After the age of twenty-one, life begins to be measured not by ages, but by crises. The first for many of us is the quarter-life crisis. The period in every 20-somethings life when you search for your true purpose. If you’re like me when I was facing the quarter-life crisis, running away to somewhere warm seems like the best option. Instead of running away to a beach or getting an ill-thought-out tattoo, listen to Director of Counseling Services Dr. Tim Morenz and Chair of Philosophy and Religion Dr. Carter Aikin. Their strategies to fight the quarter-life crisis will help anyone wanting to discover their life’s purpose.
Morenz suggested finding a person who can be an advisor, or a person you can talk to during this trying time. Journaling is also an effective tool in figuring out your answers to the important questions in life: “On one side you could ask the questions, Who am I?, Why am I here? or Where am I going?, and then on another side you could write, Who do I want to be? Where do I want to go? and How will I know when I get there?” Morenz said, “Part of that process is doing some really solid and maybe even scary introspection, and obviously having… somebody you can trust that you could talk to about this.”
Talk to someone you trust and talk to yourself by journaling your fears. When I was going through my quarter-life crisis, I didn’t have anyone I felt I could talk to, and I didn’t journal. This made the struggle to find my answers harder than it should have been.
Aikin’s strategy for fighting the quarter-life crisis is taking classes. The first course that Aikin suggested is ‘being human.’ “The course works with readings on human nature in general and also works with helping you with figuring out who you are individually… We move from all of that to human, nature knowledge and individual knowledge… Halfway through the semester we get to writing up and drafting a personal mission statement something that can drive you through your daily life… and then through the second half we polish that mission statement and work it over… and the final assignment for the semester is for you to put your personal mission in life into one paragraph at the top of a piece of paper and spend the next eight pages explaining it based on what all the stuff we’ve done all semester long.” If doing an eight page paper doesn’t sound fun to you, the second of Aikin’s solutions is a course about happiness: “Everybody in life says they want to be happy, but we are, as human beings, very bad at discerning what exactly that happiness is. And we are very bad at taking steps to get to that. So I put together a class that did research from many different kinds of fields…to say what it is that human fulfillment looks like.” If you’re suffering from an inability to answer the big questions in life, Blackburn can offer you help. Whether it’s classes or counseling, take advantage of the help you’re offered. Don’t suffer in silence like I did. Take steps to fight back against the immensity of the questions laid before you, because if you don’t you’ll never find the happiness you deserve.