Dear Dr. Reality,
What do you think of this notion of a quarterlife crisis?
Curious
Dear Curious,
We narrate our lives with chapter headings provided by society, and then we tie our unhappiness to a change in chapters. It’s a pretty close analogy to the way we speak of having a good day or a bad day, a good year or a bad year, but rarely do we think that we just had a good 37 minutes or a bad four-and-a-half hours.
If your chapter headings aren’t working for you, change them. For example, if the dog next door starts barking every night when the nearby saloon closes and the drunks stumble down your street looking for their cars, you will feel every day ends badly if you punctuate your assessments to begin when the alarm clock goes off. You have a choice about this; the Jews, for example, start each day when the sun goes down, not when it goes up (undoubtedly because life begins when the kids go to bed). So start your day when the dog starts barking and end it when your head hits the pillow and you will have one day after another that started rough and ended well. Okay, okay, it’s a bad example. Get the dog one of those collars that’ll shock it when it barks. But you get my drift.
Many so-called life crises occur because we expected something else, something better.
Late life crisis: I wish I had a dollar for every time my 89-year-old father has said of old age, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.” This will make for a crisis.
Midlife crisis: If you don’t know that you are going to have to find some new sources of reinforcement after you get good at your job, your marriage turns into chore management, and your salary prospects level out, get smart. Criminy—why aren’t they teaching that in school?
Quarterlife crisis: If you thought life was going to be one long T-ball game where everyone gets a gold star just for trying and then you discovered that only the scions of wealthy families and really hard workers who are gluttons for feedback are living in swanky apartments in major cities while those looking for their gold star just for trying are living in their parents’ basement, and if this discovery makes you whine to your parents so you can get yet another gold star from them, and if they help you manage your desuetude by inventing a malady called a quarterlife crisis for which the treatment is, you guessed it, more gold stars, why, then you are going to have a quarterlife crisis. But don’t come crying to me when you go to see a therapist for help with your quarterlife crisis and it turns out that your therapist doesn’t know a damn thing about therapeutic change because she went into the only field on earth where you can rise to the top getting gold stars just for showing up.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
Like it! And, here’s a tag to Michael’s post (see attached). How to change one’s life without having to change chapter headings. Don’t do as they say.
-john
I think curious expected something else; something gold starlike from Dr. Reality. If “Curious” truly is curious, he will reply to your reply and will do so with another question and not something like “you misunderstood my question, and were dismissive of my real crisis, so you obviously are the wrong person to ask for advice.” “Curious,” I hope that after you picked your jaw up off your key board, you had a good chuckle at yourself. Real feedback should be helpful, and can often be funny!