Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis - brief excerpt

Nov 10, 2007 - 08:21 AM PST
Introduction:

Three years ago, a little book called Quarterlife Crisis unexpectedly hit a big nerve. The book described the feelings of apprehension and indecision that walloped twentysomethings during the transition between young adulthood and adulthood. It discussed how twentysomethings were lost and confused, largely because there was no roadmap to these years, no manual providing answers. It lamented the absence of a guide – the lack of a book with solutions for how to emerge successfully and happily from the struggles of this age.

Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis is that book.

This new book is written for all twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, regardless of gender, finances, race, status, and geographic location. It is for – and includes advice from – those who went to college, as well as those who did not; those who work blue collar jobs, white collar jobs, or no job at all; those with money and those carrying six-figure debt loads; those with relatively few responsibilities and those who are single parents with tremendous responsibilities; those who are close to depression and those who feel like they almost have it together. Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis addresses our age group’s common bond: the deep, soulsearching questions that keep us awake at night; the tough, hard-hitting questions that we’re sometimes too afraid to ask even ourselves.

Many of us in our twenties and thirties go through a period that leaves us feeling panicked or directionless. For some of us, the challenges of this time become so overwhelming that we may seriously second-guess our abilities, intensely question our lives, or crush our own self esteem with our doubts. That’s what happened to me. I wrote the first Quarterlife Crisis essentially to figure out what was so wrong with me that during what I thought were supposed to be the most carefree, freewheeling years of my life, I felt useless, sad, and ill equipped for life after school.

But something happened during the process of writing that first book that changed my life. As I interviewed twentysomething after twentysomething, in the course of compiling other people’s stories, my own story changed. After months of regularly beating myself to a mental pulp because I wasn’t living up to my own standards, it was the simplest of facts that jolted me out of my funk: I was normal. When the twentysomething sources unloaded on me their fears, doubts, and uncertainties, I realized that my insecurities were common – and that I therefore wasn’t a freak after all. That was all I needed to know.

I have heard from hundreds of readers who only needed to know the same thing. But countless more twentysomethings wrote to tell me that simply knowing that their problems were normal didn’t solve them. Over the past three years, scores of readers have pointed out that there was something missing from the book Quarterlife Crisis, an egregious omission that left them still searching, still questioning, still brokenhearted by the gap between the person they are and the person they want to be.

The book was missing the answers.

When I started writing that first book, I was 23 and in the midst of my own quarterlife crisis. I thought it would be presumptuous to offer my peers suggestions for how to fix their lives when I was so frustrated with my own. Other than sharing sources’ stories with readers to let them know they weren’t alone, I had no idea how else I could help them. But that was then.

I’m still not foolish enough to presume I have all the answers now. But thousands of other twentysomethings do – and I’ve spent the last few years grilling them for these solutions. That’s what this book is for. While the point of the first book was to introduce the problems of the Quarterlife Crisis, the aim of Conquering the Quarterlife Crisis is to solve them.

You don’t need to have read that first book to get the most out of this one. The new premise of Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis is that one of the major reasons our generation feels clueless and torn is that we don’t have any mentors. Throughout our years in school, we had specific people to turn to for help and guidance: teachers, advisers, counselors, coaches, and parents. But once we graduate and grapple with real-world issues, we don’t have someone readily available to tell us, “I’ve been there. Here’s how I got through it.” And because of the ever-widening generation gap, our parents’ experiences in many areas aren’t necessarily relevant anymore.

Take the workplace. Several decades ago, for example, a young graduate might have expected to choose a company and remain there for much of his or her life, gaining guidance and insights under the tutelage of older employees. Now, however, many workers view twentysomethings as threats to their jobs; instead of mentoring young hires, they often clash with or ignore them. This sense of competition has left our craving for guidance, at the workplace and in other areas of life, unfulfilled.

