The euphoria of graduation. And then...?

“Sitting in my flat contemplating the year ahead. It’s not a glorious prospect: my job stinks, my girlfriend hates me and I’m a pessimistic, ungrateful sod. Modern demographics will keep me working for another fifty years. Modern medicine might keep me alive for another eighty years. I am twenty-five years old and pissing my life away waiting for nostalgia”

Hopefully your 2011 began with slightly less misery and a lot more champagne, but if, as the New Year rolls in, any of the above feelings sound familiar, you could be eligible for a fast-tracked membership of the Quarter-Life Crisis club.

Eloquently epitomised in the above quote from Twenty-Something: the Quarter-Life Crisis of Jack Lancaster, author Ian Hollishead addresses the phenomenon with a generous helping of comedy to ease the bite of depressing reality. A sense of humour will go a long way when examining yourself for signs of the QLC which is not, in itself, a conventionally funny topic.

The term is a catch-all for the relatively unstudied range of negative or unsettling emotions that can accompany the confusing twenties. Whether just out of university or a few years into a first job, this is an age where you are caught in between, when you’ve finished jumping through the right academic hoops and have started referring to anyone under 18 as ‘children’, but before you have experienced the traditional sense of stability that a solid career, relationship and family purports to offer.

The Quarter-Life Crisis Today

So why is it that the expression ‘quarter-life crisis’, is a much more recent invention than the more easily recognisable ‘mid-life crisis’?

One explanation could lie in our positioning as ‘echo boomers’, the children of post-World War II birth rate rise, the ‘baby boomers’. Our parents’ generation tends to be associated broadly with being a healthier, wealthier and more stable generation than ever before. We their children, aka Generation Y, born from the early 1980s onwards, are said to be tech-savvy and confident, with high expectations for our careers and lives.

Not an ideal generational mindset, therefore, to collide with a global economic recession. According to the EU’s statistical office Eurostat, the unemployment rate for young people across Europe has increased by 1% in the last year to 20.1%, with women being more affected overall than men.

Combined with spending cuts by many governments meaning fewer jobs and opportunities, and with eight European cities including Moscow, Zurich, Copenhagen and Milan featuring in the top 20 most expensive cities to inhabit in the world , the situation could definitely look rosier for today’s twenty-somethings.

What’s It All About?

Although the economic realities speak for themselves, what perhaps characterises the quarter-life crisis better than any statistic is an overall feeling of dissatisfaction, most likely combined with frequent soul-searching and sessions in the pub debating the meaning of life.

This frustration can certainly be linked to finances; as people start embarking on different careers (should they be lucky enough to find employment), you suddenly start to notice increasing differences in spending powers. While we once may have all been at the same level, eagerly waiting for our student loans to come in when we knew a good night out was in order, now ‘I’m broke’ can either mean ‘I’m literally penniless and I need my last £2.50 for the tube tomorrow’, or ‘I’ve spent all my wages in the sales this month and had better take it easy’, or ‘I’ve put half my earnings into saving up for a house and have booked a chalet for ten in February, so I’ll give this one a miss’. This disparity can make some feel a sense of failure and worthlessness, particularly if their dream job will never be paid as highly as some others.

Finances squeeze recent graduates...

The QLC worry can also be attributed to the contradiction between expectations and realities. In times gone by, a good degree and a smidgen of enthusiasm was enough to get you a good job, but under the recession cloud, one in ten of the ‘Class of the Credit Crunch’ UK graduates find themselves unemployed, while many other earlier graduates are taking jobs they are hugely over-qualified for.  Merely finding an available job that suits our skills and interests is a monumental challenge, topped with the pressure of student loans and overdrafts to pay back.

Having It All…

And career and money issues are just one side of the coin; another pressure on young people in their twenties (particularly for women) involves relationships and children. For our mothers’ generation, marrying and having children in their early-to-mid twenties was the norm, whereas today’s statistics put the average age of first-time mothers across Europe at 27.4, rising to 30 and 31 in some countries. Despite this, it is hard not to feel that there is a time bomb counting down the days as marriage and motherhood prospects become more and more remote. With beauty ads telling us we should start wearing anti-wrinkle cream from age 21, and medical advice informing us that female fertility starts to decline from our late twenties, we are so tuned into the time spans and ‘deadlines’ of remaining young that it is easy to feel pressured. The same stress is involved with relationships; is there anyone of us, single or not, who hasn’t spent time worrying about whether we will meet ‘the one’?

The combined sum of all these worries can threaten to send us all into a black depression and fear that our lives will never go anywhere. It is hard to offer solutions to a phenomenon as vast and vague as this, but practical answers to some of the QLC symptoms are probably the most simple. The internet is full of useful sites that claim to help you find your dream career and ideal job, but in reality, surfing computerised pages will not help you understand what you are really looking for, or give you the right kind of ideas better than a friend or a professional careers service. Likewise, try letting professionals plan your finances, no matter how slim they are. An intelligent banker in your local branch telling you what budget to follow and how to arrange your pension plan might just scare you into sticking to it. However, thinking a lot about what we want to do with our lives can be positive; if it means reassessing our options and evaluating our goals constantly, then we have a better chance of ending up where we want to be no matter how long the route.

At the risk of sounding like a therapist, it is up to all of us to accept the quarter-life crisis and get on with living it. In the immortal words of Carrie in Sex and the City, “Sometimes we need to stop analysing the past, stop planning the future, stop figuring out precisely how we feel, stop deciding exactly what we want, and just see what happens.”