With Great Freedom Comes Great Uncertainty
Every individual has a story to tell, and very often one of the most interesting turning points of these stories would be the first time someone realised that they are in the middle of a quarter-life crisis.
Before we begin on how these repeated ranted phases of life change our perspective towards things, let’s first try to understand the meaning of Quarter Life Crisis (and how mean it can be).
As always, any definition should start from how Wikipedia states it.
In popular psychology, a quarter-life crisis is a crisis “involving anxiety over the direction and quality of one’s life” which is most commonly experienced in a period ranging from a person’s twenties up to their mid-thirties (although it can begin as early as 18).
There is no specific age as to when a quarter-life crisis can hit you like a bolt of lightning, awakening your inner soul and make you thoroughly introspect if what you did in the last 18 or 35 years was truly worth it.
But one pattern that can be observed is you naturally undergo this process without even realising it, either when you first experience the freedom of taking your own life decisions (do you really?) or when you start feeling claustrophobic as others keep taking/influencing your decisions (another discussion for another time).
While the former is both a blend of joy and fear, you typically start freaking out when you begin noticing the pattern around your life and take every decision cautiously as you understand the repercussions of your decisions. While some may call it the power to control your life, others see it as responsibility.
“With great power, comes great responsibility!”
Sorry, had to bring in Uncle Ben’s quotes from The Spiderman. Coming back to the topic, until this point in time, you always had things laid out on a platter.
The purpose of life was limited to competing with Sharma ji ka beta/beti, satisfying parent’s dreams by joining an engineering or medical degree (and then blaming things on them when something went wrong), and making memories out of whatever little time you find for yourselves with others on the same boat.
Even during the above times, all of us have either knowingly or unknowingly experienced the quarter-life crisis. Some of the possible indicators to identify if you have ever undergone or currently undergoing the phase could possibly be
- Asking yourselves, “What am I doing with my life?”
- Constantly trying make everything right in life.
- Wondering where you will be in the next 10 years.
- Worried about the road not taken
- If Paul Coelho’s “The Alchemist” makes a lot of sense to you 👼
among other symptoms.
One important element that all of us must understand is that we are all in the same boat or more specifically, the same journey, while the size of the boat may differ.
If you are worried if you should continue the rut or try out other options in life, a billionaire is worried if he should stay in the same business or try out other lucrative businesses. There is always a choice, it is just the stakes are at different levels when it comes to the repercussions of the decisions taken.
As Robert Frost had put it,
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
No individual can take both the decisions, you can only have a choice as to which road to choose and again it would be a very calculative decision based on how far you can see.
Here lies the actual problem, not many of us really know what is that we want to do or where is that we want to be in the next five or ten years (classical interview question, eh?).
Some of the obvious confusions that keep clouding our minds when we are trying to decide the future would be:
- If I choose this, will I love it in the future?
- Will I be good at it?
- Can I bring a positive change in the society?
and finally, one of the most important of all questions
- Will it help me to sustain myself for the future?
Woah, too many questions right? Now that you experience the freedom to take your own decisions, the stakes are high, as each of them could be life changing move.
With great freedom comes great uncertainty!
Half the uncertainty can be reduced once we have some clarity about our (true) purpose. What is it that will truly make us happy in the long run and give us a sense or reason for being.
One of the frameworks that helped me decide while facing the same questions in my quarter life crisis (still undergoing it) is Ikigai: Japanese secret to a long and happy life
As the authors describe it, ikigai is seen as the convergence of four primary elements. Your passion, mission, vocation and profession. (Deep stuff!)
When you start identifying things that would go under the appropriate sections of the Venn diagram, even though you might not come to a clear conclusion as to what it is that you want to do, you’ll at least be able to figure out what it is that you don’t want to do.
All the confusions, complexities and complications you experience right now, will give you a clarity and make you a better man/woman. As Robin Williams puts it in the Good Will Hunting,
“You’ll have bad times, but it will always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to”.
As a closing thought, I just want you to remember that amidst all the ambiguities, all you have to do is “never settle”. Though it might sound like a OnePlus label, you need to remember that people have been able to climb great heights only because they have always refused to settle with what it is given to them.
With great freedom, comes great uncertainty and the outcome boils down to your confidence, determination and occasionally a small sense of humour while facing the challenge to ease out the process. Now, what’s an article on Quarter life crisis, without ending it with a TED talk? 😜
Care to share your secret to successfully transcending quarter-life crisis?
This is a guest post submitted on PaperKin by Sankara Narayanan.
“Superman by day and Batman by night”, a tagline which best describes everything in Sankara’s life. Indulging in all things Operations Management, he aims to be the next big Ops guy.
He started off his journey as Head of Operations at Techstory.in, a premier media platform covering the various trends in the Indian Startup Ecosystem. He enjoys working with entrepreneurs who are focussed in solving real world problems and is eagerly waiting to see how tech is going to transform the world as we know it.
