The truth of it occurs to me when I'm asked, "How are you?" and the answer comes out an unexpected stutter. "Twe-twenty four." A hitch. A pause. A flicker of "Holy shit. Really?" Can it really be 25 now? That is a milestone. But what does the stutter say? What does the quarter-life crisis mean?
Does it say, you're too young to be this old, too immature to be grown-up? Or does it say, yes, youth has passed. That you ARE somehow grown-up now. That it shows up not just in the stutter but in a myriad of other ways. That "search for sunrise," the effervescent 5am party child, has eluded your grasp and that mantle has been passed along to the next generation of wild-eyed youth, people born in... 1989? That you get tired quicker, wake up earlier without prodding, and notice little baby bulges that bunch up around your midsection when you sit down in a chair. That the hangovers come sharper and last longer. That the inexplicable rush of youth has passed, wasted on the young you can't exactly relate to anymore, not linearly as when you were 20 and flipped on MTV and just got it.
The quarter life crisis is realizing that downward slope, that great circling of the eventual drain from which no traveler returns. From age 20 on, you'll never look better, never be smarter, never have more energy to give the world and never have more freedom and less responsibility. It was that perfect moment of ineffable possibility and it has passed. If you were lucky you recorded it in memory somehow, not that you would have understood it at the time.
Youth flies by, age contemplates that. And the hardest thing to swallow at 25 is all the things you haven't done. No Grammy-winning album, no cure for cancer and AIDS. Which would be alright if it weren't for other 25 year olds -- your cohort -- doing it (well, maybe not the cancer/AIDS part) and proving by doing it that it can be done. That, I think, is what hits hardest at the quarter-life crisis, which, to be fair, is a fairly modern fabrication. I don't suppose in premodern society, pre-Enlightenment and pre-neoliberalism that you had this problem -- where you realize the curse of potential, the oppression of opportunity, and how ambition limits.
It is indeed neoliberalism that crushes the soul: the belief that your life, your destiny is in YOUR hands and what you make of it, what you become of it, is a success or failure shared by no other. That is the guilt of neoliberalism. How else does one make sense of this quarter life turning? Especially with the gift of coming of age in the most successful empire in history. Is 25 when you let the wild-eyed dreams slip away? Cash them in for more modest ones? And by letting go of that fight, that internal struggle, do you discover what's meaningful on the ground, around you, instead of in the clouds, in theory?
If fate taunts you with reality, do you accept? And does that make the next 50 years go easier?
serazio.
