Attack of the Quarter Life Crisis

We've all heard of the mid-life crisis: balding head, bulbous gut, grey hairs, and the ever looming reality that you're not as young as you used to be... the fear that maybe you haven't done enough yet weighs down on you, or maybe you're running out of time to do the things that used to make you alive. This leads to the urge to buy an expensive car to impress a young 20-something blonde with similarly expensive plastic surgery. Horrifying.

Boy I hope that doesn't happen to me... I nearly have two arts degrees. I don't think I'll ever afford a fancy car.

But what about the quarter life crisis? The lesser known phenomenon occurs around the same time someone in their 20s is facing the 2nd half of their college/university degree or even scarier: GRADUATION!!! (Dramatic braawwwwwwrrrr). Everything's fine and then suddenly... everything stops.

And it hits: What am I doing? What am I really doing? Do I want this? HAS THIS BEEN A MISTAKE? DO I NEED TO MAKE DECISIONS NOW? Oh no! I'm GETTING OLDER! A few more years and all my dreams will be over and I'll be stuck doing whatever I'm doing! (Whatever that is!)

So then you stop mid-essay and get out your laptop and start blogging about a quarter life crisis in third-person...

The nagging feeling creeps into the back of your head. Something's wrong. How do I fix it? What do I even need to fix? Am I being productive enough? Are the things that I'm doing that are productive even what I want to do? It becomes difficult to understand if things are a waste or not. Not in an apathetic sense, but an unsure fear of the future brought on by the stress of responsibility.

Did our parents feel like this when they were our age? Are we faced with the multitude of choice and are overwhelmed with the reality of *dramatic chord* ADULTHOOD? (Did you really expect answers here? I'm 21. I don't know anything! I'm irresponsible, ignorant, vain, and fear job interviews more than death because let's face it... 21 year olds are immortal and we cannot die until age 30. 27 if we choose to be musicians) That alone cannot be it (unless it is it and I figured it out! Did I win the quarter life crisis? Can someone give me money so I can afford food?) because I do not believe that human motives and issues are so simplistic as to have one basic cause. See it'd be easy to blame the warm embrace of the internet that distracts us into a world of escapism and easy fixes, where we don't need to deal with the difficulties of day to day life because hey look a cat gif! Awwww! Reblog! But that's such a simplistic scapegoat and sounds like something our parents would say so naturally we have to disregard that. Truth is the future is scary and unsure and I believe we aren't failing at tackling it because of the safety net of easy-access endorphins supplied by the internet... I think a lot of us go on the internet a lot because we need something to escape from the uncertainty of adulthood for a while. Life doesn't go away because we have a Tumblr, life continues... just now we have cat gifs and an outlet to complain about how hard taxes and washing machines are. (WHY DO THEY HAVE SO MANY SETTINGS AND BUTTONS? I only ever use one for my clothes! What do I need the rest of these settings for!?)

I'm pretty sure I know what to do. I've been wanting to do it since I was 8. I just don't know how good I'll be at it or how to be more successful. I don't know if I'm trying hard enough to learn how to get better let alone working hard enough to reach my goals. I can't seem to shake the uneasy feeling that whatever I'm doing might be wrong. What if it's a mistake?

But come on... I'm 21. I can screw up. I can do poorly and fail because I have time to get up and try again. I have plenty of time to achieve my goals, I hope. I just need to reassure myself that it's OK to be unsure about things from time to time because I'll figure it out... my parents did. Your parents did. I hope. Did they? No? Oh. Awkward. Well someone's parents has it together so maybe one day we'll be some other worried 21 year old's friend's parents and we'll have it together by then. If we have kids that is... oh gosh I hope I don't start worrying about having kids.

*BRRAAAAAWWWWWWRRRR*

ADULTHOOD.

I need to save my fear of the future until I'm 45 when I'm really running out of time to achieve things. 45 is old. A few mores years left and that's it... all my dreams will be over and I'll be stuck doing whatever I'm doing! (Whatever that is!)

I hope Tumblr never dies.

I hope Tumblr never dies. I hope the servers stay active for generations to come, long after we are gone and forgotten. I hope the archives remain like a digital archaeological site and people come back to it to sift through the millions of pieces of information to see a glimpse of our generation growing up… Mingled between the homoerotic fanfiction and cat gifs are real life stories of millions of people out there blogging about heart ache, success, moving out, graduating, coming out, sending messages to strangers, creating things. I really want future generations to be able to look back on us. Not history, but us, as people, and from the extensive daily records of our lives come to know us better than the characters they love in books. We’re not just a faded daguerreotype to be pondered over by a curious collector. We are entire books without paper pages. Give it enough time and you will record more to your life than War and Peace.


