Am I having a Quarter-Life Crisis?

“Should I marry my girlfriend, or should I take that new job in another country?”

“Should I get another degree, or should I run away and live in the woods where no one will find me?”

“Is everything I’ve done up to this point a huge waste of time?”

“Am I successful, or am I the biggest screw-up ever???”

Sounds like a quarter-life crisis.

A “quarter-life crisis” typically refers to something we experience between the ages of 25 - 35. A cheeky companion term for “mid-life crisis,” it carries many of the same hallmarks: uncharacteristic behavior, questioning long-held values, becoming fearful of the future, and/or holding on to things from the past. Common symptoms include feelings of being "lost”, scared, lonely, or confused, particularly when you contemplate upcoming major life changes. 

This feeling of displacement and unease persists whether you “have it all,” or are just starting on a professional, educational, or romantic journey. Have you ever worried that you’re “not happy enough,” or “not making the most of what you have?” Similar to its middle aged counterpart, the quarter life crisis may be influenced by stressors like finances and societal expectations, but its origins are more existential than material. 

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What do you mean by “crisis” anyway?

Psychologist Erik Erikson was the first clinician to identify an “identity crisis” with a particular time of life. For Erikson, each person’s personality develops in eight defined stages, and that the “successful” completion of each stage led to the acquisition of a particular strength or virtue. “Failure” to complete a stage and acquire the desired development leads to an “unhealthy” personality unable to resolve future steps and crises. He described an “identity crisis” as particular to adolescence’s transition from childhood to adulthood. Faced with changing bodies and desires combined with growing awareness of others’ perceptions of them, teenagers reach a stage of crisis as they seek a stable conception of themselves. Essentially, they’re asking the question “who am I,” and experimenting with new friends, interests, and activities as a way to answer that question.

Contemporary psychologists critique Erikson’s model as limited, but while there are certainly nuances to our lives that the system doesn’t address, it does illustrate how the leadup to our adult lives is characterized by a series of adaptations:

• Trust vs. Mistrust: infancy, identifying and evaluating caregivers, “can I trust these people to help me?”
• Autonomy vs. Doubt: toddler, testing physical and social boundaries, “do I have the power to do xyz?”
• Initiative vs. Guilt: grade schooler, problem solving and learning from failure, “can I figure things out on my own?”
• Competence vs. Inferiority: middle schooler, meeting others’ standards of performance, “how do others’ skills and strengths compare to my own?”
• Identity vs. Exploration: highschooler, defining who you are through your values, actions, and social interactions, “who am I?”
• Intimacy vs. Isolation: college and early career, creating long term bonds with people, things, and employers, “who and what will be part of my life going forward?”

In Erikson’s model, the quarter-life crisis is associated with “Intimacy vs. Isolation,” which is highly relevant to real issues 20-somethings face. Which friends should I stay in touch with? Who should I be dating? Who do I want to live with? As we transition from youth to young adulthood, we typically enter deeper and deeper commitments to other people, both professional and personal: new jobs, additional degrees, maybe even marriage and/or family building. At the same time, as at every stage, we are caught between competing needs: the need for autonomy, and the need to assimilate into our surroundings; the need for freedom, and the need for security. The quarter-life crisis occurs when we feel stuck among these choices and competing needs, anxious that we will take the wrong course of action and trigger a lengthy series of consequences.

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What about the material world?

Let’s look at this from a completely different lens. The majority of U.S. adults lose their parents’ health insurance coverage at the age of 26. In a way, 25 is the last official year of “childhood” for contemporary Americans, at least financially. Graduates from a four-year college are typically 22/23 when they enter the workforce, and the race is on to find meaningful and lucrative employment before the support of our youth runs out. Initial payments on student loans are typically due six to nine months after graduation, so for the average college grad in our country, the rubber really hits the road by the time you’re 25. 

If you’re 25 now, your parents were your age over fifty years ago, depending how old they were when they had you. Our financial reality has shifted significantly since then.

• In 1980, the median home price in the U.S. was $150K in today’s money. Today, it’s over $404,000. 
• In 1980 the average age of a first time homeowner was 29; today it’s 38.
• In 1980, the median income for an individual was about $80,000 in today’s dollars. Today, it’s still about $80K.
• In 1980, a year at a typical university cost about $10,000 adjusted; today, it’s about $40,000. 

