The twenty-something crisis is defined as “the state of simultaneously wishing to be old (and therefore taken seriously in steps along the career path), coupled with intermittent pangs for a quickly disappearing youth.” It is about trying to balance your need to have some alone “me” time and your want to go out, for days straight, with your friends and get wasted, showing that you are still the same person as you were in your college days.
They also call it the "Quarter-life Crisis." It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn't know and may not like. You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now. Suddenly change is bad, and you try and grasp onto the past because you already know what that was like. You find yourself judging more than usual because suddenly you realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and are constantly adding things to your list of what is acceptable and what isn't.
"The way I look at it is a transition to adulthood," said Abby Wilner (1), a 28-year-old who is working on a second book about her peers. "It's taking longer than ever today because of college loans, debt, competition for jobs, more and more people living at home with their parents, and people taking longer than ever to get married. This phase, this transition, is becoming a more tumultuous process."
Knowing that there are people out there dealing with the exact same thing that I am currently dealing with does help me understand that everything will be ok in the end. It makes me feel like I am not so strange for not knowing where my life is going, or what exactly it is that I want to do. Finding this crisis made it easier for me to find words to describe how I am feeling, taking me one step closer to be able to find images to portray such a thing.
1. # ^ Goldstein, Meredith (September 8, 2004). "The quarter-life crisis". The Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/09/08/the_quarter_life_crisis. Retrieved 2007-09-05.
2. Robbins, Alexandra; Wilner, Abby. Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. Tarcher, 2001. ISBN 1-585-42106-5
No comments:
Post a Comment