When I turned 25, I used
to smirk at the posts talking about quarter life crisis. And why not? I had
just turned 25, and realised that I could now officially consume all kind of
liquor in Mumbai(legal age 25). Why feel sorry about it? Why feel so low-brow about
it. Two years down the line, I am not particularly going through a crisis, but I
think I understand the exaggerations called the quarter life crisis. Let's talk
about some of the points mentioned in the famous and forwarded-many-times e-mail.
I promise, I will keep it short.
You hate your job and
you wonder why you are doing it:
No sir, I do not hate my
job. I have a desk job, agreed. I do not go out like the hosts of discovery
channel or MTV into the wilderness or the most happening party in town. I also
do not get to travel a lot(forget about earning a living out of it). Neither do
I make a living out of tasting the best food around the globe. On the flip
side, I am not in a hot industrial warehouse, working on a machine,I am also
not cleaning the streets(no disrespect to the ones who do, rather they have my
respect), neither am I playing a nanny and cleaning child poop. I love driving,
and I am driving my own car, not someone else's car. I have got a lot to
complain about my job if I compare, and yet, I have got a lot to thank for, if
I compare. I am making a living, I am financially pretty much independent and
doing some interesting and challenging work occasionally(Yeah, before you raise
your brow, I know I am not a scientist).
"You don't have
great friends anymore" paradigm :
Over the years, I have
been to various institutes and made a lot of friends. There are the school
friends, then the high school friends, college friends and then work place
friends. Even at workplace, I made friends in various projects that I worked
on. I trained a few people in some college as a part of my company's initiative
and I made friends there too. Guess what, I am always in touch with the ones
who really mattered. I may not get to meet all of them all the time, but when I
do meet them there are no awkward handshakes or nervous 'hellos'. It is generally
a tight hug and a volley of curses for how fat I have become or how I didn't
get them the birthday present. When I meet my friends from school, with them, I
am still the person I was in school, not a 27 something, mid tier corporate
employee. Your body ages, friendships don't( Disclaimer: not giving a quote
there).
The Dating issues:
While in college,
approaching an unknown girl was simple, it's either a hit or a miss.
Consequences generally didn't matter in an Engineering college, but in a
corporate environment, you are more careful about whom to approach(if at all).
The 'Indian' quarter life crisis suggest that, it is a bad time to be a single
guy, because the girls your age are all committed or getting married. But hey,
are these girls not hooked to guys older than them. So stop scanning your age
group and widen the horizon, the dating crisis may just be a figment of
imagination of a frustrated soul.
You compare
yourself to your peers and family and be sad about it:
Human mind can never be
appeased, I certainly cannot be. That is something which keeps us going. Yes, I
compare myself to my peers, my family and sometimes I am sad about it. But the
fact of the matter is, I don't do it because I am 25(plus), I have been doing
it for as long as I can remember. I got really upset when my cousin got an A,
and I got A- in kindergarten, but no body said I was going through 1/25th life
crisis back then, so why now? Comparison within a peer group is what keeps a
human mind to strive for more(again, not giving a quote here), why associate it
with an age? And besides, for every more successful 27(or younger) year old
person that I meet, I know more than one less successful 27(or older) year old
person.
Turning 27:
Alright, this part of
this post has nothing to
do with quarter life crisis, but it's important, because this is the reason I
wrote this post. I was wondering aloud on Facebook about how singers like Kurt
Cobain had done almost everything before they turned 27(and dying), and here I
was, only able to talk about them. I also wondered, if it was a devious
plan(a-la-Matrix) that some greater force took away all the talented people at
27, which made me more sad, because that meant, I am not talented enough for
that greater force. At this point, Shivani, a great friend of mine wrote these
beautiful lines.
"You might end up
being slow-and-steady and you might end up winning a long long race...
Bottoms-up are not
always fun you know...you might end up relishing every drop of life's expensive
champagne... u might end up telling loads and loads of awesome fun stories to
kids in a neighbourhood park...You might end being the only go-to-guy n
know-it-all for guidance on almost any topic related to
teenage-quarter-middle-full life crisis situations...coz you know what...
you'll see it all...with awesome cinematography, full zoom and in the finest of
fine details"
Finally:
The word quarter life
crisis in itself is an improbability. It conveniently assumes that we are all
going to live 100 years, for it to be a quarter of live that we have lived. My
life will often be in crisis, and I will always be cribbing about it, and at
the same time, my life will also be awesome and I will be happy about it. These
events, and my age are mutually exclusive.
