okay to tell people that you are having a quarter-life crisis. It’s become common. Give it credence. Admit that it’s really happening. By fighting internally, you’re only going to prolong it.

Tell people what you are thinking about. Tell them that you think you have a dead-end job, and that you will never have any of your past glory (whatever that may have been). Don’t try to go back to the past glory, but it’s okay to say it out loud. One day, I wrote down all of the things that I was annoyed with and couldn’t believe that I was concerned about them.

Don’t Ask Why, Ask What’s Next

In the early episodes of The West Wing, President Bartlet’s catch phrase is “What’s Next?” Try and think about where you could go from here and not why are you here. Focusing on the why brings up the past and makes the catch phrase “I should have…” Choose dates in the far future and decide where you’ll be those days. “I will be in graduate school in Chicago in four years… I will be picking up my kids from school in ten years…” By looking at what could be happening that far in the future, you create a reality about what’s important now.

Find a Short-Term Unachievable Goal

My favorite QLC story is that of my friend who is now a quasi-pro-wrestler. He had his quarter-life crisis when he turned 25 and couldn’t believe what hadn’t happened during the last ten years. He wasn’t in a band, he wasn’t in a really excellent job, and he wasn’t in any of the places he had wanted to be. His community was a group of pro-wrestlers from NWA Wisconsin. He got involved, started by practicing non-stop and refereeing matches, and set his goal to win a title his first year.

It’s been two years and he still hasn’t won a title. Ask him if he cares. It isn’t the destination, it’s the journey. My friend honestly loves being in the ring. Although his wrestling career has become a sidebar to everything else he’s doing now, it is what led him to where he is. Working towards that goal of the title is what pulled him out of his pit.

He set an unbelievably high goal that he wanted to attain during a short period of time. He didn’t wrestle in an actual match until three months after he started. The goal gave him a starting place for what he wanted to be the rest of his life. He didn’t wait for a sign, he didn’t give up when it took three months to get in the ring. He knew that wrestling would be the new centerpiece for his life and he followed it.

Adlai Stevenson once said, “We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.” Knowing where you’ve been is only the first step, knowing where you want to go is the second, but going there is the third. It doesn’t matter what comes after that, because at least you’ve done something.

Amy Brown is a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin - Marathon County (one of the two-year UW-Colleges), transferring to UW-Green Bay for the 2008-09 academic year. She is pursuing a dual major in Economics and Environmental Policy and Planning.

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advice, guest-blogger, lifehacks