What it’s like having a quarter life crisis

You’ve successfully graduated high school and gotten through the ugly time of puberty. Now you’re suffering through a whole new level of hell, also known as university.

You’re half way through your major when one day you wake up with a very new, very scary perspective of life.

Well, there’s no need to panic because we’ve all had it. Here are a few signs that you too, are suffering from a quarter life crisis.

Question every decision you’ve ever made

Suddenly you find yourself unable to sleep at night because you can’t stop thinking about all the times you could have done something differently. Like maybe you should have studied harder through high school. Maybe you should have chosen a different university, a different major.

Choices start haunting you as you live your monotonous, average life and think about how spectacular you could have made it had you done something differently.

Now that you’ve started regretting a few moments of the past, you start analysing every decision you have to make in the future to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes again. Because now, suddenly, you’ve started thinking about the weight of all your decisions and the impact it can have on your life.

You constantly feel like time is running out and that you have to make sure you don’t do anything that’ll further slow you down.

What happens after graduation?

Since you’re questioning your life already, why not also think about the very near future. However exciting the idea of graduating seemed a few days ago, now, the idea seems daunting. Because then a question arises. What do you do when you graduate?

With your new perspective comes this whole new definition of responsibilities that you now have to worry about. You start to think about the idea of stability, the concept of which is applied in every aspect in your life. Financially, career wise and emotionally. So you start to think about how you can acquire it. Questions berate you.

What do you do when you’re done? What’s the next step? How do you find a job?

Then there’s that one question that scares the living hell out of everyone.

What if you can’t? Do you even know what you want?

When it comes to making decisions you have to do them based on the things you want in your life. So then arises the next question. Do you know what you want?

Even though most of us act like it, we don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t decide whether our dreams are too ambitious or too unrealistic. And some of us suffer from the problem of not having a dream at all, of not knowing what we want.

Whichever category you fall under, time has come to pick and choose which goals you want to pursue and which of them you need to leave behind.

Everyone else is more successful than you

You take one look at everyone around you or you watch one mildly inspirational movie and now you’ve started to think about how, compared to them, you haven’t done anything. You haven’t followed your dreams, you haven’t achieved anything you can brag about and your life is half gone! What have you been doing?

You scroll through your news feed and see how your friends have accomplished so much more than you. You watch the news and you learn about children half your age who have achieved more than most people can do in a lifetime. And now all you can think about is growing old and having nothing to brag about to your children.

You haven’t changed the world and you haven’t helped people. You’re not famous and you haven’t done anything to make a mark for yourself in the world. You’re afraid of never feeling the sense of satisfaction that you get when you’ve done something worthwhile in your life.

Ready for the next scary question?

What if you amount to nothing?

Setting priorities

You’ve now come to realise that the time you have on Earth isn’t all that much and you have to start cutting out anything and anyone who’s wasting any of your precious time.

Then begins the process of detoxing. You rid yourself of bad habits and toxic friends. You stop investing in people unless they’re worth it.

You start to realise that putting time in yourself is the only way you can ever actually accomplish anything so that’s exactly what you do. You invest time in yourself by putting effort into learning the things you want and into getting a job somewhere. You start deciding what you want and start taking the necessary steps to take an initiative for a possible career.

Then, one of two things happen depending on what kind of a person you are. Either you stay committed to all of your new commitments and make something of yourself, or, this lasts approximately a few months before you go back to just chilling. Responsibilities? Meh, you’ll figure it out later.

Regardless of what kind of person you are and what decisions you’ve made, you have nothing to worry about. These things happen and you either do something about it now or later. You’ll figure it out. All the scary questions that you’ve read in this article are a good sign because you thinking about them is already you taking responsibility. You’re aware of the life you’re living and how you can better live it. This is the first step and there are many more to follow. Just make sure not to let it suck you into a pit of depression! Use it as motivation and have a good life!

Syeda Erum Noor is dangerously oblivious and has no sense of time. Send help at erum.noor1998@gmail.com