October, my birth month, has always felt like the slowest and the fastest month of the year: the days go by quickly until the fact of becoming older hits me, and the subsequent days then pass me by in slow-motion as I begin reminiscing over the past days and weeks and months of my life. I revisit old journals, look through old pictures, listen to the songs and albums I was listening to during the months before. It's a month of nostalgia -- a time for me to take stock of who I am and who I've been. Birthdays, for me, have always been a celebration of the past, the future felt too uncertain for it to be otherwise.
I turned 25 this year and it's hit me like a truck. I'm more conscious of where I am in my life, the things time has taken from me forever, and the looming unknown of an open-ended future. It's become harder for me to suppress a deep uncertainty about the years and decades to come.
A core tradition of every birthday month is opening up old journals and reading through them. I read them with curiosity as if I were reading somebody else's worries and dreams. I have to make a conscious effort to remember that it was me who wrote those words. And yet it couldn't be anybody else: the same doubts about my future have been with me for most of my written life. My entries are filled with melancholy and hatred towards the way that time wilts vivid moments into faded memories. Journaling was a way for me to preserve those moments by plastering them, now dead, onto the page.
Looking back, I can see now that my anxiety was fed by a fear of having wasted my youth. This anxiety is really a collage of related worries about different aspects of my life, whether they are professional, romantic or otherwise. The uncertainty that comes with being young -- what kind of life to lead, what kind of people to surround oneself with, what kind of things to value -- led me to believe that nothing is certain. This void of certainty is what has bothered me for most of my life. The future was too ambiguous and I hated that.
I think that I'm just now reaping the fruits of living in that ambiguity. And though I still think the future's openness is unsettling, I can now see that the passage of time does bless us with a gift, which is not a truth but an instrument of it: hindsight, a blessing that only gets better with time.
Thank to this gift I came to understand that worries can only be confirmed or dismissed through action. This seems obvious in retrospect, but I promise you that for a long time my solution to worrying was to worry harder, to frantically make life-plans that I would soon after abandon. I can't count how many times my journal entries consisted of bullet-points detailing a new motivation, project or outlook for the next phase of my life. In the end I didn't stick to any of it. Time passed and all I could do was watch it fall through my hands like precious and wasted sand: this is how anxiety paralizes one into submission.
I also understood that my anxiety was a general anxiety felt by many other people my age. This realization may have come much later than it should have and I am not sure if I should blame myself for feeling I was alone. I had just assumed everybody else had stuff figured out so I didn't think to ask. While in college, conversations with family members and people older than me usually meant I had to answer the question of where I saw myself in five to ten years, what kind of career I'd like to have. These questions terrified me, so I came up with generic answers, answers I thought I believed but deep down didn't. I manufactured dreams that the other would approve of.
Now I know that if I had the courage to ask, my peers would have told me they felt a similar way. I look at people around me who are similar in age and I can recognize we're all still figuring stuff out even after college, contrary to expectations that after college things would be much more certain.
I've also come to understand that this feeling of uncertainty at 25 is markedly different from the so-called identity crises of high school and college. I think those are times where self-awareness hits us the hardest -- back then we were dealing with our most latent insecurities. Conscious of the future, sure, but in the end too obsessed with figuring out who we thought we were. I think it was much easier, back then, to find comfort in trying new things and engaging in a hectic roleplay of different versions of oneself. We were too busy growing to understand what was to come.
At 25, these worries become more sobering. It becomes harder to be ambiguous about what one is, what one wears, what one likes and hates. Maybe it's because we're now joining the general workforce, buying work clothes and learning to be a professional. Or maybe it's because we've learned important lessons from our late teens. We're conscious of so-called red flags and green flags in ourselves and others. Our beliefs, also, become a bit more rigid with experience. Our tastes begin to take a more concrete shape. If we were made of clay, one's mid twenties may be the time where some parts begin to harden, gaining definition at the cost of flexibility.
This is not to say that we suddenly stop growing. In fact it's the opposite. At least in my experience, I felt thrown into a world I thought I was not ready for: the world of careers, of worrying about long term financial goals, long term trajectories. I graduated college not long after the pandemic hit the United States. I knew that the job market would be hell, but nothing prepared me to deal with the often soulcrushing job search. Making a path for myself in this current state of affairs feels almost impossible unless I suddenly came across a lot of money.
I'm thankfully not alone in this feeling. The reason I began to write this piece was because I had found out that there was a name for this feeling: the quarter life crisis. And yes, it is a new concept to me. And yes, I live under a rock.
This crisis is really a bunch worries stacked up on top of one another, though this varies from person to person:
When I first came across this concept, my immediate reaction was one of relief. I had heard of people my age try to formally kick start their adulthood by moving out of their parents house. Most of my friends haven't done that yet, and some are still in an intersticial period. Some of us went on to grad school, some of us are working jobs, others a (mostly) cozy 9-5. It felt like we were planes stuck in a hangar, birds with their wings clipped.
But let's not wallow in self pity. Our generation has been accused of that many times at this point. The point is, I have a strong feeling that the ambiguity I feel about the future isn't entirely in my head -- there are widespread conditions affecting those in a similar position that I can point to as being complicit at best.
