Thursday 11 September 2008

Growing up through the Quarter-Life Crisis

The other day while I was chatting with my best friend, we both conceded our lives had changed a lot during the past one year. Break-ups, new love relationships, re-prioritization between work and love life, relationships with family, moving places, new career, new directions in life - either already been through or under way.

We both heaved the sigh of relief that our worst may already passed. But at the same time, we know there are more for us to go through while recovering.

"Hey, you know what?" I exclaimed to her. "I read about this. It is called Quarter-Life Crisis. It means now we have really grown up." I did not get to see her expression, but I knew she concurred vehemently.

"After coming out from college and working, we thought we were grown-ups but we were still very much like teenagers, having no idea of our future and hardship that we need to endure." I added. "So now, we are officially a grown-up."

In fact, it is not just me and my friend. I know most of my twenty-somethings or approaching-thirty friends (and new acquaintances) are going through the same quarter-life crisis. Some learn from it and become better. Some are still in denials and unable to accept why these happen to them. Some may have totally given up. In fact, I begin to meet more and more people who are in the midst of quarter-life crisis because Jeffrey has a way of attracting them. Most came to him to ask for helps and advices. Others (like the first time I met him) were drawn to him because there are things we want to know about this world, about ourselves and we know he can provide that knowledge since he been through a lot (crisis, failures, success, etc.) in life.

According to him, there are 5 main problems with us:

1. We never do the things that we should do
2. We do not take good care of ourselves
3. We are not making enough money because we work the wrong way.
4. We have not cared for others and nobody care about us.
5. We have not learnt well because nobody is teaching us.

I do not think I need to delve into what is quarter-life crisis as there are already 2 excellents posts about it: One from my favourite blogger, Penelope Trunk and another one from Holly, a member of Brazen Careerist.

Marrying the two posts, it means:

We're all just growing up. Finally. Let us take some risks now to achieve our dreams, because we do not want to be eighty and regret not taking these risks.


Growing up involves being able to reflect back on the past and understand more about my own self, where I come from and where I want to be.

I like this photo of myself - the way I happily climbed on the gates to take this photo with my brothers, who looked cute themselves too.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

while i like the growing up part, i'm not so sure about taking risk, i'm, after all, terribly risk-averse... i only take risk when i feel like it or have the sudden urge to... =P

'quarter-life crisis' do sound interesting and very familiar at first, but come to think of it, i think these kind of frustrations don't only affect those who are 25-ers to 30-ers... at some stage in life, when you finally come to your senses that something is wrong with how you lead your life all this while... bang, you know you have to change...

Anonymous said...

Wow Susan, it's so great to know you actually leave a remark based on our conversation...haha..ya luckily you didn't see how I responded...sigh..hope to see you again soon. Muaks...love ya

Unknown said...

autumnmusic, well said. yeah, it certainly comes with the BANG!

Unknown said...

yee cheng, I figure my blog is about me and things that matter to me. So it is not just about writing about an interesting article or books and share them. It is more meaningful to share my own personal experience. I hope you can do a guest post or something in my blog sometimes.
Love you too.

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