David McRaney  |  Journalist

Our quarter-life crisis

I’m 28 years old, and I still like cartoons. I’m part of a growing phenomenon in America and most of the Western world.

We are part of a generation of kids who thought we would never have to grow up, so we didn’t. Now, approaching 30, we feel a peculiar sort of dread about what life has to offer us.

You see, most of the people I know are in their mid to late twenties. Trendier authors call this age group the “twentysomethings.” These are members of generation X and Y who are staring down the barrel of true adulthood and don’t know what to make of it.

When we were younger, we inherited a country and a pop culture that had just trudged through the decadence of the 80s and came out the other side looking pathetic and insubstantial. So, we grew up on movies and music that had a grimy realism. We absorbed a value system that shunned materialism and lauded idealism. We looked at the progress our parents and their parents had made through the last few decades and realized that we had no wars or crises to live through.

Generation X and Y knew that the lessons of the 60s had somehow been bleached clean, and the world they inherited was devoid of angst. So we raged, but without a Vietnam, Watergate or a missile crisis, we were mainly sound and fury. And now we have rent to pay.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the art of the 90s. The television, movies, comedy, music and books are intensely introverted. This was the overall sentiment of the decade. As a whole, we were moody and introspective with large flannel shirts to cover our sensitive sides.

But, eventually, everyone has to grow up. This means going to college, getting a job, family and house, then, at some point, having children. And for all of the above, we were not prepared.

People in their twenties are going through something that has been dubbed the “quarter-life crisis.” There are a handful of self-help books on the subject, which I can sum up in two sentences: I grew up in a time that glorified abstract concepts of life and humanity, thus I find it difficult to commit to careers, mates and belief systems. Now that it is becoming clear that my parents aren’t going to be able to support me forever, I realize that I need to figure out who I am and what i want to do with my life.

Now that I’ve saved everyone $30, let’s consider what this says about us as a society.

The people of my generation were inundated with a barrage of messages about just how pointless the rat race is. Now, we can’t hold on to jobs or love because we have tiny voices in the back of our head telling us that we should never settle for less than we deserve. When we do occasionally come across people who seem to have gotten it together when it comes to money and relationships, it only makes things worse.

Life is offering us a bewildering number of choices, and we are used to flipping the channel. We have grown up in a plump American Neverland where a lifestyle of hanging out and playing videogames between snazzy movies and late night parties seemed as if it would last forever. Making hard life choices is, well, hard.

Luckily, I can tell that I am starting to slip out of my quarter-life-crisis. One thing in my favor is that I married someone that I knew for years and had a great relationship with. So, that’s one hard decision that I no longer face. The other factor that has me seeing better days is that after changing my major in college seven times I finally found something that makes me happy and that I can do well.

It’s a documented fact that adolescence lasts longer than it used to. People today tend to go to college for six or seven years to get a bachelor’s degree. Kids do not leave home right at 18 anymore, and most of the time they come back a couple of times before biting the bullet and truly moving away for good. So, it’s later in life when you decide to step off the bandwagon and examine who you are.

The result is a whole lot of insecurity at a time when you are expected to be producing something worthwhile. You and your friends are simultaneously realizing how little you all have in common. You fear that you will end up going through the same routines forever because you have yet to get in on the ground floor of anything. Despite the fact that you want to cling onto the past you start to realize that you don’t want to go to the club to find your perfect mate and that acting a fool for the sake of being foolish doesn’t have the appeal it once did.

It’s a hard time in the life of generation X and Y. But, we are fortunate to be able to go through it. Our parents and grandparents never had the luxury, and most of the people on this planet would trade places with us without batting an eye.

That being said, I still love cartoons, and I want a Playstation 3 for Christmas.

Originally published in The Lamar Times summer of 2005