Read the full transcript of artist Imran Nuri’s talk titled “How Gen Z Can Navigate A Quarter-Life Crisis” at TEDxEmory 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Misconception of Midlife Crisis
We hear about the midlife crisis all the time, synonymous with the bright red convertible sports car. We see movies fully focused on the theme of the midlife crisis, like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Crazy Stupid Love,” and even more recently, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.” As great as those movies are, studies show that only 10 to 20% of adults over the age of 39 ever actually have a midlife crisis. Only 10 to 20%.
And if you’re wondering why a 20-something kid is on stage talking about midlife crises, it’s because what I believe we should be more focused on as a society is a different kind of life crisis.
The Quarter-Life Crisis: A Common Experience
First, let’s think about whether this sounds familiar. You graduate high school or college and you enter the workforce full-time for the first time. While that first year is understandably challenging as you adjust to being your own person, you eventually get into a sort of groove with things.
You wake up, you go to work, or more recently, you start work from home. You finish work, make some dinner, you get a workout in, maybe you watch some TV, and you go to bed. You repeat this generally Monday through Friday. You might do something fun with your friends on the weekend, only for the dreadful Sunday scaries to hit right before you continue in another week of the working routine.
And you do this for a year or two or more, and then one day, it hits you. Is this what the rest of my life is going to look like?
Am I happy? Am I doing what I want with my life? Am I supposed to be married right now? What is going on? You’re having a quarter-life crisis.
You might combat these confusing and challenging feelings by picking up new hobbies, going on a spontaneous trip, quitting your job, or other seemingly impulsive decisions.
Society’s Perception vs. Reality
American society will look at those impulsive and sometimes risky decisions as immature, irresponsible, and straying from the career-building path that you should be on. But it’s my belief that the quarter-life crisis, with its many challenges and confusion and frustration and anger and all these horrible feelings, is actually the greatest opportunity that we have to live the vast majority of our adulthood feeling fulfilled.
A few years ago, LinkedIn ran a study asking people age 25 to 33 if they had ever experienced a quarter-life crisis. 6,000 people responded, and 75% of them said yes, they had experienced a quarter-life crisis. 75% of people experienced a quarter-life crisis, whereas only 10% to 20% experienced a midlife crisis, despite the fact that we always hear about the midlife crisis.
The Statistics of Quarter-Life Crisis
The average age of when those respondents said that they had it was 27 years old. 59% of the respondents said that their primary reason was that they didn’t know what to do next in their life or in their career. 44% also said that they felt like they were stuck in a rut. 43% also said they felt like they hadn’t traveled enough.
So, what did those 75% of the 6,000 respondents who had a quarter-life crisis do about that quarter-life crisis? Well, the largest majority, about a third, switched their careers entirely. And think about that for a second. Imagine getting a degree, going into a job, and working that same job year after year after year, only for it to completely switch, something completely different. Easier said than done.
The next largest majority, also around a third, went on vacation or took an extended trip. Now, over half of them also indicated that they wanted advice about what to do next or how to handle their quarter-life crisis, yet they didn’t know where to go for that, which blows my mind because so many people are beyond their 30s who have already gone through their quarter-life crisis, who could probably be great mentors and sources of guidance for somebody experiencing it, and yet 50% said that they didn’t know where to go for that advice.
Personal Experience with Quarter-Life Crisis
My quarter-life crisis happened at the age of 24, and it happened as a result of a few major factors and many smaller factors. Some of those big ones were, for example, graduating college in May 2020, right at the start of the pandemic. I always like to tell people I went on spring break and didn’t come back, not because I partied too hard in Miami or Vegas, but because, of course, the whole world shut down. I said goodbye to some friends thinking I’d see them in a week and didn’t see many of them for years. A lot of us went through the same thing. It was traumatizing.
I started a non-profit startup as a student that I ran full-time after graduating, too, that I had to shut down. I spent thousands of hours building and running this thing only for it to fail. That was devastating, to create something just to throw it away. And, of course, after that, I got a full-time job that should have looked awesome on paper, should have been an incredible experience, and in reality was very frustrating and unfulfilling.
All these factors and more compounded into my quarter-life crisis where I felt frustrated and confused and directionless and angry. And in the midst of all these horrible feelings, I asked myself one very big question to elicit the rawest response as to what I wanted most out of life. And that question was, if I knew I had one year left to live, what would I do with it? What would I do with my final year? All of us want to believe that we will get to live 80 healthy years, but that’s not true.