Beyond financial goals, social values are shifting in ways that reset the typical trajectory for someone who wants a family. According to current data, surveyed Americans believe the ideal marrying age is between 28 and 32, and medical professionals have traditionally considered 35 to be “advanced maternal age.” To many young adults, this is a highly compressed timeline to find a suitable life partner and secure enough capital to provide a stable childhood for their family. The number of women in the United States who are freezing their eggs rose 400% between 2012 when the practice became standard for fertility medicine, and 2020 when rates spiked during the pandemic. In 1980 the average age of a new parent was 23; now it’s 27.

All this is to say that young adults from every walk of life are experiencing a profound degree of stress that our parents and role models may not be prepared to relate to and help with. That can feel seriously debilitating. “Not only am I having a hard time, but the people I count on to tell me how to manage don’t seem to understand what I’m going through and can’t give me actionable advice.”

In short, adults are attaining the economic and social symbols of adulthood much later in life, and it’s making people feel weird, and our traditional support systems don’t seem to know what to do with us.

How can I navigate my quarter-life crisis?

To a large extent, the distress arising from a quarter-life crisis comes from feeling overwhelmed with choices about the future that have seemingly far-reaching consequences - if I don’t choose the right job I’ll be stuck in a dead end career; if I don’t live in the right neighborhood I’ll never meet my soulmate and will die alone. The following are useful attitudes and frameworks to support productive decision making, hopefully taking the pressure off and giving you more emotional resources to deal with stress.

1. Crisis 101: stop what you’re doing and assess the situation.

Sometimes it feels like we have to respond instantaneously to something to fix it, but that’s not always the case. As we have seen in news coverage of our world’s natural disasters, sometimes emergency workers have to pause and fully assess a situation before rushing in to help, because if they’re missing crucial information, their intervention might cause more harm than help. Imagine a rescue team venturing onto an unstable bridge to rescue someone accidentally breaking the bridge entirely with their body weight.

Hopefully your quarter-life crisis is not this high stakes in reality, even if it feels that way, but the advice is the same: take a pause to survey the situation. The stereotype of blowing your life savings on a souped up car during a mid-life crisis has its counterparts in the quarter-life crisis. Before you quit your job, move across the country, or end a long term relationship, check in honestly with how you’re feeling. Why do you want things to change?

Are you safe? If the answer is “no,” your instincts are telling you what you need to do. Just make sure you’re using every available support system to give yourself the best chance of success. If you are safe, that means you have time to sit and think before you make any big moves. Give yourself that time, because once again, you want to give yourself the best chance of success. What’s success? For this purpose let’s say “peace of mind,” as in the ability to sleep at night because you’re not caught up in endless anxiety and overthinking. There are certainly a lot of important choices to make and questions to answer in your twenties and thirties, but you will struggle to make good ones if your brain is constantly in a state of panic.

2. Avoid binary thinking whenever possible.

‍Many of us first encounter formal logic while preparing for standardized tests in highschool and beyond. When stumped by a multiple choice question, the best way to answer correctly is to eliminate the least likely answers first. This works when there’s only one right answer, but when is life so straightforward? When you think you only have two choices, there is often a third you haven’t thought of (or fourth, fifth). Using binaries like “good,” “bad,” “smart,” “dumb,” and so on makes value judgments around our choices that don’t help us evaluate them fairly. Sometimes choices are neither good nor bad. Instead of eliminating choices to find the one right answer, try treating all choices as equally possible and/or desirable. You might have an easier time seeing things as they are.

For example, you may love writing and want to make a career of it, but worry that you won’t make enough money doing it to support yourself. In this mindset, you may feel you have a choice between artistic poverty and mindless success. That’s truly a difficult choice to make…so why make it? It may very well be that you find a career that allows you to write and provides enough resources to keep you afloat, or that the “mindless” job you fear ends up being creatively fulfilling in other ways. If you can avoid the binary thinking around your choices, it may not feel like such a heart wrenching thing to make a simple decision.

The idea that you can make right and wrong choices about your path forward in life gives you, and life, very little credit. Think about the last twenty years or so -  how many unforeseen circumstances have overturned our day to day as we know it? From the housing bubble of the late aughts to the pandemic of the 2020s, our best efforts to predict and prepare have turned up half useful at best. We’re manifesting for a more peaceful next two decades, but the point is that agonizing over the perfection of long term plans doesn’t necessarily prepare you for what’s to come. Whatever you decide in the short term, you will have time to deal with the benefits or consequences.

