Dedicated to all my twenty-something friends who have no idea where they are going and are enjoying every minute of “not knowing.”
“So what are the costs of stamps these days?” I asked a friend of mine at work. She started to laugh in my face. “Why, how old are you? Fifty?” she replied.
No, I’m 21 but I don’t really “act” my age. And I never want to.
I didn’t realize that my question was not stereotypical of someone my age. Why should I be nostalgic about the price of stamps? I have no reason to. But I do. I sometimes find myself acting older than my age or younger than what I really am.
I get a work-out just by climbing up three flights of stairs. Does that make me sixty, seventy, even eighty? Yet, I also will pause on Nickelodeon while I channel-surf if “Rugrats” is on and I can’t wait until the next installment of “Harry Potter” hits the big screen. I guess that puts me in the eight to 10-year-old category. However, when the weekend rolls around, I don’t want to be asleep at midnight; I’m ready to go out, have fun and enjoy the city. Perhaps that feeling puts me back into the 20-year-old subset. “Thank God,” says society. But I don’t agree with society’s image of age.
According to authors Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, a journalist and Website administrator who are in their twenties and wrote “Quarterlife Crisis: the Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties,” society has been tough on the twenty-somethings of our generation. Few realize our worries about the future including finding a job, maintaining adult relationships and managing finances. It is a frightening and uncertain time that leads us into post-graduation life that isn’t as carefree as it seems, it’s actually a depression. The authors do have a point, society does put a lot of pressure on our age group, yet I believe the pressure exists as we get older, no matter what the age. When we’re thirty, we’ll have our mid-life crisis and look back on those good ol’ college days. When we’re 40 everyone will be labeling us as the “over the hill” gang. The cycle continues and we’ll buy into the media’s perceptions of what is young until we’re senior citizens and say “the hell with society, we’re young!”
I discovered the book by accident and I thought Robbins and Wilner wrote the book just for me. There was a point during my junior year when I broke down and uttered the words: “I’m having a quarter-life crisis.” That was a pre-crisis about having a crisis and my parents didn’t buy it and said I was stressed. I got over it until this year when the pressure really kicks in. I know what I want to do but the road there is still pretty long and I feel as though I’m only driving 65 miles per hour and everyone else is going about 80.
When I met some friends from high school at a friend’s graduation over winter break, we all had the same question to ask each other: “So, what’s next?” We all responded, “Yeah, I really don’t know.” The ideas were all there, words like law school, Europe, internship and apartment floated around the room but no one really had a clue where they were going, but we liked the idea none of us had a real plan. We’re all in the same boat: degree in hand but no idea where to take it.
Society likes to tell us that we’re “getting up there,” that we should be focused on getting a job so we can get the high-rise apartment in the city, a fancy car and the house in the country and enjoy it when we’re 30. Around our twenties we’re also supposed to find Mr. or Miss Right, marry, have kids and attend our high school reunion so we can show them off. But what if we don’t stay with the so-called aging road the way society would like us to?
Sure, I don’t want to stop being a kid, a symptom of this crisis, nor do I want to sit around watching daytime television forever. I want to have a career and I feel like the next stage of life is going to begin and I welcome it. Why commit ourselves into the pre-quarter-life crisis stage when there’s no need to be feeling this way. We’ll miss college. We’ll miss bumping into people on campus whom you’ve known throughout the years. But there’s no reason to wallow in self-pity. If you want something, then go get it. We’re all confused and nothing will get easier even when we’re thirty, forty or fifty. We’re going to have new worries and life experiences that we’ll freak out about. Every year of our lives we’ll have a crisis that we eventually figure out and forget about.
Quarter-life crisis? Yeah right. Robbins and Wilner don’t fool me and they shouldn’t get to you either. We’re lucky to have received a great education and great experiences while at school. And there are more experiences to come. Life will gives us lemons, don’t just make lemonade, have a party while you’re at it.
– Comments for Afsha Bawany may be sent to [email protected].
