Vitamin We #4: Quarter-Life Crisis

It's graduation season again - The time when young people worldwide finish their studies in schools and begin their university of life!

These recent Gen-Z graduates are SPECIAL - they are Zoom natives, went through periods of lockdown when they needed friendships the most🙄, and have been witnessing the emergence of web3, creative renaissance, AI mass adoption, and possibly a reform in the global financial systems soon?

The vacuum of their missing campus life certainly brings an extra layer of uncertainty, in addition to the threat of AI that could replace the profession they were trained for sooner than expected. On the bright side, as we are now on the cusp of a new era, they are also the most pragmatic and self-reliant generation who are ready to adapt 💪 while cultivating their talents industriously behind the-scene. Plus, their guts to say NO to toxic hustle culture make me feel so hopeful🌟!

How do we ride the waves in times of change? I've been working with twentysomethings via career coaching for almost a decade now - and from my observation, the faster they can UNLEARN the "student mentality" of expecting a syllabus-like structure to be handed down or trying to come up with a close-to-perfect A+ answer before they commit, the smoother their transitions to adulthood can become.

So instead of falling for the illusion of control - thinking the harder we work, the more we'll gain control in life - why not choose to be a surfer in life 🏄‍♀️ 🏄‍♂️ and enjoy the tides?

The courageous stories you are going to read below will bring you a sense of rewilding that gets you closer to the core of who you are. Enjoy!

This could be a strange concept to many at first - after all we are not wild animals raised in a zoo?

But if we’ve ever felt “trapped” in life by:

🧳 the social pressure that makes us feel obliged to behave a certain way, look a certain way, think a certain way;

🧳 the cookie-cutter life path of “school-job-marry-kids-retire” with age markers that makes us question, “Is that what life is all about?!”;

then having an urge of wanderlust to throw ourselves into novel, immersive experiences makes perfect sense!

Yet, even when we know what we DON’T want, in our twenties, most of us don’t know what we DO want because we don’t even know who we are!

Rewilding is how we get closer to THE nature, as our attempt to grow closer to OUR nature so that we can figure out,

“Why am I here?”

“What makes me ME?”.

Our self-definition comes from the feedback we receive from the external world. Like having mirrors from all angles, the more interactive we are with a large variety of environments, cultures, and communities, the more concrete we can understand the multiple facets of who we are, just like characters in movies🎥 .

While exploring the meaning of our existence in relation to the vastness of the Universe, the act of rewilding allows us to have:

More intimate self-conversations, less opinions of others.

More shedding and un-doing, less complications.

More listening to our intuitions, less autopilot responses.

That’s why having grand adventures, especially spending extended time in the wild nature, can be so healing, so grounding for one’s self-identity in our individualization process, so that we can shed layers of conditioning to reconnect with the diamond we are within.

Now listen up: What is the Universe trying to whisper to us? (We definitely don’t want the Universe to yell at us later 🫣)

“In September 2022, I went on my first vacation alone and this was absolutely mind-changing.

My trip was to Toscane, which is a place I have been dreaming of my entire life.

This trip by myself helped me understand I had to do a 360 degrees change in my life. Starting from my job, my relationships, and everything you start questioning when you are 25.

I think traveling alone is a necessary experience to get to know better your goals, necessities, and desires.

Also, being alone gives you 100% time for yourself, doing what you want, managing your time as you want to, and spending time with whom you want to.

This is also very enriching when you are feeling overwhelmed by life.”

“I graduated from University in March 2020, a time when the world started to change.

Whilst all my peers were starting to get full-time, fancy 9-5 jobs in their respective fields, I decided to kick back for a few months and wait until things started to calm down in the world.

Sooner than later, I realized that things weren't getting any better, so by the end of that summer, I too started looking for a fancy full-time job. After all, that's what you're supposed to do after you graduate, right?!

This thinking led me to work 2 different 9-5 office jobs in marketing within the span of a year and a half. I thought that marketing was what I wanted to do with my life. And while I did enjoy the work for a period of time, I felt like something was missing. My soul wasn't being filled. I realized that in these jobs, I wasn't nurturing my natural gift, love and passion for creativity.