One of my aims with this book is to get the concept of mentorship back into society. Imagine if we each had people whom we could contact for advice whenever we had questions about work, love, hopes, home, social life, or identity issues – people who had wrestled with the same matters during similar times and conquered them. Imagine if we each had go-to guys who would talk us through hard times or, when we needed it, would give us a figurative kick in the pants. Imagine having your own personal Oprah. Your own personal Vince Lombardi.

The structure of this book mirrors that premise by providing those missing mentors, at least temporarily. After thousands of interviews, I’ve pinpointed some of the most widespread quarterlife dilemmas and paired twentysomethings in the midst of them with people in our generation who have dealt with those same situations successfully. For every twentysomething with a problem, I have twenty- or thirtysomethings with answers. I thought it was important that the voices of wisdom in this book come not from professional experts, but from people our age who navigated these issues sometime over the past ten years. In fact, along with many new voices of experience, some of the original Quarterlife Crisis twentysomethings are back – older, wiser, healthier, and ready to serve as mentors. These mentors share the problems they faced, the suggestions they learned, and the advice they wish they had known. Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis is the chance for our generation to get advice from people who have been there and done that.

It’s probably too idealistic to hope that this book sparks the beginnings of a societal movement toward mentorship. It might be too cheesy to explicitly call for that. (Our generation isn’t the “let’s all hold hands and sing” type, anyway). But how many times do we have to hear that we’re an aloof generation before we do something about it? There are many reasons that we are an age group on “disconnect,” as Oprah rightly assessed in her show on “The Turbulent Twenties.” But part of the responsibility to remedy that is on us. If we want to start bridging the generation gap, to show the older groups that we do care, that we want to lead a useful, helpful existence, perhaps it’s about time we as a generation begin to combat that image.

It wouldn’t hurt to start by reaching out to ask for help. Although in this book I use only fellow twenty- and thirtysomethings as mentors, in life there is nothing to lose by developing mentor relationships at any age. One might ask what older mentors would get out of the relationship beyond a sense of volunteerism and companionship. Actually, “reverse mentorship” is an idea that hasn’t received much attention beyond a focus on technology training. Reverse mentors, usually twentysomethings, provide older individuals with insight into current popular culture and social trends, technological expertise, and generational thinking. Reverse mentorship programs have already caught on at some companies, including General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, and Best Buy. Just as mentorship plays a crucial role in this book, so, too should it become an integral part of our lives. If we can return the workplace and social environment to one of mentorship, we may collectively be able to conquer the Quarterlife Crisis once and for all.


Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis - brief excerpt


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3 Comments

Dec 11, 2007 - 13:36 PM

CharlieMystic on
anyone willing to help a person out I would think is welcome. Online I tend to interact with all age groups. I teach them and interact when I can. And those younger then me teach me things. And seem far wiser The young tend to teach the older generations. Which is a hard concept to get over. When we think the older should be teaching us. Doesn't matter the age everyone is still learning.
Nov 18, 2007 - 08:42 AM

Rhona on
It is very interesting to read what you say about the quarterlife crisis. I am currently 66 years old, and wonder why I am participating in the quaterlife web connection. I suppose it is because I have a twenty something son and daughter, and a thirty something daughter. Since we all live near each other in Brooklyn we have a sort of family life, in which I know their friends and they know my friends. I am aware from this process that your concept of a quarterlife crisis seems to have validity. A person my age working as I do as a college professor, and relating with my own children, has to struggle to understand the world as experienced by people 40 years younger who often would like to have some advice and guidance and sounding board functions performed. I suppose I am interested in quarterlife because I learn from it and widen my perspective on the world we are living in, which is not the same world in a socio-cultural sense that I lived in when I was twenty something. I feel as if I am privileged to be able to sit in on a discourse which is somewhat new to me, and which is fascinating on many levels.
Nov 15, 2007 - 07:48 AM

jacy on
Love this concept! I'd love to be part of a collaborative mentorship...at 57 it would be great to be paired with a twentysomething. We could help each other. I actually tried this in 2000 with a former student then in his late 20's. I needed my writing lessons infused with 21st century technology and he needed a critical eye to examine his illustrated children's books.