Future Foundations provides training and support for young people. The company needed an article on the Quarterlife Crisis – the loss of direction that afflicts many young people after leaving college.
What is the Quarterlife Crisis?
The Quarterlife Crisis, or QLC, is the time when you make your transition to adulthood. You finally become independent – financially, socially and psychologically. You move from the known into the unknown. You have to make decisions about your future and live with their consequences. And that brings challenges.
One challenge is that mainstream education rarely provides all the skills you need to live in the ‘real world’. Another is that it will probably leave you with some kind of financial problems. But at its heart, the QLC is a crisis of identity. Whether you’re leaving university, entering a job or just stuck in a job you don’t like, your early twenties often involve asking yourself who you are and what you really want in life.
We feel a sense of crisis when we don’t have the ability to respond to situations, or to control them. The crux of the QLC is the lack of direction and answers at the very time you need them most. One way out is to get a job, but only around 20% of graduates presently do so. And even they may well be avoiding QLC questions rather than dealing with them. Those who travel certainly broaden their minds, but often return with little idea of what they will do in their twenties and thirties other than save to go travelling again. And others are temping or living at home, wondering what the ‘real world’ is all about and why others are getting on so easily.
The truth is that university is much more like school than the real world. Socially, you’ll never have a peer network quite like it again. Pre-QLC life is about structures (GCSEs, A-levels, degree) where someone offers you a range of choices and you pick one. Now you have limitless choices. But very wide choice sometimes brings anxiety and paralysis, particularly if we allow the options available to shape our values rather than the other way round.
Your ideas about competition and collaboration may also need to evolve. At university, effort leads to achievement in a fairly predictable chain of cause and effect – do the work, get the grade. You are a discrete unit, working for and by yourself. To realise opportunities in the real world, you need to decide where and how you’ll compete. Working harder may not be effective if everyone else is working towards the same goal. And it may be more productive to form a network of contacts with complementary resources to yours (skills, knowledge, more contacts) rather than go it alone.
No-one’s transition to adulthood is easy, but the problems are particularly acute in modern western society. A few years ago, a degree was your passport to a safe, secure job and reasonable prosperity. Today, both careers and organisations are increasingly fragmented, and there are too many graduates chasing too few ‘graduate’ jobs. Few graduates can expect to walk into a job for life, but education funnels us into specialisation in the expectation of exactly that. Graduates who find themselves in McJobs naturally question the value of their 16-year education and the debt they’ve run up acquiring it. But the message that things have changed doesn’t always get through to students, and as a result graduates don’t always realise how proactive they’ll have to be about their career. Different academic areas have different values and different social circles. In the humanities, branding yourself to succeed in a commercial reality might be regarded as ‘selling out’.
It can feel like the life tools you’ve got don’t fit the task of living. That’s not surprising, because there’s so much education doesn’t teach us. Unless our parents step up to the plate, we’re not told how to develop ourselves, manage a career, create wealth and manage money, build a long-term relationship, raise children or do any of the ‘big things’ we take on as adults. With the possible exception of careers, these things are ‘off the radar’ during education, probably because they’re emotionally based and western societies undervalue emotional intelligence. As a result, many of us don’t even realise that we can learn or exercise choices in these areas. Oriented towards creating employees, education emphasises conformity and delivering outputs (essays, usually) rather than choice, reflection or actual intelligence.
So the QLC is about reality falling short of expectations. But where did your expectations come from? As we’ve seen, some come from the government, trying to fix today’s economy with yesterday’s education system. Others come from parents, who often hold fixed ideas about work, money and education. From the earliest age, children are asked what they want to be, not what they want to do. If parents’ ideas are too rigid, they may find it hard to adjust to the reality. This has implications if you go to parents for advice, as many graduates do.
Your parents might figure particularly strongly in your world if you’ve chosen to return home to live with them. It’s a natural option to take, particularly if money is tight. But it can mean stepping back into an old version of yourself – the sixth-form you. You may also by physically isolating yourself from the job markets you need to be in.
When our expectations and reality diverge, we have to decide on our response. We can try to bend reality to our will, or we can change ourselves to fit reality. In this series of articles, I will put just as much emphasis on looking inwards to your own identity as I will on getting a job or making money. Because I believe that only success that’s in tune with values is worth having. Over the next few weeks we will examine what that means, and how you can work your own QLC to build a foundation for happiness and prosperity in your future.
