Quarter-Life Crisis: Silly, strange and inevitable
In the first installment of her column “Quarter-Life Crisis,” Sharis Hsu ’25 defines the term and the beauty of being the punchline to your own joke.
I used to think of a quarter-life crisis as a punchline.
It was the term I pulled out of my back pocket when I changed my major (again) and revoked my pre-med status for the seventh or eighth time in a quarter.
A stereotypical quarter-life crisis looks like panic attacks in office cubicles and reckless spending on plane tickets to “find yourself” in another country. It’s impulsively cutting your hair, breaking up with your partner and deciding you weren’t cut out for corporate America.
Quarter-life crises are theatrically comical.
And then there are the hobbies.
Pottery classes, marathon training, pickleball — these are the hobbies that attract every young adult in the midst of an existential crisis. There’s that one friend who starts baking elaborate sourdough loaves even though they don’t like bread. Another becomes a rock-climbing addict. One goes backpacking across Europe instead of enrolling in classes.
These drastic “quests” seem like the perfect remedy to life becoming stagnant.
Despite my youth, I am no stranger to the quarter-life crisis. See 35-mile bike ride from Stanford back to my childhood home as evidence. It seems oddly inevitable and more chaotic that most coming of age movies make it out to be.
There’s nothing wrong with experiencing a quarter-life crisis.
Perhaps, I will become the first to advocate that this demonized struggle and these strange coping hobbies can be formative (and fun for you friends to witness). It’s the realization that you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want in life and you can keep trying things even in your adult age.
The terrifying quarter-life crisis typically arrives in the early 20s to 30s.
Assuming that Stanford students are also overachieving in this aspect, we’re all going through this crisis together!
From the strange, to the silly, to the nitty gritty, I will be diving into the experience of a quarter-life crisis and the unsuspecting hobbies that spring from it. Whether it’s picking up a random obsession or taking a solo trip abroad, it’s all part of the messy, unpredictable process of growing up.
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