3. Make yourself the main character.

Imagine there’s a book or a movie created about your life that starts ten years from now. What are you like? Who do you love? Where do you live? Focus on the result rather than the process. Instead of focusing on whether you make enough money, consider the quality of life you would ideally have - are you taking exotic vacations, adopting stray animals, or simply sitting in your favorite cafe having a pastry? Instead of focusing on what kind of person you date, consider how your ideal person would make you feel - do they laugh at your jokes, anticipate your needs, or stick up to your parents for you?

We’re emphasizing the product over the process to illustrate that there may be many roads you can take to become the ideal version of yourself. We may be so caught up in the process that we have lost sight of our destination, and that can push you into some unnecessarily desperate thought patterns. The fellowship you’re applying to, the dating app notification you're waiting for, the apartment you just put a bid on - all of these are possible entryways to a life that you want. They are not the only entryways.

How you feel at the end of a story doesn’t typically depend on the protagonist’s success in meeting their original goal. In the best stories, the hero grows and learns from their experiences, often until the original issue that motivated them seems simple to solve, or even irrelevant. This will happen to you one day, if it isn’t already happening. When faced with a difficult choice, don’t ask what you should do, or what others expect you to do. Ask what you would want your main character to do. Characters in our favorite stories often find themselves at a crossroads overcome with self doubt and with little idea of where to turn to next. When we’re rooting for them, what kinds of choices do we hope they’ll make? What would make us cheer them on? Seeing your life as a creative project rather than a rubric to be filled could infuse more joy into your decision making, and drive you to make choices that align with your values.

That’s all well and good, but what can I actually DO about this? I FEEL CRAZY.

Understandable. Good decision making  tactics don’t always leave us feeling zen. You may even be riddled with anxiety at this very moment and seeking escape from those feelings in any way possible. No reason to burn out. Get yourself into a more grounded state of mind - take a hot shower, eat something spicy, break a sweat. Once that’s done and you’re feeling a bit less panicked, consider this: you don’t have to run from those unpleasant feelings because, in a way, they’re a critical part of this time of your life. Typically we associate anxiety with negativity - it flares up when we feel unsafe, emotionally or physically. However, anxiety is also a message.

A big trigger for anxiety can be acting in conflict with our values. You may have felt this before, but perhaps not as intensely. That could be because this time of life is when we road test our values. Do we like the way we were raised to treat others now that we see how it makes others feel? Are we prioritizing something that makes us unhappy over something that makes us happy just because that’s what we’re used to doing? The things that make you most anxious right now could be connected to this kind of friction. Once you get the chance to recover from your most recent panic attack, literal or otherwise, investigate where your anxiety feels greatest - that’s where the work is. A few things that could move the process along:

• Visit or call an old friend. Reconnecting with someone who has known you for a long time can give you perspective on how far you’ve come. Family counts too, but if they see you often they may be less able to appreciate any dramatic changes you’ve undergone. Ask this person if they remember who you wanted to be when you grew up, or what your biggest dream was. Sometimes life takes us on a path to something we love, but we forget where we’re going somewhere in the middle.
• Go to a support group. Hearing from others who could be experiencing similar things can be validating and inspiring. Don’t compare - just identify. Even if the person sharing has better clothes or a cooler job than you, that doesn’t mean they can’t empathize deeply with what you’re going through and share useful advice. Vice versa, don’t discount those who have struggled or failed, because they have learned things you hopefully will never have to face, and can be the most valuable teachers of all.
• Check in with a therapist. Let them know how you’ve been feeling, what situations or thoughts trigger those feelings, and what it is that you want most out of life. They can help you get perspective on what you’re facing, identify areas where you can take action immediately, and give you permission to take your foot off the gas when something isn’t working well.

No matter what your worries are, the best thing about a quarter-life crisis is that it is time-bound. This isn’t the last time you’ll struggle to make decisions, battle anxiety, or question who you are, but it’s the last time you have to go through it fresh and with no experience. Getting yourself the help you need to handle what’s happening today will be a valuable experience as you continue forging your way forward and building new networks of support.