One reason it rocks to be a twentysomething today

Feb 20, 2008 - 10:27 AM PST

I ran out of Family Guy reruns on my Tivo the other day and caved to watch a movie that really isn’t my style. Friends with Money was way too chick-flick-nothing-really-happens for me (Batman Begins, now that’s my kind of movie), but there was an exchange in there that stuck with me.

A fortyish, depressed Frances McDormand is in the car with her husband.

FMcD: “I’m just tired.”
Husband: “Of what?”
FMcD: “I just … I guess I feel like there’s no more wondering what it’s going to be like.”
Husband: “Like what’s going to be like?”
FMcD, softly: “My fabulous life.”

These days you might hear a lot about how challenging the twentysomething years can be. But the Frances McDormand exchange encapsulates, for me, one of the aspects of twentysomethinghood that rocks: the sense of wonder about your future.

Sure, you can get yourself caught up in what you think is a lack of direction, a feeling of helplessness, or levels of insecurity and doubt ranging from pestering to all-consuming. Conversely, you can view quarterlife as a time that is all about wondering what your fabulous life is going to be like. When else in your life are you relatively free of responsibilities, dependents, and obligations? When else are the potential career/romantic/social paths and detours so endlessly varied? When else is the vast majority of your life stretched out before you, with decades of adventures between you and the horizon?

Okay, that last one was a little cerebral, so let me put this differently. The Quarterlife Crisis ™, which I’ll probably post more about in future blogs, is healthy. What I mean by the term is simply the transition between young adulthood and adulthood, which for some people is a breeze, but for many people can be tricky. For most of us, quarterlife is a time when we try to figure out who we are and what we like.

Older adults like to accuse us of spending this time “navel-gazing,” or deride our worries and fears, calling us whiners for daring to admit that the 20’s aren’t as carefree as we had expected. I usually respond by pointing out that adults in the throes of the midlife crisis clearly “whine” about their lives, despite their fancy cars, corporate expense accounts, 2.5 kids and white picket fence, so to call us whiners for being scared and saying so seems awfully hypocritical.

As for the navel-gazing, I believe strongly that introspection is crucial. How can you discover who you are if you don’t stop and take the time to think about yourself? In fact, I’m optimistic about the way young adults are pausing to consider their lives before they make serious commitments. I’m confident that the current crop of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings isn’t going to have a midlife crisis at all. Why? Because unlike the generations that came before us, we’re not vaulting into marriages, long-standing careers, families, and home ownership as soon as we leave school. (There are many reasons for this, some of them economic, some of them cultural.) We delay all of these things, such that we have a longer time period during which we’re not adolescents, but we’re not really adults either. (Cue icky Britney song here.)

Because we have this extra time period – something no generation before us has had the luxury of experiencing – we’re confronting our inner demons and making decisions about our lives based on long-term consideration or trial and error. Unlike members of older generations, who made hasty leaps just out of school and only now, 20 or 30 years later, realize that their middle-aged lives don’t reflect their identity – thus the midlife crisis – we’re gauging our identity first and then creating lives that reflect who we are.

All of this is a way of saying that you can view quarterlife as a time of uncertainty – or you can view it as a time of possibility. And if you try to keep the latter perspective, then you’ll never have to lose that fabulous sense of wonder.

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