The Quarter-Life Crisis

I turn 25 in October.

Everyone keeps congratulating me on my prefrontal cortex growing in, as if that means I’ll suddenly become more decisive as a person even though I’m a Libra (not that I remotely identify with astrology).

The reactions I get are mixed: my dad is expectant, as if this birthday means I’ll have finally grown up. My friends are shocked, because I’m still an undergraduate in Yale College and they sometimes forget I’m (comparatively) old. The females in my life are empathetic, acknowledging the clangor of a biological clock moving forward. The younger ones are smug, relieved that it’s not them yet, while the older ones shake their heads, knowing the worst (best?) is yet to come. The men are oblivious to any nuance, as usual.

i.
My mom once told me that there’s a difference between growing up and growing old. Some people let time pass them by, she said, without ever processing what that time has done for them, or what they’ve done in that time. Aging is both an active and passive process, and the ones who age gracefully are the ones who wear their age with pride, not shame.
But it’s not that getting older feels shameful to me — it’s just that there’s a weight to it. I feel like I’ve been experiencing my quarter-life crisis for a decade, except now I’ve lost the cheeky cover of precocity. That could also be the milieu of our generation, though: having access to everyone else’s timelines has perhaps made us cynical too soon, and worried too fast. We are prematurely nihilistic, because we are always aware of where we are not, where we could be instead, and where we won’t ever be at this point.

ii.
With every passing year, I find it harder to separate the idea of aging from gender. Because it’s not that I’m getting older, it’s that I’m getting older as a woman: becoming more free and more limited, more powerful and more burdened, more secure and more uncertain, all at once.
Kate Winslet says women get more beautiful as they get older “because our faces become more a part of who we are. Our faces have more life, and more history.” She finds wrinkles incredibly beautiful. Unfortunately, I think her old co-star would vehemently disagree. If we’re going off track record.
Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, the actress who plays Sylvie in Emily in Paris, says the show is ultimately about loneliness: “the freedom women have now is bittersweet. It’s like okay fun, but what about depth and love?” She says the difference between the kind of freedom French women have and the kind American women have is in the “attitude of being able to own [their] freedom.” But what does it mean to own your freedom? To own your own age? How do you derive a sense of agency over something that happens with or without your consent?
I keep referencing celebrities not because I think they are the arbiters of authority on this topic, but because I think the actress mentality of self-imposed surveillance has spread to the masses: technology provides every individual a platform and an automatic audience, which means we are all more acutely self-aware of our image than ever before. How we perceive others perceiving us is a thinking pattern we have by now implicitly internalized.
We love the character of Sylvie therefore not in spite of her age, but because of it. She wears her skin and her scars as well as she wears her shawls and her shoes. She is strong before she is beautiful, and grew up in an era, pre-social-media, that young women are nostalgic for. Plus, her fit is so much better than Emily’s.

iii.
My friend once told me that every year since she’s turned 13, she’s cried on her birthday. Every year on this supposedly happy day, she experiences a wave of sadness and alienation for having passed a stage of life she can now never get back to. At the time, I didn’t fully understand her: why be sad when you could be celebrated instead?
But now that I’m here, on the eve of this semi-important number, I understand that milestones will just always be bittersweet for the deeply sentimental. When asked how he confronted aging, Keanu Reeves said: “With a wonder and a terror.” When asked about how she felt about aging, Cher said: “It sucks. F*ck wisdom.” Both seem right: I feel sad, but also grateful. Annoyed, but also calm. The moral of any movie with a character stuck in a time loop is that change is always good, and more important than good — it’s natural. Being stuck in stasis is the antithesis of being human, because if you’re not changing then you’re not living, and if you’re not living
then what the hell are you doing?
At the same time, Phil Connors and Adaline might’ve been perfectly content with their immortality if everyone else around them had been immortal too. What’s painful isn’t the presence or lack thereof of aging itself, but the prospect of aging without context, or without community. Time doesn’t hurt. Loneliness does.
Getting older sometimes feels like drifting further and further apart from a shared sense of the future with the people around us. What’s the baseline of maturity, or of generational solidarity, when people start to venture down different paths? What these movies help us do, thus ultimately, is to remind us of relativity: because maybe we think we’re lonely now, but there’s always a version of life that’s lonelier than ours. Spun in a more positive light: we’re never as lonely as we think.

iv.
25 is the age my parents got married. It’s the age my dad started teaching, and my sister got promoted. It’s the age some people start families, and others start businesses. I also realize that in many ways it’s a completely arbitrary number. But even if comparison is the thief of joy, it’s still the basis for most of all human understanding of ourselves. So I know 25 will bring new layers of loneliness — but I hope it brings new layers of love too.
Confucius had this to say on aging: “At 15, I had my mind bent on learning. At 30, I stood firm. At 40, I had no doubts. At 50, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At 60, my ear was receptive to truth. At 70, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”
At 25, I hope to overcome choice paralysis. Getting a job would also be nice.
I don’t know what Confucius would make of my current stage of crisis. How would he respond to my ongoing malaise of confusion? Maybe he’d say 25 is the new 15, because I still have so much learning to do.
Or maybe he’d recognize the truth, as I think I do, in Milan Kundera’s take: “when someone is young, they are not yet capable of conceiving of time as a circle, instead thinking of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons. They do not yet sense their life contains just a single thread. They will come to realize this when their life begins to enact its first variations.”