The Quarter-Life Predicament
What is life? I think that is what everyone wants an answer to, especially Gen Z
Have you ever worked for your whole life on something, gotten there, and realized it wasn't what you expected?
It is an internal battle between wanting something so badly, working hard to get there, and then realizing nothing really, truly changes internally when you reach it.
For the entirety of our childhood and a portion of our young adult life, up until we are 22, our purpose is to prepare ourselves for our adult life and set ourselves up in our career. We work tirelessly in school, take college classes in high school, become presidents of clubs, change majors five times, maybe start a small business, and so much more to define the larger purpose of the work we do and should do.
The search to define this purpose provides both meaning and suffering. We are a finance or pre-med student and with this comes failed exams and long nights. When people ask us what our major is, we beam with happiness to tell them what we study. When we fail a test, we wonder if we are really cut out for this. It gives meaning to our life. College helps us to figure out our meaning and purpose.
College life is good. College campuses are a serotonin trip. The architecture is inspiring, any food you could want is at your fingertips, plentiful outdoor space to do as you please, and gyms and libraries to focus and decompress. Friends are a door, a house, or a street over. Your only real responsibility is graduating with good grades, landing the job/internship you want, and maybe finding your larger purpose in life.
Graduation comes and now you have a degree in hand. You were taught everything about finance, medicine, or whatever you may have majored in. The world is now your oyster that is until that ideology comes to a screeching halt. You are more knowledgeable than ever before but college misses on educating on one thing. It doesn’t teach you what life is like after college. This is not all of college’s fault either, a good bit of it you just have to experience yourself.
For most, graduating college is a culture shock. No longer will you have all your friends within a mile, no rules on Friday as you have no class, and everything you could ever want within walking distance. Life after college is quite different.
As you distance yourself more and more from college, you may begin to enter into an existential crisis. You are now faced with the question of what your purpose is now after college. The scary part is you are left with no satisfying answer. You spent the last 15 years of your life working on something, only to find it may have left you with more questions than answers. Time has never been a scarcer resource and that’s a sobering thought that scares a lot of young people.
Once a week on social media a TikTok reigns king, going massively viral. It is typically a young professional questioning life, work, and everything in between when they realize what life after college may be. The winner this week was a young girl wondering how anyone has any time to do anything while working a full-time job, a thought I think everyone has had at least once in their young career. She’s not wrong either.
The viral video is met with a bunch of “Gen Z finally learns what it is like to work” or “this is what the real world is, little girl!” People welcome them to the quarter-life crisis. However, I think to call it a quarter-life crisis is quite wrong.
A crisis is an intense, defined period of time that can be easily identified. To call it a crisis is missing the point of what it truly is. It is best viewed as a quarter-life predicament. It is an unpleasant state of being that is difficult to get out of. A constant state of flux between two options in many areas of life.
Do I want to save money and live outside of the city or spend more to live closer to work and shorten my commute?
Do I value a job that offers a higher salary or more work-life balance?
Is it more important to currently work at a job that I’m passionate about or have a job that affords me a lifestyle to chase my passion in non-working hours?
Do I want to live closer to family and friends or move to a city I have always dreamed of living in?
What is the work that actually lights me up?
The list goes on and just because one question is answered doesn’t mean the problem is immediately solved. The events and options are all strung together. One thing influences another, a domino effect of sorts.
This is new. No longer are the options strung together and defined. Life before college had always been spelled out and much of it was out of your hands, which makes this transition especially hard. The path had already been defined for us. Elementary school to middle school to high school and then college but now when you leave college that path changes. It is no longer structured or predetermined. The path is overgrown, littered with questions, and has yet to be cleared by any answers. The next step is truly unknown and I haven’t even mentioned how the current state of the world affects it.
