BackgroundThought that this topic will be useful to 20s people out there.Recently it has been getting attention from counsellors and psychologists and more research is being done on this rising phenomenon. Basically Quarter life cisis is not mid life crisis. And it is more prevalent in current times, interestingly comes in a different time than previous decades because of the changes the world seems to be going through in these times. It is now being thought how it affects individuals when a crisis of such sort hits them so early before their mid life crisis which is more recognised and talked about.
Quarter life crisis refers to the culture shock which affects the age group of people in their early to mid 20s who have left their teen & school life years to enter the working world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis[i]The quarter-life crisis is a term, coined circa November 1965 in Toronto, by psychologist Elliott Jaques [citation needed], applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the ages of 21 - 29. The term is named by analogy with mid-life crisis.
Emotional aspectsCharacteristics of this crisis are:
confusion of identity
insecurity regarding the near future
insecurity regarding present accomplishments
re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
disappointment with one's job
nostalgia for college life
tendency to hold stronger opinions
boredom with social interactions
financially-rooted stress
loneliness
These emotions and insecurities are not uncommon at this age, nor at any age in adult life. In the context of the quarter-life crisis, however, they occur shortly after a young person usually an educated professional, in this context enters the "real world". After the initial excitement of adult life and its responsibilities wears off, some individuals find themselves in a world of career stagnation and extreme insecurity.
As the emotional ups-and-downs of adolesence and college life subside, many in the quarter-life crisis experience a "graying" of emotion. While emotional interactions may be intense in a high school or college environment where everyone is roughly the same age and hormones are highly active these interactions become subtler and more private in adult life.
Furthermore, a contributing factor to this crisis may be the difficulty in adapting to a workplace environment. In college, professors' expectations are clearly given and students receive frequent feedback on their performance in their courses. By contrast, in a workplace environment, a person may be, for some time, completely unaware of a boss's displeasure with his performance, or of his colleagues' dislike for his personality. Office politics require interpersonal skills that are largely unnecessary for success in an educational setting. Emerging adults eventually learn these social skills, but this process sometimes compared to learning another language is often highly stressful.
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Financial and social aspectsA primary cause of the stress associated with the "quarter-life crisis" is financial in nature. Real wages for most people have been dropping since the 1970s [citation needed], and most professions have become highly competitive. Positions of relative security such as tenured positions at universities and "partner" status at law firms have dwindled in number. This, combined with excessive downsizing, means that many people will never experience occupational security in their lives, and this is doubly unlikely in young adulthood. Generation X was the first generation to meet this uncertain "New Economy" en masse.
The era when a professional career meant a life of occupational security thus allowing an individual to proceed to establish an "inner life" is coming to a crashing end. Financial professionals are often expected to spend at least 40 hours per week in the office, and people in the legal, medical, educational, and managerial professions may average more than 60. In most cases, these long hours are de facto involuntary, reflecting economic and social insecurity. While these ills plague adults at all ages, their worst victims are ambitious, unestablished young adults.
In The Cheating Culture, David Callahan illustrates that these ills of excessive competition and insecurity do not always end once one becomes established by being awarded tenure or "partner" status and therefore the "quarter-life crisis" may actually extend beyond young adulthood. Some measure of financial security which usually requires occupational security is necessary for psychological development. Some have theorized that insecurity in the "New Economy" will place many in a state of, effectively, perpetual adolescence, and that the rampant and competitive consumerism of the 1990s and 2000s indicates that this is already taking place.
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Other theories
Erik H. Erikson, who proposed eight crises that humans face during development, also proposed the existence of a life crisis occurring at this age. In his developmental theory, he proposed that human life is divided into eight stages, each with its own conflict that humans must resolve. The conflict he associated with young adulthood is the Intimacy vs. Isolation crisis. According to him, after establishing a personal identity in adolescence, young adults seek to form intense, usually romantic relationships with other people.
The version of the "quarter-life crisis" proposed by Erikson, then, is very different from the one that occurs in popular culture. Indeed, the pop-culture version of the "quarter-life crisis" contains more elements of the crisis Erickson associated with adolescence, Identity vs. Role-confusion, giving credence to the theory that late-20th century life, with its bizarre mix of extreme comfort and insecurity, is then causing people to mature at a slower rate.
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Popular cultureJack Kerouac, in his description of the character Remi Bonc'ur in On The Road, wrote:
When I found him in Mill City that morning he had fallen on the beat and evil days that come to young guys in their middle twenties.
In the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, author Douglas Coupland defines "mid-twenties breakdown" as
A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments, coupled with a realisation of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.
