The Full Bodied Whine

A young friend was raving the other day about a website community she’s recently become involved in. Now my experience with websites and message boards has thus far been pretty unremarkable and occasionally has resulted in terror-soaked dreams of crazy stalkers and unbalanced basement geeks. However, the site to which my friend has become a frequent poster has been written up in the New York Times. In my world, that implies some sort of credibility.

By the time I typed in the URL, I was already confused – and that doesn’t usually happen to me unless I’m visiting The Onion. The subject of the website? "Quarterlife Crisis". I had to find out what was going on, and find out I did…

I just don’t know if I want a boyfriend right now. I’m just so busy, you wouldn’t hardly believe. I mean, there are lots of guys out there but I just don’t think I can add one more thing to my busy schedule.

I can’t believe I never came to this site before. It made me cry when I read all the posts from other girls just like me who are going through the exact same thing. I feel so much better about life.

I’m just dying. I don’t know why everything has had to go so wrong all at once. I’m so grateful to find a website where I can be supported by such thoughtful people. I would just die without this place. You are like family to me.

According to the website this is precisely the sort of questioning and confusion that serves as the basis of a quarterlife crisis.

And here I thought it was just part of being awake.

But they're not kidding here. They're actually slapping a 'Disorder of the Moment' title onto something we all go through in an attempt to make us feel that much more insecure and defective. And apparently, the "classic symptoms of a quarterlife crisis are feelings of indecision, helplessness, uncertainty and anxiety." First of all, can we really claim that the symptoms are "classic" when they've just invented the disorder? Second, aren't all those feelings just part of being twenty-something? The period in life when you decide what you really, really want, change it a thousand times, worry about it and then wind up with something totally different?

Sure, some people have it worse. They're called worriers. And psychiatrists have all kinds of nice pills to help take the edge of the anxiety. Certainly if someone is obsessed about their failures and their uncertain future, then they are probably obsessive and should seek treatment immediately.

As if it wasn't alarming enough to read the message boards on the site, I’ve since learned that the concept of a quarterlife crisis is now old news. One article proclaims that dot.com-ers are particularly vulnerable to it. Well, duh. If I spent the first half of my twenties slaving away at a dot.com that promptly slipped right off the map at the turn of the millennium, I'd be a little anxious, too.

Stepping back from it all, it occurs to me that maybe I'm just pissed off because there is a new crisis with a funky name and, chronologically speaking, I no longer qualify. That means I'll have to wait for midlife.

Anyone up for a one-third life crisis?