Crisis Cycles

Facebook. Love it or hate it, it IS a way to stay connected and keep up with people. This week J1 posted this article on her wall, not because she's having an existential crisis herself (she's had hers already!), but because she's a culture-watcher, like her old man.

For those of you who hate to click through... (even though you should, at least for the lead cartoon), here's how it opens:

Welcome to Your Quarterlife Crisis

You can't make any decisions because you don't know what you want. And you don't know what you want because you don't know who you are. And you don't know who you are because you're allowed to be anyone you want. How messed up is that?


Imagine a day in the life of a couple you probably know. He’s 27 years old, and she’s 26. They wake up beside each other in his downtown bachelor apartment and have sex that neither of them particularly enjoys. They’ve been sort-of dating for a while now, but they’re not willing to commit to each other: he likes her, but doesn’t know if he always will. She can’t decide if she likes him more or less than the other two guys she’s sleeping with.

He bikes to work at an advertising agency, where he uses his master’s in English to proofread ad copy, and spends several hours reading music blogs and watching movie trailers, periodically Twittering updates about his workday to his 74 followers. He doesn’t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling with vermin most of the time that he’s there, so he has a plan to move to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school.

At her government job, she instant messages her friends and mostly ignores the report she’s drafting because she’s planning on quitting anyway — and has been planning to quit for about a year now. She spends her lunch hour buying boots that cost slightly more than her rent, then immediately regrets it.

He listlessly works through lunch, then goes to the bar after work to meet up with some university friends, where they talk about their jobs and make ironic jokes about other people. Back at home, he wonders why he feels so gross and empty after spending time with them, but it’s mostly better than being alone.

She walks to the house that she shares with three friends and spends a few more hours on celebrity gossip websites, then clicking through the Facebook photos of girls she knew in high school posing with their husbands and babies, simultaneously judging them and feeling a deep pit of jealousy, and a strange kind of loss. “When did this happen for them?” she wonders.

They both eventually fall asleep, late and alone, each of them wondering what it is that’s wrong with them that they can’t quite seem to understand.

*****

Um, yeah.

The article goes on to plumb the depths of the issue, with lots of real-life testimonies to twenty-something angst, and includes various coping resources in web links at the bottom. Oy.

While the formal study of the "Quarterlife Crisis" is new, I do remember having one of those, at about... oh, 27. :) As I recall it was something about leaving a dead-end job & going completely broke, in order to simultaneously go back to school for a career change AND adopt a kid - a new daughter (the aforementioned J1). Now that was a crisis, a real beauty.

Honestly, I think human beings tend to go through cycles of crisis, averaging about 13 years apart. Maybe if we took the Biblical concept of sabbaticals (a one-year break after every six) more seriously, we could avoid these. But I think that we push through the sabbatical, and then we sort of.. crash, then take a "forced" sabbatical, in terms of a life crisis and then some change. So, plus or minus a few years, here's how it goes through life:

Age 0 - Beginning Of Life crisis.
Age 13 - ok, who doesn't have a crisis in Middle school?
Age 26 - college/committment/direction crisis (see above)
Age 39 - 'Yikes! Almost 40?!? Where did my youth go?' crisis.
Age 52 - Let's not discuss this one, okay? It's still painful. :(
Age 65 - Retirement Crisis. Yes/No? When? Where? How?
Age 78 - Rocking Chair Crisis. How to stay vital?
Age 91 - End Of Life Crisis. Get your house in order, bud.
Age 104 - 'Woah. I'm still here?' crisis.


See what I mean?

Skip the angst and the self-help links. Take a year off, clear your head. Move somewhere exotic. Or at least different. Like Toronto! Or in a pinch... Des Moines.