The twentysomething "crisis"

So the post-college phase of my life continues. I refuse to call it my "step into the real world" because seriously, aside from the fact that I couldn't have possibly been living in a fake world throughout a decade of schooling, I'm still finding a way to snap out of my cavalier sense of things. Well, some things, at least.

The only sort of temporal happiness I've gotten so far was receiving my first paycheck. It feels liberating to have money (for the first time. Haha). Suddenly, entering stores isn't such a "lonely" (for lack of a more appropriate term to how I truly feel) thing, because I can actually buy things now, instead of just staring at them. As for the rest of my work, I am only beginning to taste the very hem of the "real world" (fine I will refer to that term for what philosophers would otherwise call the workaday world). Not very fun. Most of the time I'm still groping for reasons I can't disclose.

I'm now beginning to understand the dilemma of the quarterlife crisis. Such balderdash, I originally thought. Yes, there is that series of strange emotions that twentysomethings reading this will understand and relate to. But I never really thought that it would be so serious, so pressing, that people who make sniglets actually had to give it a name! I'm understanding it with clarity now because it has gotten to that point where it simply isn't just a cliche anymore. There is that need for constant self-improvement, yet, there is also that desire to do something you love. When these don't exactly fall within the same pie, what must be done?

The times we are living in contributes to this strange twentysomething "crisis". Really, it's just one of those phases, like puberty. A crisis is like, a house getting burned. Anyway, to continue. Can you imagine the 15th Century Europeans aged 20 and above going through this? Of course not. Their paths would have been set by then! The women will be married and rearing children. The men will be running something, depending on their social class. It could be a country, a business, a lab...whatever. Then again, it probably isn't fun to get married at 14. I can't imagine when their menarche could have possibly started, if they can have children at that age. It must have been a pretty strange developmental cycle. Infancy-childhood-prepubescence-adulthood. They just skipped the whole adolescence and pre-adulthood stage, and that to me, means they skipped a whole lotta lessons (or heartaches, depending on how you look at it). This whole pressure of "establishing a career" (really, a career is just a path. whatever happened to spontaneity? that was how the road less travelled was discovered!), and the difficulty of "finding a job" or moving from one job to another, or shifting from one career to another.... yadda yadda yadda. Is it not an awful lot to expect a 20 year old fresh from college to have his entire life mapped out? Exactly. Hence, the quarterlife dilemma. The thing is, some of us want to take our time to discover what we really should be doing out there. Experiment. While we see this as enriching, the world may not think of it that way. In fact, they might think it is awfully standoffish of us. Unfortunately, the external forces would rather we hasten the entire process and just get on the next train, while knowing which train we're definitely supposed to be on.

I don't know how this entry came to be. The words just sort of popped out. I guess it's just an accumulation of my frustrations. There are things we shut off or at least turn volumes down because of our inability to see it as part of our horizon. But what if it's the right path to tread after all?