Quarter-life crisis
The quarter-life crisis is a term, of recent coinage, applied to the period of life immediately following adolescence, usually beginning around age 24 and ending around 30.
Emotional aspects
Characteristics of this crisis are:
- confusion of identity
- insecurity regarding the near future
- insecurity regarding present accomplishments
- re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
- disappointment with one's job
- nostalgia for college life
- tendency to hold stronger opinions
- boredom with social interactions
- financially-rooted stress
These emotions and insecurities are not uncommon at this age, nor at any age in adult life. In the context of the quarter-life crisis, however, they occur shortly after a young person-- usually an educated professional, in this context-- enters the "real world". After the initial excitement of adult life and its responsibilities wears off, some individuals find themselves in a world of career stagnation and extreme insecurity.
As the emotional ups-and-downs of adolesence and college life subside, many in the quarter-life crisis experience a "graying" of emotion. While emotional interactions may be intense in a high school or college environment-- where everyone is roughly the same age and hormones are highly active-- these interactions become subtler and more private in adult life.
Furthermore, a contributing factor to this crisis may be the difficulty in adapting to a workplace environment. In college, professors' expectations are clearly given and students receive frequent feedback on their performance in their courses. By contrast, in a workplace environment, a person may be, for some time, completely unaware of a boss's displeasure with his performance, or of his colleagues' dislike for his personality. Office politics require interpersonal skills that are largely unnecessary for success in an educational setting. Emerging adults eventually learn these social skills, but this process-- sometimes compared to learning another language-- is often highly stressful.
Financial and social aspects
A primary cause of the stress associated with the "quarter-life crisis" is financial in nature. Real wages for most people have been dropping since the 1970s, and most professions have become highly competitive. Positions of relative security-- such as tenured positions at universities and "partner" status at law firms-- have dwindled in number. This, combined with excessive downsizing, means that many Americans will never experience occupational security in their lives, and this is doubly unlikely in young adulthood. Generation X was the first generation to meet this uncertain "New Economy" en masse.
The era when a professional career meant a life of occupational security-- thus allowing an individual to proceed to establish an "inner life"-- is coming to a crashing end. Financial professionals are often expected to spend upwards of 80 hours per week in the office, and people in the legal, medical, educational, and managerial professions may average more than 60. In most cases, these long hours are de facto involuntary, reflecting economic and social insecurity. While these ills plague adults at all ages, their worst victims are ambitious, unestablished young adults.
In The Cheating Culture, David Callahan illustrates that these ills of excessive competition and insecurity do not always end once one becomes established-- by being awarded tenure or "partner" status-- and therefore the "quarter-life crisis" may actually extend beyond young adulthood. Some measure of financial security-- which usually requires occupational security-- is necessary for psychological development. Some have theorized that insecurity in the "New Economy" will place many Americans in a state of, effectively, perpetual adolescence, and that the rampant and competitive consumerism of the 1990s and 2000s indicates that this is already taking place.
Other theories
Erik H. Erikson, who proposed eight crises that humans face during development, also proposed the existence of a life crisis occurring at this age. In his developmental theory, he proposed that human life is divided into eight stages, each with its own conflict that humans must resolve. The conflict he associated with young adulthood is the Intimacy vs. Isolation crisis. According to him, after establishing a personal identity in adolescence, young adults seek to form intense, usually romantic relationships with other people.
The version of the "quarter-life crisis" proposed by Erikson, then, is very different from the one that occurs in popular culture. Indeed, the pop-culture version of the "quarter-life crisis" contains more elements of the crisis Erickson associated with adolescence, Identity vs. Role-confusion, giving credence to the theory that late-20th century life, with its bizarre mix of extreme comfort and insecurity, is causing people to mature at a slower rate.
Popular culture
When I found him in Mill City that morning he had fallen on the beat and evil days that come to young guys in their middle twenties.