Fast forward to March 2022, I decided to quit, moved back home with my parents, and tried to create a career for myself that filled my cup. At this point, I had no idea what that was going to be but I was determined to make it happen.

I spent lots of time thinking about how I only have one life to live in this body, and how it can be anything I want it to be. This thinking led me to want a life where I am blessed with time, location and financial freedom. To enjoy the world and make an impact in a positive way.

I now work for myself as a full-time artist, content creator and curator. While there are a lot of ups and downs with what I do, I have never felt so filled with purpose in my life before.

My mission in life is to inspire others to live the creative life they want to live. I want to uplift other artists and creatives and let them know that the life they dream about living is in fact, possible.”

Idea #1 Identity Crisis & Identity Capital:

Identity Capital = A collection of personal assets about how we build ourselves, bit by bit, over time.

What brings an identity crisis is uncertainty, that breeds anxiety, and with anxiety, we tend to use distraction as the opium (can you see the vicious cycle and its detrimental effect on mental health?)

One of her clients shared,

"I feel like I'm in the middle of the ocean. As I could swim in any direction, but I can't see land on any side, so I don't know which way to go.” 

Jay suggested that identity crisis and identity capital can go together. Twentysomethings who take the time to explore and also have the nerve to make commitments along the way construct stronger identities. They have higher self-esteem and are more persevering and realistic.

Another way to build identity capital is through leveraging the strength of weak ties - people we have met or are connected to somehow but do not currently know well.

Weak ties are like bridges. You cannot see all the way across. They force us to communicate from a place of difference (P.22), to use elaborated speech that does not presume that the listener thinks in the same way or knows the same information as people we grew up with. We need to be more thorough when we communicate, and this requires more organization and reflection, which builds effective communication skills.

Our weak ties are usually the most beneficial when it comes to opening doors to opportunities and access to a network of people we need because there is much less overlap of contacts than our strong ties.

Idea #2 "My life is up to me" carries a certain terror:

And a defense against this terror - is to tell yourself that you do not know what you want to do with your life. It's a resistance to admitting that the possibilities are not endless (P.33).

"Above all else in my life, I feared being ordinary. I finally got it. There's a reason everybody in the world lives this way - or at least starts out this way - because this is how it's done." ~ From Ian, a client of Jay.

"Follow your dreams!", "Reach for the stars!" , "You are the best! The sky is the limit!" are undefined encouragement that is not helpful and leads less to courage than they did to confusion. Also, the problem with choice overload makes the matter worse, as demonstrated by the famous Jam experiment that found out that when fewer options(6) were available, more people purchased jam than when they were offered 24 flavors to choose from.

What would you do with your life if you didn't win the lottery? What might you enjoy enough that you won't mind working at it for years to come?

Idea #3 Our personalities change MORE during the twnentysomething years than at any time before or after:

This is big news because conventional wisdom tells us that childhood or adolescence is when our personalities are on the move. Turns out our twenties are our best chance for change!

The frontal lobe of our brains, where we do forward-thinking, especially in uncertain situations, is still a work in progress in our twenties.

MRI scans also show that twentysomething brains react more strongly to negative information than the brains of older adults.

Therefore the workplace could make many twentysomethings feel so anxious and incompetent - especially for academic high-achievers who are used to receiving recognition by measurements of a relatively narrower array of competencies in school than in the workplace. A typical workweek could create micro-traumas 🤕

Feeling better comes from investing in adulthood i.e. making adult commitments - to employers, coworkers, partners, leases, roommates etc, and these commitments shift how we are in the world and who we are inside. The investments we make in work and love trigger personality maturation.

Remarks: The book I have is the first edition, published in 2012 when I was having my quarter-life crisis. The Author published an updated edition in 2021, and I believe in the post-pandemic era, with AI mass adoption and new research discoveries in neuroscience, the core messages of this book will continue to evolve in order to stay relevant.