Could you imagine someone out there falling in love with the memory of someone who died a hundred years ago because of their blog? That seems silly because it’s never happened before but think about it. The static words on a screen, the virtual memorial to your youth, being read by some lost teenager going through the same old problems of growing up and facing life just in a different time… We have these shared basic themes to experience: how to fit in, dealing with the transition to adulthood, being judged for our appearance and coming to terms with the fact that it doesn’t matter. These aren’t limited to our generation even if we don’t really think about our parents struggling with looking in a mirror at age 15…


They could go from the start and watch you grow, watch the progression of your life and get so attached to you and then… your blog ends. The last post has been made. They know you probably lived on past that, that you just moved onto some other website that they’ll never find and you might have spent decades being happy but at the same time… that’s it. That’s the end of the story you have lived and shared and it sinks in and it’ll hurt more than any fictional character because it’s real. You’re dead… you died years ago and it’s too late to send a reassuring message to tell you it’s OK, you’ll get past your problems eventually… They know, because they read on after 2013 and saw that one day you’re happy again, that the mirror doesn’t hurt to be near, that you find love, that you stopped needing those pills to get up in the morning… And after all that all that’s left is dust and words.


But you live on in the faint flickering light of a computer screen displaying the long neglected archives of the autobiography you wrote with words and images many many decades ago… a new way to be remembered.

I'd like to be remembered.

Advice for High School Students

Dear kids in high school right now...

I have some advice for you. Advice I really wish someone had told me when I was in high school because it is kinda super important. It is about the very point of high school. See right now you're probably procrastinating doing some kind of homework that involves polynomial equations (functions? Something?) or reading some bit of assigned literature you'd otherwise be enjoying if only you didn't have to think about it. And for what? None of this is going to be relevant to your future employment right? You're not learning important things like how to do taxes? Well... yes, true. But does that make it pointless? No.

OK so you are simultaneously blessed and cursed right now because you're in high school and that seems like a difficult concept to grasp but it is true. See you're in a golden period of your life where not doing something you don't want to do has no immediate consequences. I managed to avoid doing multiple assignments, hand things in late, and generally not put in effort for half of my high school life. It's possible to get by without actually engaging properly, and some of you probably feel like doing that. "This isn't immediately relevant or obviously to my future so I don't need to do it." If things are hard you can just scrape by, graduate, and forget everything you ever learned about coefficients and all that other weird maths hoo-hah. I know I can't remember a damn thing about anything number related...

But here's the thing, and I'm putting it as nicely as possible so don't get offended... shut up about it and just do the work.

You heard me. Yes, High school may seem pointless learning a bunch of standardised stuff you really don't care about but that is simply a lack of forethought. I did high school. I survived. I'm out of it now and kinda in the real world. Thing is, the very point of high school is to suck. Yes. High school is designed to suck. That may seem blatantly obvious to you but it sucking is only a means to an end not the end itself. Sucking has a purpose. You are going to be faced with a bunch of horrible, bland, boring, uninteresting, and seemingly pointless hoops and loops to jump through which you don't want to do... and the point is to shut up and do it anyway.

Because that's life. High school is a life simulator. Sure, one day you may just get your dream job and there won't be any hoops to jump through so much as casually stroll past once you get there but until then things will most likely suck. You are inevitably going to be faced with things you don't like, like a difficult essay for a University course you're doing. A course actually designed to get you what you want. The real world requires work and the work isn't always going to be fun.

The grand practical skill given to you by high school is not whatever they are teaching you in class (though one class might appeal to you) but the skill of sitting down and doing something regardless of how you feel about it. I love my University courses, I really do. they're interesting and wonderful and looking back I have certainly learned a lot that I will take with me to a future career... but at times it has been awful, dreadful, and dull and I had to do it anyway to continue onwards to the good stuff... and that is just part of life. If you sit around being entitled and thinking you can cruise through things later on because high school lets you then when you step out into the real world you'll trip and fall face first into the ground. You'll be behind and need to figure out how to catch up, to sit down and work for hours on end despite your problems with the task at hand.

They're teaching you how to study. They're teaching you how to work. If they cannot give you a passion for their subject than at the very least that is the gift you must take away from high school.

So next time your schoolwork sucks remember that it sucks for a reason... and do it anyway.