What’s a quarter-life crisis? Learn from today’s young 20somethings.
This is an introduction to Hindsight 20/Something, a book of 1st person perspectives by twenty-somethings on loss, transition, and the quarter life crisis.

My friend Marie moved to Minneapolis. It was a disaster.
She’d lived her first 23 years in California and wanted to move elsewhere, afraid of being complacent and getting trapped by the sunshine. Marie got fixated on Minnesota, even though every one told her not to. When she got there, it all went wrong — she moved into a windowless room, her carbon monoxide levels were dangerously high, she saw a stranger pull a gun on a public bus.
Many people she’d met, said, “why’d you move here from California?”
That was the first 48 hours.
Taking the jump is hard and it’s worth it and while you’re doing it you feel like everything’s a mess.
Shit goes wrong in the your 20s, especially when you take risks.
When I moved away from Oregon I’d stayed up till 4am the night (uh, morning?) before. I was best man for my buddy’s wedding and woke up after 2 hours asleep to take an uber back to my car while still wearing my suit and still being drunk.
I sobered and drove 14 hours to Southern California, almost falling asleep halfway through by Lake Shasta. On the way I found out the door to the apartment I was unofficially subleasing had been kicked in and wouldn’t lock. At 2am, on mile 846 of the 850 trip, I got rear-ended on the freeway…while talking to my ex for the first time since we broke up.
It was my first car ever — I’d bought it only a month before. The rear was crunched.

That night I slept at an America’s Best Value Inn that was haunted. I don’t believe in spirits, but the room had ghosts. Doors would shut randomly, the comforter was blood red, and I woke up at 4am to the microwave screeching.
2 hours later I woke for my first day working. An hour after that I was sitting at the DMV because I’d forgotten my Social Security card in Oregon.
What the fuck was I doing?
The 9 months before that were somehow even more insane. After a traumatic break up, saying goodbye to friends, and struggling with eating, I had constant panic attacks that made me always feel like I was floating outside my body. I didn’t like my job. My roommate was thrown in jail for threatening to kill my other roommate.
A year out of college I was in no shape to give any commencement.
But, few are.

Hindsight 20/Something is a response to a conversation I keep having over and over. I don’t know what I’m doing, man. Life’s fucking crazy. My job’s fine, for now. I want a better life, but I’m not sure how to change it and even if I could, to what?
The early 20s are a cliff.
Hindsight 20/Something is a chronicle of quarterlife crises — stories of getting laid off, losing a lover or your mind, having a gun pulled on you, renting a house with a urinal in the living room.
Hindsight 20/Something is a book I would’ve wanted to read when I was 21 and scared.
It’s a living room full of older friends, vulnerably telling you that it’s okay that it’s not okay.
Minnesota’s gotten better for Marie.
But, I can’t tell you that whole story.
You’ll have to read it this fall.
Hindsight 20/Something will publish this fall. For more follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
