What Do You Do About the Quarterlife Crisis?

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

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Hopefully, this book will help to change that perception. This book won't solve the quarterlife crisis, just as the hundreds of books on the midlife crisis won't make anybody any younger. But the first way to confront the quarterlife crisis is to acknowledge that there is one. We came up with some of the deepest questions that are plaguing twentysomethings-the questions that they ask themselves but do not ask each other and the types of inquiries that might have come up during one of those three A.M. philosophical discussions that were so common in college and so rare after graduation. Then we asked these questions to twentysomethings across the country. In this book, they share their uncertainties, their indecisiveness, and their failures-as well as their successes and how they achieved them. When other twentysomethings realize that the barrage of doubts they face on a regular basis is not that uncommon, maybe these limbo years will seem a bit less daunting.

The lack of psychological studies on relatively recent college graduates ties in to a larger problem for individuals in this age group: twentysomethings are virtually invisible in the marketplace. Perhaps one of the most noticeable differences between the midlife crisis and the quarterlife crisis is that, until now, no one had bothered to name and to address the twentysomething years as an often traumatic and wholly unrecognized difficult turning point in life. This lack of acknowledgment, of course, has simply fueled the quarterlife crisis into an even more difficult experience. Because graduates are not made aware that other graduates are experiencing the same cyclone of doubts, they doubt themselves to an even greater extent. Considering the fact that nearly every possible mental ailment, confusion, or inconvenience has a name now, from the well-established postpartum depression and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder to the lesser-known medical students' disorder and inanimate object phobia, we found it surprising that no one had yet come up with a name for the tough shift from student life to real life.

Our critics, once they surface, might counter that no one had named the quarterlife crisis because such a crisis does not exist. The reason we wrote this book is precisely because of that mind-set. Nearly all of the twentysomethings we spoke to believed that their identity crises were unusual, which only made them feel more isolated. But the funny thing was that all of them were going through pretty much the same experience.

One reason today's twentysomethings may feel so alone could be that it is so difficult to lump them together as a group. They do not have a strong, collectively shared historical moment that helped to define them and continues to shape their identity. The baby boomers had the Vietnam War and its aftermath, the Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches, and the civil rights movement. Americans older than the baby boomers had the Great Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War. Today's children and teenagers are the first generation to grow up in the Information Age, with computers as a necessity and the Internet as a primary method of communication. They also share the horror that schools simply are not safe anymore. What do twentysomethings have? They have the Challenger explosion, which was unquestionably a tragic event, but it did not leave a legacy that caused them to debate issues or shift principles. It was just sad. They have the Persian Gulf War, which seemed too distant, too minor to those who weren't fighting in it or who didn't personally know someone stationed in the Middle East. There were no protests or parades akin to the attention America devoted to the other major wars of the century. The death of Kurt Cobain may be the closest thing twentysomethings have to an event that gave them a collective sense of tragedy, of shared grief, of a historical mark that influenced all of their lives as a generation. But it didn't, really. It hurt, and it frustrated, and it angered, but it didn't draw twentysomethings together as one common unit. Nothing really has.

By now you will probably have noticed that we refer to the people who are prime targets for the quarterlife crisis as twentysomethings. We do this for two reasons. First of all, "quarterlifers" somehow just doesn't sound right-we don't call 40-to-60-year-olds "midlifers," and we certainly don't call centenarians "endlifers." Dude, that would just be mean. Second, the term that the public and the media most often use to describe this age range is "GenXers." People completely gloss over the fact that twentysomethings simply do not have the sense of collectivity that the boomers and the horrifically named younger "GenYers" supposedly share. Generation X was the name of Billy Idol's band and the title of a 1965 British self-help manual. For some reason, in 1991, Douglas Coupland used the term to describe twentysomethings in his book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Marketers pounced on the term, and suddenly the members of this thirteenth generation since the Pilgrims landed found the label Generation X affixed permanently to their backs. It stuck. But the phrase Generation X means absolutely nothing to the generation it is supposed to encompass. We are not going to refer to ourselves and our peers with a label that we do not understand. In our opinion, there are really only two things that apply to most twentysomethings: they are, obviously, the same age; and they tend to fall into crisis mode at this point in their lives.

We realize that this book at times may come across like a program on the Nature Channel: "Here we observe the twentysomething in its natural habitat. See it feed on Pop-Tarts and caffeine. Watch as it struggles to decide whether to return to its birthplace or strike out on its own." But for other generations, twentysomethings can be a bit of a mystery. That is why, while we are primarily gearing this book for twentysomethings, we are also writing it for the people who want to get a better grasp of what it is like to be a twentysomething today.

The twentysomethings in this book are a diverse crowd, from dozens of universities and dozens of geographical areas across the country. They are people who earned their undergraduate degrees some time during the past ten years. They come from a variety of ethnic, economic, moral, racial, and religious backgrounds. We intend this book to represent their voices, not as one collective expression, but rather as a collage of different voices that speak separately, yet largely come together. Currently, the twentysomething generation has no spokesperson, no one who represents the interests of recent graduates as a group. We are hoping that the twentysomethings in this book will emerge as a group of voices that can in some fashion, however vague, speak for all of us.

You might be reading this book because you yourself are a twentysomething who is in the midst of or has already experienced the quarterlife crisis. Or you might be a college or graduate student who is curious about this sometimes shattering shift and wants to prepare for the transition to come. Or maybe you are a concerned parent, friend, colleague, teacher, neighbor, or relative who merely wants to understand what it is like to be a twentysomething in the twenty-first century and how to help the twentysomethings you know ease into adulthood as smoothly as possible. Then again, perhaps you are the middle-aged Jim after all, complete with leather jacket and Miata, in which case you should probably pay particularly close attention so that you can better understand the mood swings of your brand new girlfriend.

© 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.