When I was a kid, I would hear my parents and grandparents speak of a “midlife” crisis.
It might be about someone buying a Corvette convertible or getting a divorce and dating someone half their age, etc. In my mind I always considered the term “midlife” to be at the age of 50! Like I said, I was young!
As I got older, I realized I didn’t want to live to be 100! So, midlife took on a different definition, from high 30?s to low 40?s. Not to be outdone, Millennials have coined a new term — “Quarter-Life” Crisis. This is that extremely difficult and challenging time you have around the age of 25 years of age.
Tips for dealing with “quarter-life” crisis
Knowing how challenging it was for me to be 25-years-old and having no responsibilities, mortgage, kids, tons of free time, I wanted to give HR Pros some tips on helping your own employees through this most difficult part of their life. Here’s goes:
- If you’ve been having this overwhelming feeling of, “Hey, I’m 25 and haven’t really accomplished anything in my life,” don’t be afraid, because you are not a freak. In fact. 22 percent of people your age haven’t accomplished anything either, and the other 78 percent of your friends who have accomplished “something” are lying about it on their Tumblr.
- Feeling completely paralyzed by indecision? Again, completely normal. You feel this way because you have no real life experience on which to draw upon to make actual real meaningful decisions. This feeling will go away in about 10-15 years, after you have many failed decisions to learn from.
- Getting bored with your friends? That’s all right – they’re bored with you as well. It’s because you have nothing to talk about, yet. Get married, have some kids, buy a house; now you can be boring with each other on all those topics! Nothing makes your friends less boring than to hear about baby bowel movements and having to replace your water heater!
- Starting to feel differently about dating? You should! Statically speaking, by 27-years-old every good potential married mate is already taken and you start to get into the idiots that got married at 21 and 22-years-old who are now getting divorced. Yuck! Who wants a used partner? Not you. Here’s a Pro Tip: Lower your standards. If you’re 25 and no one has popped the question yet, you’ve got some issues.
- Do you have sudden, intense fear of failure? You should know this will never go away. Well, it might go away if one of two things happen: A) You win a large lottery ($5 million plus – smaller ones will just be a tax headache and potentially still have to make you work at your young age); or, B) You marry extremely rich (Which is called the Spouse Lottery, and they think it’s really for love and don’t make you sign a prenup).
And don’t believe all those crappy motivational sayings about “The only failure is to not try.” There are much bigger failures than not trying! Trying and being completely inept is a much bigger problem!
The reality is if you do absolutely nothing, 99 percent of decisions will make themselves and you don’t have to take the blame! (Pro Tip #2)
This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.