It also doesn’t help the predicament that now the housing market sucks and the American dream of a home with a white picket fence, a dog, and three kids has never been cloudier. Also, the Golden Age of Grift has led our generation to think they should be getting rich quick. This has only perpetuated FOMO and left people wondering if they are lagging beyond. When you have a friend who turned $10 into $30,000 off Dogecoin it is only natural for you to wonder, am I doing something wrong here?
Social media doesn’t help either. Never does anyone post the lowlights of their life, it is just the highlights of them swimming with dolphins off the coast of Mexico, riding elephants in Thailand, or clubbing in Spain. It is a constant tap from the devil on our shoulder leading us to believe that we aren’t doing enough.
Not to mention, because of social media and phones, the premium you must pay to get someone’s attention is at an all-time high. I mean people struggle to even go to the bathroom without their phones these days. The idea of work has never been harder when you can click on your phone and get a dopamine hit much stronger than what your work would ever provide. Young professionals, namely Gen Z, were raised on smartphones and social media, something a generation before them never had. It is a new frontier out there.
These are just some of the things on the post-college path that must be wrestled with. You are the blazer of that path and now, it is on you, a young, ripe professional to determine where that path may take you while trying to balance and answer all the options, questions, and events that continue to pepper and punch you.
However, finally taking the reigns is part of the beauty of life. It’s what makes life, well life. It is a continual search to find what makes you tick. What truly gets you out of bed in the morning. What truly makes you lose track of time and ultimately, what you truly prioritize. In life, it is all about priorities, we all have time. It is just a matter of how you prioritize that time.
It is also realizing success doesn’t intrinsically change you and expecting it will, will be a life of continual disappointment. This is the thing about college, we are led to believe once we graduate and realize the gains on all the equity we put forth, we will be freed and will be whole but that is really never the case.
Phil Knight talks about it in Shoe Dog. He changed not only his life financially but also his employees' lives the day Nike went public. It changed the amount of money he may see in his bank account but it didn’t change anything for him or his employees on who they were.
“I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke it was cold and rainy. I went to the window. The trees were dripping water. Everything was mist and fog. The world was the same as it had always been. Nothing changed, least of all me. And yet I was worth $178 million.
I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else.”
$178 million and nothing really changed the man intrinsically. It’s hard to believe that landing the job we have always wanted or graduating with the degree we worked tirelessly for will change us, at least not internally.
Part of the predicament is finding what things we may value over others and with that time is a necessity. It is about exploiting and exploring niches and areas until you find what you truly enjoy. Explore and exploit over and over until something sticks. With that, there will be struggle and with that, there will be people taking to social media to voice their struggle and project their pain. Something we have never really seen before and something we have to understand is human. Gen Z has only known social media so it is understandable for them to see it as a mode to voice their displeasure, concern, or frustrations.
Gen Z will redefine work in some manner and it will be borne out of the quarter-life predicament, just like every generation before them. Asking them not to is expecting them to be different from every other generation. Every generation changes the world in so many different ways, Gen Z is no different. It is all a natural part of life.
Life is a constant flux, a constant battle between all the options we have. Those options smack us in the face when we graduate college because that is finally when we are forced to choose or pursue an option. Life is no longer defined. It is a continual search to find the answers to the predicament, the quarter-life predicament. Everyone faces it, even Phil Knight, a man behind the most successful sports company to ever grace this earth.
From Phil Knight himself,
“I have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all… different.
I wanted to leave a mark on the world.
I wanted to win.
No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose.”
No one is immune to it, some feel it more than others but in order to see the end of the predicament, it is about having more answers than questions and finding your calling. Phil Knight takes us home,
“I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
Appreciate you reading.
-Scantron
Scantron’s Selections - A few things I loved this week.
Superlinear Returns - Paul Graham - Not a bad thing to read to supplement this piece. “Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious.”
Can’t Hurt Me - David Goggins - I thoroughly enjoyed this and the body does achieve what the mind believes.
really nice piece ry
Thank you for this piece and h/t to Kyla for the notes