Why Worry About a Quarterlife Crisis?

Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties
by Alexandra Robbins, Abby Wilner

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The whirlwind of new responsibilities, new liberties, and new choices can be entirely overwhelming for someone who has just emerged from the shelter of twenty years of schooling. We don't mean to make graduates sound as if they have been hibernating since they emerged from the womb; certainly it is not as if they have been slumbering throughout adolescence (though some probably tried). They have in a sense, however, been encased in a bit of a cocoon, where someone or something-parents or school, for example-has protected them from a lot of the scariness of their surroundings. As a result, when graduates are let loose into the world, their dreams and desires can be tinged with trepidation. They are hopeful, but at the same time they are also, to put it simply, scared silly.

Some might say that because people have had to deal with the rite of passage from youth to adulthood since the beginning of time, this crisis is not really a "crisis" at all, given that historically this transitional period has, at various times, been marked with ceremonial rituals involving things like spears and buffalo dung. Indeed, it may not always have been a crisis.

But it has become one.

Maybe it is because the career and financial opportunities for college graduates have skyrocketed in the past decade and, therefore, so has the pressure to succeed. Maybe it is because the crazy people out there who amuse themselves by going on shooting rampages seem to have proliferated in recent years, leaving young adults more fearful of entering into relationships with new friends, lovers, and roommates. Or maybe increasing competition from the rising millions of fellow students has left twentysomethings feeling like they have to work harder than ever to stand out from their peers. Whatever the reason, the quarterlife crisis poses enough of a threat to the well-being of many graduates-however well-adjusted they may be-that it has to be taken seriously. Here's why.

Although hope is a common emotion for twentysomethings, hopelessness has become just as widespread. The revelation that life simply isn't easy-a given for some twentysomethings, a mild inconvenience for others, but a shattering blow for several-is one of the most distressing aspects of the quarterlife crisis, particularly for individuals who do not have large support networks or who doubt themselves often. It is in these situations that the quarterlife crisis becomes not just a common stage-it can become hazardous. Not everyone at the age of the quarterlife encounters some sort of depression, which is why we relegate doubts and depression to only one chapter. But we are addressing depression as one common result of the quarterlife crisis here so that we can illustrate why it is so important to acknowledge this transition period.

After interviewing dozens of twentysomethings who said they were depressed because of the transition, we ran our conclusions by Robert DuPont, a Georgetown Medical School professor of psychology who wrote The Anxiety Cure. "Based on my experience," DuPont said, "I have found that there is a high rate of all forms of disorder in this age group, including addiction, anxiety, depression, and many other kinds of problems because of the high stress associated with the transition from being a child to being an adult. And that has gotten more stressful as the road map has become less used. The old way of doing this was to get out and get it done right away. There was an economic imperative to doing it. It's not like that anymore. And as the road map has disappeared, the stress has gone up. People have to invent their own road map. It used to be that it came with the college graduation. Now you have to go out and figure it out yourself."

These high rates of disorders, however, have gone virtually unacknowledged. That's why we can't bog you down with statistics on this age group. They don't exist. Psychological research on twentysomethings, including statistics on depression and suicide, has not been performed. We asked major national mental health associations such as the National Institutes of Mental Health, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association for any information they had on people in their twenties. They didn't have any. As one psychologist told us, associations don't cut the data to incorporate this age group. "It's not a subject that's interesting to them. They just lump everybody together," he said.

We can only speculate as to why there are no psychological studies on our age group:

• The public and the media largely ignore 21- to 35-year-olds as a generation.

• Because many twentysomethings cannot afford therapy, professionals do not have accurate and representative records of graduates' depression.

• Twentysomethings tend to attach a stigma to therapy-so they do not talk about it.

So we can't tell you the percentage of people who experience depression at some point during their twentysomething years. We can't tell you the likelihood that the transition from college to the real world will create such a jolt that a twentysomething will experience something more than the normal anxiety. And we can't tell you how many twentysomethings see therapists. All we can do in this book is provide you with our interview-based conclusions (lots, high, and many more than you think) and the stories of more than one hundred of the twentysomethings with whom we spoke.

© May 2001, J.P. Tarcher, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Alexandra Robbins, a contributing editor at Mademoiselle, is a journalist who has written for such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Salon, and Time Digital.

Abby Wilner works in the information technology field as a website administrator and lives in Washington, D.C.