Taking Action: A Journey of Self-Discovery
I ended up answering that question for myself by quitting my full-time job, taking out a personal loan, and leaving everything behind to travel to all of the lower 48 U.S. states to ask 1,000 complete strangers about what they know now that they wish they knew earlier. In other words, I asked 1,000 strangers for life advice based on their own experiences.
And as an artist, I wanted to photograph every single one of them to immortalize the fact that we had met. I would shake their hand and move on, one by one by one, 1,000 times. It took me 84 days to drive 15,298 miles, living in the front seat of my Toyota Camry, sleeping at rest areas, to ask 1,000 strangers for life advice.
And I can tell you with full certainty that embracing my quarter-life crisis by traveling, by experiencing the world, by facing my uncertainty head-on was the best way to move past my rut. I can tell you with full certainty that doing something as crazy and risky as quitting my job to live off of a personal loan, to live in the front seat of my Camry, to talk to strangers, was a far better way to figure out more of who I am and who I wanted to be than it would have been to just power through a job that I didn’t like.
The Value of Discomfort and Self-Reflection
Embracing my quarter-life crisis by pushing myself radically out of my comfort zone and existing in that space of discomfort was the best way to get used to an expanded comfort zone, to reflect on who I had been and decide who I would be moving forward.
I had so much time to reflect in those 15,298 miles of driving and in that time I came to some very important conclusions for myself that I also knew were best for me but would probably upset other people in my life. For example, I grew up in a devout Muslim household and I came to terms during that trip with no longer wanting to be a part of that religion that I grew up with. I came to terms with not wanting a traditional linear career. I came to terms with the fleeting nature of life itself.
I am no longer afraid of the future and much less afraid of wasting my life away. I came away from fully embracing my quarter-life crisis, unafraid of any obstacle that life could possibly throw at me and now I get to live out the rest of my life, hopefully a healthy 80 to 100 years with that pure inner confidence.
Embracing the Quarter-Life Crisis
Now I’m not saying that every 20-something experiencing a quarter-life crisis should quit their job and take out a personal loan and live in their car and talk to strangers. That’s kind of wild but the reality of being a young adult in America is that until you’re 18 and if you go to college, maybe until you’re 22, you are told exactly what to do every hour of every day until that moment.
The quarter-life crisis is not just a pressure to conform to societal expectations, it’s a realization that for the first time in your life, nobody actually has the authority to tell you what to do or who to be. For the first time in your life, you can quit your job, live in a car and talk to strangers. For the first time in your life, you can switch your career entirely. For the first time in your life, you can be whoever you want and reinvent yourself as often as you want.
As a society, especially in America, we need to more fully embrace and accept the quarter-life crisis as the greatest, most important chance for us to become the most fulfilled versions of ourselves. For those of you beyond your 30s, think about how much more joy and fulfillment you would have had if you had given yourself the chance in your 20s and early 30s to take huge risks and explore new identities. It’s not too late, that’s what the midlife crisis is for.
But for those of you in your 20s who either haven’t experienced this yet or are currently experiencing it, I encourage you to move through those feelings, those wildly uncomfortable and challenging and frustrating and angering feelings, knowing that you will come away from it as a better version of yourself.
However, you decide to define better, not what your parents think, not what society thinks, what you want that better to be. I encourage you to move through those feelings of simply not knowing with a sense of endless possibility and to utilize that crisis as an opportunity to try new things without needing something new to stick with you for a lifetime. A new job doesn’t have to become a new career. A new place to live doesn’t have to become your permanent home.
And your new hobbies can be completely dismissed if you try them and decide that they’re just not for you. Everything new that you try that works or doesn’t work is you moving in a direction to create the best and most fulfilled version of yourself. And make no mistake, it’s not about finding yourself in the chaos of it all, it’s about creating yourself in the process.
And that process is guaranteed to be awful. It’s going to be emotionally exhausting. It’s going to be frustrating. It’s going to be angering. There’s no way around that.
And still, we can utilize it as an opportunity to create the best versions of ourselves. So let’s move forward to the future. Let’s embrace the quarter life crisis and let’s create the most extraordinary versions of ourselves that we can possibly be. I can’t wait to see how our society transforms when we do.
