You're young, healthy and well-educated. You're supposed to be having
the time of your life. But a lot of that time is spent worrying about your
future. Your plans. Your career. Where are you going? Why aren't you happy?
You're awash in pangs of self-doubt and angst. Your
parents just don't
understand.
But a new book does. "Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in
your Twenties," by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, claims that today's
college-educated, middle-class twentysomethings in the United States
have it a lot tougher than one might think. Despite entering a job
market more robust than any in American history, despite — unlike their
parents and grandparents — missing the horror of being drafted into war,
despite being born into a country of unfathomable wealth, theirs is a crisis
of existential proportions (if not of
Sartre proportions, then at least of
"Sartre
for Beginners" proportions).
For instance, Robbins and Wilner give us Gabriella, a 1996 Oberlin grad who
was shocked to find the world outside college was not conforming to her
expectations. She sees life in her twenties as "an especially trying time in
life now, though, as everyone is going through the same questions, re-
evaluations, and worries. There seems to be no balance or center at times."
Gabriella's struggle is a testament to a tough
journey through a young, upwardly mobile life.
It's a wonder, though, that Robbins and Wilner left out other twentysomethings
going through their own quarterlife crises, such as
Sveta,
a 24-year-old Russian who is having a hard time balancing work —
road-side prostitution — with the questions, re-evaluations and worries
of her own twentysomething life, like AIDS and vicious pimps. "I'm very frightened about the
disease … A few years ago we hardly knew what AIDS was, and now we all know
someone who's infected."
Perhaps Sveta should read "Quarterlife Crisis" — then she might see that she
is not alone, that men and women her own age are going through the same sort
of self-examination right here in the United States. Like Helen, a 1997
University of Texas-Austin grad with a successful business career but also
existential doubts about her place in the world. "I got what I had zeroed in on.
And now I was wondering, what do I do next? There has to be a 'next.' There
has always been a 'next' in my life. After high school there was 'go to college,'
after college there was 'get a job,' and then in your job it was 'work hard
and get promoted.' So there I was, a twentysomething single, successful
marketing manager, wondering what in the world the next step should be for me.
I still haven't figured it out."
Helen's story would be a great comfort to
Felfiel Manhica, 22, of Mozambique.
When he was 12, he was kidnapped by rebels and forced to spend the next several
years killing innocent people. He finally escaped and made it home, but even
today he is unsure of what he will do with the rest of his life, because "I killed
people. I saw their faces when I hurt them."
Then there's the case of Penny, a 1999 Syracuse grad who moved to the "deserted
cornfields on the outskirts of Columbus" for a job, only to find the company
that had promised her work had abandoned her. Then things moved from bad to worse.
"Suddenly I wasn't moving on so well and started getting nostalgic," she said. "
My boyfriend was still in school in Syracuse, and I sure as hell didn't want to
continue the long-distance thing."
Penny's brush with the hard realities of life sets a good example for
José Miguel Larenas Mahn, whose arm was blown off when his truck hit a landmine
in Chile's Atacama Desert. José, like Penny, was abandoned, in his case by a
government that even threatened his life if he spoke too loudly about his
accident. Fortunately for José, he didn't have a girlfriend in a far-off city,
or else he would have faced the horrors of "the long-distance
thing" as well.
All sarcasm aside, even a quick read through the
copious excerpts
of "Quarterlife Crisis" makes one wonder which is more ridiculous: the book or
the people in it. The book is nothing to take seriously — relentlessly banal
prose and thunderstorm of anecdotes ring of the
many books in recent years outlining
every age group between 10 and 80, pigeonholing them into marketing niches
and "target demographics."
On the other hand, if the book is even half right in its thesis, if in all our
society's abundance twentysomethings really are facing a unique, existential crisis,
then things are even worse. Americans have never cared about the rest of the
world, and no one should expect modern 25-year-olds to be any different. Predictably,
the book and its authors are getting a lot of
coverage, further legitimating twentysomething whining. Face it
— if the Next Insanely Great Generation is
actually turning out to be the next Lost Generation, we're screwed.
More than likely, though, the really ridiculous part of "Quarterlife Crisis"
lies somewhere in between. There's nothing special about today's twentysomethings;
young people have always spent time trying to figure out their place in the world.
That's what life is all about. But "Quarterlife Crisis" only fuels a pernicious
tendency in modern American society, the urge to treat every attitude, every
opinion as a condition, a pathology or — egad! — a crisis,
which in turn needs the attention of analysts, researchers and "experts."
E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.
Qualms of the Quarterlife