Quarterlife Crisis — The Crisis of Too Many Paths

Quarterlife crisis is the name given to the upheaval that befalls many people between their mid-twenties and mid-thirties, and hardly a word could be more misleading. It sounds like a smaller forerunner of the midlife crisis, like a premature fit of doubt that one ought not yet to be able to afford at this age. But what happens here is not a midlife brought forward. It is a crisis of its own, with its own logic, at a threshold of life all its own.

You have done what there was to do. Education, a first job, perhaps a relationship, perhaps a place of your own. From the outside it looks like a successful start. And yet there sits a feeling that cannot be shaken off: the life you are now living is not the life you pictured for yourself when you imagined being grown up. Between the imagined and the actual adult life a gap has opened, and in that gap lives a quiet, persistent unease.

#Not too little, but too much

The common reading goes: this generation has it hard, conditions are insecure, the prospects narrow. There may be something to that, but it misses the heart of the matter. The real burden of early adulthood is not the lack of possibilities but their abundance.

Whoever looks out at the world at twenty-five sees an almost endless number of paths. Every place on earth seems reachable, every profession learnable, every form of life conceivable. This breadth is regarded as a gift, and it is one. But it has a reverse side that is rarely spoken of: an endless number of possibilities is paralysing. As long as everything is open, nothing is real. The promise of being able to become anything tips over into the fear of choosing the wrong thing and thereby losing all the rest.

Schopenhauer described the young person’s gaze precisely. At the beginning of life, he writes, one sees a long future ahead, and at its end a long past behind. The young person stands before time as before an immeasurable expanse. What Schopenhauer noted merely as a difference between the ages of life has today been condensed into a crisis, because the culture has stretched this open expanse to the immeasurable.

#The counterpart to midlife

It is worth setting this crisis beside its better-known sister. In the midlife crisis, which knocks between forty and fifty-five, the matter is one of letting go: the first half of life has been lived, the roles have been filled out, and the question arises of what remained unlived in the service of others. There a person stands before a work that is finished and yet does not fulfil them.

In the quarterlife crisis a person stands before the opposite. Here the first half of life is not exhausted but not yet found at all. There is nothing to let go of, because nothing has yet been grasped. Where midlife asks whether what has been built will hold, early adulthood asks what there is to build in the first place. Both crises are steps in maturation, both belong to a person’s becoming, but they lie at opposite ends of the same movement.

It is precisely this distinction that guards against a misunderstanding. The quarterlife crisis is not the same as a crisis of meaning, in which neither the old answers nor new ones take hold. It is narrower in scope and bound to a stage of life: to the moment when a person notices for the first time that being grown up is not a ready-made form one grows into, but a task that falls to them.

#The first encounter with the finitude of choice

In early adulthood a person meets, for the first time in full sharpness, a truth they had until then been able to avoid: every decision excludes others. Whoever takes up this profession does not take up that one. Whoever lives here does not live there. Whoever commits lets the uncommitted go. Youth lives in the notion that everything is still possible and nothing is lost. Adulthood begins with the experience that every step is at the same time a renunciation.

This pain is hardly named in the culture. Instead there circulates the quiet imperative of “I really ought to already”: I really ought to already know what I want, to be further along already, to have arrived already. The comparison with others who seem to have found their way effortlessly sharpens the pressure. The measure by which a person takes their own measure is not their own life but a picture of how life at this age is supposed to look.

This picture is new. Earlier generations entered adult life earlier and with less choice. The extended youth, the open future, the almost boundless wealth of options are achievements of the past few decades. The quarterlife crisis is therefore not the failure of a generation but the maturation crisis of a stage of life that, in this concentrated form, hardly existed before. What feels like a personal failure is the fitting response of an awake person to a situation for which there are scarcely any practised answers.

#Transformation instead of solution

If the paralysis comes not from scarcity but from abundance, then no further piece of advice helps that enlarges the abundance. Weighing more options, taking more tests, writing more lists only drives the confusion further. What helps is a different approach to the question itself.

The I Ging, the ancient Book of Changes, thinks of becoming not as a choice between finished possibilities but as a transformation that has its own time. There is a moment in which a step is ripe, and one in which it is not yet. Wisdom consists in distinguishing the two, and it guides action just as much as forbearance. Not every indecision is weakness. Sometimes it is the right sense that something is not yet ready.

This touches on what I call the organic. One’s own path cannot be planned from a distance like a route on a map. It shows itself only in the walking. The true next step arises not from a will that forces a decision but from clarity about the situation one actually stands in. I remember an accompaniment in which a single sentence that was due took half a year before it could be spoken. What looked like hesitation was in truth a ripening. Only once the form had completed itself was the step possible.

Here too it becomes clear what being awake in this phase actually demands. Not the swiftest commitment, but judgement: the ability to recognise, amid the wealth of paths, what is really the case here and what follows from it for one’s own action. Judgement is not the same as an opinion about what one ought to do. It is the maturity to distinguish the essential from the loud and to trust one’s own perception more than the picture in one’s head.

#The first birth into one’s own life

In the end the quarterlife crisis can be understood as what it is in its essence: a birth. Not the repair of a defect, but the hard and rightful passage from a life that has fallen to one into a life one grasps as one’s own. Being grown up is not a wall one stands before but a threshold one passes through, and from the inside thresholds often feel like distress.

Carl Gustav Jung called the becoming of oneself individuation and saw in it the task of a whole life. Its first, ungainly step can fall in this age: the moment when a person stops retracing the lives of others and begins to ask after their own. That this step feels like a crisis is not a flaw in the process. It is the process.

Perhaps the beginning lies not in finding an answer to the question “Who do I want to be?” but in taking the question itself more seriously than the pressure to answer it at once. If you sense that your unease grows no smaller by weighing one more possibility, but rather by giving room to the question behind all possibilities, then a philosophical consultation may be the place where this room first stands open.

If this upheaval is right now not only questioning you but pressing you down, if the unease turns into lasting despair or hopelessness, then it belongs in other hands than those of philosophy. In acute distress you can reach, around the clock, the Telefonseelsorge in Germany at 0800 111 0 111 (free of charge, anonymous), and in an emergency the European emergency number 112. Philosophical accompaniment thinks alongside you; it does not replace medical or therapeutic help.

#Sources

• Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (1851), chapter “Vom Unterschiede der Lebensalter” — the young person sees a long, as yet unlived future ahead; the expanse of as yet unlived time as a basic trait of youth.
• Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter Band (1844) — on the relation of will, character, and the transformations of temperament over the course of the ages of life.
• Carl Gustav Jung, Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten (1928) — individuation as the lifelong process of becoming oneself, whose first steps fall in early adulthood.
• I Ging — Das Buch der Wandlungen (core layers ca. 1000 BC) — transformation as an event with its own time; wisdom as the distinction between the ripe and the unripe moment, between acting and not-acting.