Most of my friends are going through quarter-life crises of varying severity. On the whole, each feels that he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, or that he knows but isn’t getting there any time fast. Most either don’t have jobs they like, or if they don’t mind what they do they still aren’t in a field they want to be in for much longer. I’ll go ahead and throw myself into that batch, too, only I don’t feel the crushing pressure of my own wasted potential as badly because I was unemployed for so long. Not having a job for an entire year makes you pretty happy to be doing anything for a paycheck. But that’s already wearing off a little bit, and I, too, am wondering where I want to go from here.
I thnk that the reason that most of my friends are having their “quarters” is that we’re all too creative. We want to write or to dream or to make movies or music, but reality caught up with us way to fast so we’re stuck for the moment. No one has the means to do nothing but write all day, or we’re unwilling to give our lifestyles up to do it. Sure, we have free time from six to bedtime, but instead we hang out or watch tv or otherwise waste our time. Sure, we don’t regret the social time, but at the end of the week we haven’t written many pages.
And I think the problem is motivation. And fear. We don’t have teachers or parents watching over us, evaluating us, and forcing us to produce. We just have our friends, and if we lock ourselves in our rooms all week to create, they get lonely. I’m not calling for my friends to urge each other to pursue the arts. I’m calling for each of us to stop being afraid of our potential. There’s nothing wrong with writing a few crappy short stories if it gets you in the mood to write a really good one. But we all just keep whining to disatisfied selves that we’re unhappy with our jobs because they won’t take us where we think we want to go with our existence. We don’t actually want to quit our jobs to go be artists or entrepreneurs, we just want to want to to quit our jobs. In the meantime we should just get something done.
I almost think that an old-school literary society is what some of us need. The artists need somewhere to sit around and discuss books and films and maybe on odd occasions share their own works. It needs to be a dedicated place and time, not just a tangent sprung from a hang-out. And it needs to force the disatisfied out of their ruts. I don’t mean life-changing madness, I just mean a nudge in the right direction until we all really figure it out.
Just a thought.