Breaking into adulthood: one girl’s quarter-life crisis explained
There should be a disclaimer on everyone’s 18th birthday cake:
“Happy 18th! You are now semi-legal; You can make your own money, you can buy a house or a car, you can accumulate lifelong student loan debt, you can get married, but you can’t drink, not in North America at least. Warning — there will hereafter be recurring waves of anxiety regarding your competence and use in this world. Go forth!”
I wish some adults had elaborated, in a detailed memo, what they meant when they looked at our youthful, grumpy and hormonally acned faces and told us to appreciate being young, or that our problems were small and we didn’t really have anything to worry about.
Maybe they meant we should appreciate those things because all the privileges of adulthood like driving, drinking and no curfew are just coping mechanisms for the new, terrifying reality that you are now entirely in charge of how your life turns out.
Kurt Vonnegut is probably the only adult that also agrees they should all further explain themselves:
I began to define what adulthood meant to me for the first time soon after I started college. I realized what it is to take on the responsibility of your own life and it scared the s*** out of me. Life suddenly became something I had to make use of and the weight of that still paralyzes me at times. I grew up in the Middle East and spent quite a lot of time in North America before living there for five years during college and grad school. My entire ecosystem in both those places for all those years encouraged me to study, go to a good school and get a good job as early as possible so I could be as successful as the investments that allowed me those privileges.
Job snobbery, something eloquently and humorously discussed in a Ted talk by Alain de Botton (link below, check it out, he’s awesome), is at the core of this prevalent issue in our societies. The struggle many of us face between society’s drawn-out version of success and our own desires to feel fulfilled, leave us caught in a neverending cycle of “career anxiety.” By default, any sense of calm is stripped away from our day-to-day lives as we seek to accomplish much as possible while simultaneously showcasing it to everyone else.
De Botton interestingly points out that he believes the reason we allow ourselves to be consumed by career anxiety is for the emotional rewards it provides, not the materialistic ones — the rungs of the societal success ladder get sturdier with emotional support the more you achieve and attain.
And in our meritocratic society where anyone can become as successful as their efforts and hard-work, we have no one to blame but ourselves when we don’t turn out exactly as we thought we would.
So where do we find any relief? Well, since part of the problem is that nowadays, we tend to worship ourselves and other humans, rather than something transcendent, as we did in the past, De Botton explains, nature is often used to “escape from the human anthill.” I resonated with that. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sought the outdoors, not just for a physical breath of fresh air, but for an emotional breath of fresh air. Seeing the world in all its glory reminds me that I’m one single person in a much larger, more magnificent world and the knowledge that there is so much more space to live and breath and operate in, is a refuge.
Job snobbery is global and it’s out of hand. But last month, while traveling across picturesque New Zealand for the purpose of getting some emotional fresh air, I miraculously didn’t encounter it. Everyone I met and spoke to was on a working holiday visa, doing odd jobs to pay for their travel around the country.
No one asked me what I do, no one cared what my alma mater was. I wasn’t being gaged. Usually, I don’t like to talk to strangers, but since there was no pressure to impress them, I found myself speaking to everyone around me, constantly. Soaking up their energy and thrilled that there existed another part of this world that operates differently from mine. I even overheard a group of visiting American women, in their early 20s, talking about the same thing as we all walked into an elevator together in a hotel in Queenstown.
“It’s school and then a job in the States. No one tells you to travel,” one of the girls, who was wearing a bandana, said.
“Yeah, everyone here (New Zealand) is encouraged to see things and do things. It’s so different from back home,” her friend replied.
The girls sounded shocked as they processed this new lifestyle and slightly envious, as was I, as I raised my eyebrows and nodded my head in agreement from my corner of the elevator.
I don’t disregard any of the privileges I’ve been allowed. I’m grateful for all my schooling, the traveling it’s led to and the experiences that made me a responsible, accountable and independent adult. What I struggle with is how to use the tools I’ve been given to mold my own life, free of career anxiety and envy, instead of feeling like a fraud, carrying out the pre-approved blueprint that’ll ensure I don’t disappoint the ones that have helped me get this far.
At the time this deep thought was repeating and rephrasing itself in my brain — because, you know, redundancy of thoughts always leads to a solution, right? — the small elevator TV in my work building displayed this:
Thank you for validating my thoughts Elevator. I appreciate it. But I wasn’t sure whether to be happy that my thoughts were warranted or agitated that I was being fatefully shoved to step way outside my comfort zone and admit my own displeasure.
Most of the people I grew up around have like-minded parents. They grew up middle-class in wartime Lebanon or Syria and they were taught never to waste anything from food to tissues. But it also left them all with a natural desire to build a life that was stable and reliable, not contingent on politics or lost opportunities. So once they ventured out on their own, many of them worked hard and long to lift their families up and out of a world where they’d be stuck in a country if it was politically unstable. They wanted to give their kids the best educations and provide them with the consistency and safety in life that they didn’t get when they were their age. We owe them a lot.
But since we didn’t grow up the way they did, we crave some risk, we look for adventure and we don’t think a stable lifestyle is the be-all end-all.
That’s currently where I’m at. I deeply appreciate what I’ve been given while simultaneously searching for a way to live that’s exciting and new all to me. I can’t be the only one.
Parents forget that they didn’t take advice when they were our age either. We like to figure things out on our own too and part of that is exploring what could go wrong if we don’t make all the logical or rational decisions one could make in their 20’s. I want these years to be experimental. I don’t have many responsibilities yet or any dependents, so why shouldn’t I use that room to take chances on myself?
The answer comes from Kurt, “We don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.”
Breaking into adulthood: one girl’s quarter-life crisis explained
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