I turned 25 in January this year and now that I have completed my education and have a job, that puts me in the “settled” category of the natural order of things. Honestly, I do no feel that way.

Recently, I was watching Taylor Tomlinson’s Netflix special “Quarter-life Crisis”, which was hilarious and I didn’t really understand the deeper meaning till I actually got to thinking. I am of the similar age as her and facing similar problems in life. She makes this joke about how in the mid twenties everyone expects you to be the adult but you have no gut feeling or the intuition to tell you what is right from wrong, and that totally resonated with me. There is so much indecision in many aspects of life that it feels like running around as a headless chicken.

Does that mean I too am at the quarter-life crossroads? I am trying to avoid using the term “crisis” as it has this stressful connotation vs crossroads that sounds a bit positive.

Everybody around my age or younger is getting married left and right, but my brain is still trying to figure things out. Getting hitched and being responsible for another person in your life just blows my mind right now. Also, choosing your partner for the long run is like taking a risk knowing only a few things and hoping everything works out in the end. How would you even know that he/she is the perfect partner for you?

Comparing yourself with your peers who work in bigger companies with better pay but not so great work life (based on their description). I then wonder whether my job is better with awesome people even though I have a lower pay. Should one always try to find the greener grass on the other side. Is it though? If not, does this make one complacent?

There are so many issues the world is facing now ranging from global warming, civil war in the middle east, plastic straws, Amazon fires, and now Covid-19. All these are important but the list is unending and exhausting to keep up with. The moment you take a break the world jumps onto you saying, remaining silent is not an option. How does one care about all the problems of the world as well as ones own issues?

Also, I feel adult life in general is difficult, you have to take so many small decisions that you took for granted when you were younger because your parents took care of them. You meet so many new people who have an equally complicated life as you. How does one try to adjust to their behavior while being empathetic to their problems?

I always believed that your outlook in life should be positive and your glass should always be half full. But I recently learned about toxic positivity, where being too positive is considered toxic for yourself. How does one even find the line between being just enough and too much?

How much ever I would like to see this tangled mess in my brain as an opportunity for improvement, the will power to actually make it into one is a little hard. The internet will tell you a million solutions to deal with this mess like meditation, therapy, journaling, doodling, painting, books, and many more, leading to more confusion and indecision. After talking to friends who are in the same age group, guess what, they have the same indecisive, gutless problems. In a way, it does make me feel better that I am not alone in this and it is just the quarter life crossroad in everyone’s life.

I know a few years down the line when I will look back at this post, my gut and my intuition will be laughing at my 25 year old self for being so naive.

How do you/did you manage to choose your direction at these quarter-life crossroads?

I believe, in the end, all we can do is make mistakes, learn from them, and not repeat them.