Some magazines and publications, which often miss the point of conversations between younger demographics, have characterized the concept as simply a case of wealthy and lazy young people who have not much else to do but worry. Some even pose this crisis as stemming from having too many options rather than too few. It's obvious to me that this is done to make our generation seem pampered and entitled, though I think there is some truth to the claim that we are faced with too many options. The thing is that this doesn't mean we are free to choose. Instead of the wide open fields these people imagine, sometimes our future in this world feels much more like a labyrinth.
I reject the claim (usually coming from older generations) that this is simply the aftershocks of the angsty phase that young people are infamous for. I think we're done with the frankly self-absorbed identity crisis around what online aesthetic to turn into one's personality. We've been there already, and I think we're past it. No, this is not simply a question of what people call "identity" -- a mere idea of oneself devoid of references to one's real, lived conditions. It's clear that what we are calling a quarter life crisis is a surrogate for the real anxieties stemming from the material conditions of most young people today. So, what are the material conditions of our youth? I'll be honest here and answer this question based on my own situation:
The economic realities outlined above have been explored much better elsewhere. But what is to be done? I think we should be cautious about how we give up strong feelings of discomfort about the world we inherit.
I'll be more direct: I fear that our valid political/social concerns as young people are sometimes undermined by politicians, family, bosses etc. (i.e older people, or people who sold out the dreams of their youth) precisely because of our youth, which is seen as inexperience and something to grow out of. I wonder if people much older than us simply project their own regrets about lost time onto younger people, and we are sometimes inclined to accept their projections as wisdom.
From my point of view, the older generation's complaint that young people having a quarter-life crisis is something to simply grow up from is based on the assumption that we are expending unnecessary energy worrying about the future and/or paralyzed because of a lack of direction. And what is an unnecessary expenditure of time if not the basis of wasted time? Haven't we all heard youth protests as simply young people kicking up a fuss? As if maturing meant an acknolwedgement that it is wasteful to be vocal about a particular issues?
I think everybody develops a sort of "common sense" with regards to what is wasted time and what isn't. However, we should be acutely aware that so-called common sense can lead us to overwrite what are otherwise valid social concerns, and that the "politics" of common sense can be used by those in positions of power to dismiss justified critiques -- this is no different than someone being told to be quiet and calm down as to not of disrupt a given status quo, whether it is a toxic family dynamic, offensive institutional practices or broader and normalized acts of systemic violence.
I say this to say that the "expenditure" of time is also subject to this same logic - we have been inculcated to believe a particular definition of time wasted -- a definition that is really an impossible expectation.
The question is, what can the discourse around the quarter life crisis tell us about the prevailing social definitions of wasted time?
Let's recap the discussion so far:
I, like many young people, feel a deep uncertainty about my future. This feeling becomes harder to ignore as you reach your mid-twenties. There's sufficient reason to believe that this uncertainty isn't just due to the openness of possibilities. In the contrary, the apparent multitude of choices hides the fact that we lack the basic foundations of a transition to adulthood: impossibly high cost of living, dire employment prospects, and lack of financial indepence. On the other hand, older generations often admonish us for enjoying an extended adolescence. Criticisms of a status quo that only benefits the wealthy are pushed aside, downplayed as youthful and conceited rebellion. We are pushed to think of careers, of spending time productively. Under the surface of this discourse is a socially accepted definition of the value of time. Without this definition, there would be no concept of wasted time, or in this case, wasted youth.
I think that interrogating time's inherent worth is the key for us to break out of the crisis, or at least to begin to see a way out of the labyrinth.
Where do we get a sense of time's worth? Who taught us what is time wasted or spent? Can time, like money, be wasted in superfluous things? If so, what defines superfluous in this context?
One way to answer this question:
Is the answer to these worries a boost in motivation and therefore productivity? In other words, if you are paralyzed by anxiety towards the looming future of adulthood, would it be enough to convince you that you are wasting precious time as a way to motivate you to act? Does worrying about the future inevitably mean that the solution is to "take action and just do"? Could it be that the older generations are right: a quarter life crisis is only solved by embracing the suck of life and growing up?
What if, in order to truly build a healthy relationship with the passage of time, and one's own personal development as a result, we must learn to disrespect the fleeting nature of time? In other words, to learn to live patiently and without hurry?
Implicit in the concept of wasting time is the point of view that time has inherent worth. I think capitalism has done its thing here -- naturalized a conception of time that is inextricably connected to production: "Time is money".
I think this is why so much self-help content online is geared towards redirecting people's willingness to be more active in their personal development through stuff like maximizing productivity, pursuing alternative income streams, and other pursuits whose appeal is entirely within the realm of "look how much time you are wasting while young -- learn to make money in your free time, it will make you better off in the long run".
To be clear, I am not advocating here for a conception of youth that shuns the benefits of long term planning, or in general, having a general sense of one's wishes and passions in life. But I do think that it is important to note that feelings of paralysis in our 20's does not mean that the solution is to embrace productivity with open arms.