— Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Some years ago, an experienced meditation teacher described his one-on-one interactions with students primarily consisting of listening to them, nodding sagely, and respond: yes, what you’re experiencing is normal.
Most people An oft-quoted stat from LinkedIn – not exactly a scientific stat, but good enough for intuition-building – says that 70% of 25-33 year olds will go through a quarter-life crisis will go through some variation of the “quarter-life Or mid-life, hell have a three-quarter life crisis or beyond. “Never let a good crisis go to waste” and all that. crisis.” From the outside, these periods can seem chaotic and impulsive, from the inside confusing and frustrating. Having some idea of what to expect can be a helpful starting point – things like major psychological studies or popular books are a good way to get a foothold – but these are by nature written from a thousand-foot view.
On the other side is the individual report, the phenomenological experience of what it’s like to navigate these choppy waters – mystery, confusion, elation, and the complete reformation of personality. I thought it worthwhile to write up some “field notes,” if only as historical artifacts that I can later read through and have pity on my younger self for their misguidedness; or perhaps for others to read and maybe find some kinship in a fellow lost traveller, a stand-in for a seasoned teacher patting you on the shoulder: yes, what you’re experiencing is normal.
My story is the one that has been said plenty of times: 27 years old, a good job that payed well, had mostly figured out How to Be an Adult. Some amount of conventional success, you get the picture. These accomplishments are the last in the set of stepping stones that are laid out for us as adolescents: high school, college, get a job, and then suddenly I find myself in an open forest glade without a map:
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.
I didn’t have a great sense of where to go, but I knew that my current situation wasn’t it. I would often be sitting at my desk trying to be a productive adult at my well-paying job and think: you are going to die someday.
Memento mori is a trite aphorism right up until it punches you in the teeth. Death is one of those things that cannot be understood any other way – much as we may wish it otherwise – except to experience the sort of wracking grief and regret that accompanies the passing of a loved one. This was certainly true for me after the death of my mother, that being the first time I had experienced the realities of loss so clearly and acutely. But if nothing else, losses like that are so far beyond words and conceptions that they lodge themselves instead into your nerve endings, embed themselves into the very way you see and experience each waking moment.
And so with these thoughts sitting at the back of my mind, I would find myself sitting at my desk, responding to Slack messages, waiting for the time when I could log off and just pray for a modicum of energy to work on my own projects or goals – which inevitably never happened, something I’d habitually realize right before falling asleep after a 2 hour stint of drinking and rewatching Mad Men for the fourth time that year – it was then that I remembered that I too would die, that I would be some frail body in a hospital bed, soon to be ash in a crematorium; or perhaps it come for me unexpected, some terrible accident that would strip away all those later years that I had meticulously planned out, all of those potentialities unfulfilled.
And I’d walk through all of these worlds, all the different sets of possibilities, and I’d see that at the end of every one of them that what I had worked so hard thus far to cultivate – money, status, and most of all a sense of security – wouldn’t mean anything. They seemed to me, sitting there, utterly irrelevant to the project of living. All I could imagine caring about in each of those moments was this:
Did I live well?
Great is the matter of birth and death
Time passes swiftly, everything is lost
Awake, awake
Do not waste your life
And so what does it mean to live well? There’s been enough ink already spilled on this topic to line the shelves of bookstores and fill the pews at religious institutions for millenia. My opinion on the matter is irrelevant.
What is relevant, however, is to befriend the question, to bathe in it for a while. One of the tricky things about an identity crisis is that it’s very difficult to know what you’ll know when you know it, to be comfortable with changes you do not currently comprehend. How does one know how to become something new? It’s a balancing act: to become comfortable with not knowing is a helpful skill, but doing so requires some amount of personal, emotional resources, the sort of resources that come from the stability and confidence of what you already know. Even if you find an answer that resonates intellectually, it’s still incumbent upon you to understand living well experientially, to feel it in a way that resonates in your own heart-mind.
Journaling – or more specifically, writing Morning Pages – has been a helpful routine for me. The big questions naturally came up once I start dumping all of my thoughts onto the page, and while I don’t necessarily find definite answers Questions like how do I live a good life will rarely have definite answers. in those pages, they are helpful barometers to alert me when I am off course.
That, I believe, is really the ideal outcome of an identity crisis. It’s not to come out with a new identity, but rather to have the set of tools to effectively and continuously reinterpret yourself and adjust accordingly, day after day. For myself, I started out with a life built on a set of values and rules that were instilled in me by others; now, I’m finding myself navigating by my own internal value system.
I don’t have a succinct, pithy phrase to point to with any amount of certainty about What the Good Life is – least of all one that applies universally to everyone – but the best bet I’ve got so far is this: the good life is one in which you are entirely yourself.
Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint… They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s experiences or write somebody else’s poems.
And so here I am, four months after having left my job and shipping off to trot around the globe for a bit. Physical distance is a good thing in moments like these. It’s that balance of the known and unknown: travel forces me to be in new postures, to do something different, but traveling solo offers me the flexibility to decide exactly how that happens adjust however feels best.
The travel has been fun and all, but the greater consequences have come from packing light. I’ve lived for 4 months now out of a backpack, sleeping on shitty hostel mattresses, and eating mostly convenience store food I would be that my molecular makeup is now approximately 80% Lawson egg sandwhiches and spicy chicken. . Living with so little makes you more sensitive to just how much each extraneous thing weighs on you. And from here I reflect back on the rest of my life. My house, my books, the art and decorations and just stuff that fills those rooms – what purpose do these all serve to me? Some of them are undoubtedly good and are things I cherish, but I’m also forced to recognize the costs (monetary or otherwise) that holding on to them has.
That healthy bit of asceticism has also seeped into my relationship with technology. That same attenuation to the costs of every marginal interaction has meant becoming hypersensitive to the state of technology today.
To put it more simply: I hate my phone now. I already disliked my phone before, at least intellectually, but now I have a sort of gutteral disgust whenever I catch myself scrolling social media. Cutting down on my screen time became less of a chore, something that I should do, and more like an assertion of self-determination.
With the reclaiming of my attention also came this insatiable desire to work. I don’t have a job, so I can work on literally anything, and as such I’m forced to aggressively cut the myriad small projects for the things I really care about, the skills that I must develop instead of the skills that are merely incidental. I’ve found myself dedicating whole days to journaling, reading, and writing in ways that I don’t think I’ve ever done before. There’s a whole new dimension that I’m actively uncovering in learning how to work – really work – how to inculcate the skills to handle larger creative projects. I certainly don’t have those skills yet, but they’re the sort of developments I can feel bubbling in my psyche.
The outcomes of all of this remains to be seen. Like I said at the beginning, these notes are intended mostly as a record of me attempting to Figure Things Out, and if something in here resonates, I’m glad this was of service. If nothing else, I’ll leave this as a reminder to check in: continue being truly and uniquely yourself, now and always.
