Is she for real?
No one gets to claim a quarter-life crisis. There’s no such thing. The self absorption required to complain that your twenties aren’t what you envisioned them to be is astounding.
When did this vision even take take place? After the prom? During freshman bio class? Did she really expect her teenage visions of her twenties to hold up?
And enough about the marriage/house/children nonsense. No one should get married before they’re thirty. The incessant need to match your friend’s marital, occupational and parental status generates more unhappiness in the world than can possibly be imagined.
Who gives a damn if your sister was married and owned a house when she was 25? Are you an individual or a sheep? Live your own freakin’ life.
Here is a brief, chronological summation of my twenties:
- Employed as a McDonald’s manager
- Arrested for a crime I did not commit
- Fired from my job as McDonald’s manager
- Homeless
- Taken in by a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Employed as bank teller and McDonald’s manager
- Worked 90 hours a week for two years to pay attorney
- Robbed, tortured and beaten at gunpoint
- Post traumatic stress disorder that lasts 15 years
- Tried and acquitted for a crime I did not commit
- Moved to Connecticut
- Employed as a legal copy services delivery boy
- Employed as a bank teller
- Married my future ex-wife
- Employed as McDonald’s manager
- Attended Manchester Community College while working full time
- Attended Trinity College while working more than fulltime
- Graduated
- Hired as an elementary school teacher
Not exactly what I envisioned, either. Certainly not ideal. But I suspect that a lot of people would have lists like this.
Perhaps not as fraught for violence and legal challenges, but an interesting list nonetheless.
But at no point did I wonder if I was suffering from a quarter-life crisis.
