Before the Midlife Crisis Arrives, Your Friend "Quarter-Life Crisis" Is Already Online | QDaily Research Lab

Quarter-life crisis is a catch-all term for the anxieties of young adulthood — about work, relationships, and getting out of poverty — which add up to something like "Is this really all my life is going to be?" Today, QDaily Research Lab takes a close look at it.

You've just turned 25, and life has suddenly switched to hard mode:

Some problems you assumed would vanish the day you graduated are still problems — tomorrow's deadline, for one. Others you thought you were ready for turn out to be much bigger than expected, like how to support yourself. You work hard to break even, but managing the tiny scrap of property you actually own is heartbreaking.

Every friend who gets married sets off a small financial crisis that month; in October, when everyone seems to marry at once, the cash gifts you hand out come to nearly half a month's salary. Your parents are hoping for a return on that investment soon, but you feel the water has already been spilled and can't be gathered back: first you'd need someone to marry, and then, at the risk of a full outbreak of secondhand embarrassment, you'd have to stage a magical-realist wedding — the unmistakably local kind.

You don't like your job and have no idea what you actually want to do; so far the only professional skill you have truly mastered is taping receipts onto expense forms. When your manager asks why your numbers look bad and you haven't grown, you think about the two-hour commute — bus, then subway, one way — conclude there's no time left to learn anything, and go back to browsing rental listings.

In the end, most of your problems come back to browsing rental listings. You want an oven to improve your quality of life, but the kitchen is too small to fit one, so you go browse listings; a broker cheats you, so you go browse listings again. Renting is so miserable you figure you might as well buy — you take one look at housing prices and go right back to browsing rental listings.

What you dread most is being asked about your plans, because you don't have any. You sense that "there is a chorus of vulgar forces in this world, and once you submit to it you sink forever," and then you do nothing about it, letting yourself be "pushed along, drifting with the current of life."

You're thinking about all this while washing yesterday's dishes in the sink, and your hand slips and one breaks … ah, you really are good for nothing.

You've just turned 25. Before the midlife crisis arrives, your friend "quarter-life crisis" is already online.

Quarter-life crisis is a catch-all term for the anxieties of young adulthood — about work, relationships, and getting out of poverty — describing a sense of crisis best summed up as "Is this really all my life is going to be?"

"It doesn't literally happen a quarter of the way through your life," says Professor Oliver Robinson of the University of Greenwich, "but a quarter of the way along the road to becoming a fully formed adult — roughly around 30, in that 25-to-35 window."

Professor Robinson led the first survey on quarter-life crisis, interviewing 1,100 young people. Of them, 86% admitted that their stress over relationships, work, and money spiked as 30 approached; two in five felt they were genuinely poor, not earning enough to support themselves; 32% felt their odds of finding a spouse before 30 were slipping away; 21% wanted a complete career change; and 6% were weighing emigration.

Based on the pressures young people in China face at this stage of life, we've compiled eight numbers that can easily trigger a quarter-life crisis:

Faced with all this, you feel it's time to do something, but you have vision and no plan — you haven't opened your résumé once since graduation, and the only thing you're really good at is slacking off. All your diligence goes to strange places: reading on the toilet, answering email while you walk, ordering delivery to save time, then watching three episodes of a show while you eat it … And somehow, while slacking off, you keep picking up odd little skills, like spotting the real download button on a page in under a second — a superpower for focus and burning enthusiasm, available only when you're doing something that isn't your job.

You can't stop the compulsive, trivial busyness any more than you can stop the urge to eat — that way you don't have to think about switching jobs, or about credit card bills, wedding invitations, and a lease about to expire, or about how you've turned your twenties into one long Ge You slouch.

But you can't actually escape any of it. These are the keywords of being 25, the way deskmates, exams, and your first cell phone were the keywords of being 15. Drawing on QDaily Research Lab's surveys and observations about young people and the workplace, we've put together 43 quarter-life-crisis keywords in four categories:

A Quarter-Life Career Crisis

Career anxiety turns out to be the leading source of crisis. QDaily Research Lab previously ran a survey titled "What's the thing you're most anxious about since graduating?" Of the 5,815 responses received, the work option "I don't like my current job, and I don't know what I want to do" came out on top, with 1,110 votes.

That "current job" probably looks something like this:

• It has nothing to do with your major or your interests, the work is more scattered than an odd-jobs gig, quitting time is quietly extended by four hours by default, and every day you and your coworkers compete in silence over who leaves first — "Time to go home! So who's going to be today's first one out the door?";
• You're on WeChat standby 24 hours a day, your Moments feed has to run mostly on loyalty posts like "I love my job," and the one time you carelessly repost "My Body Has Been Hollowed Out" and forget to hide it from the right people, HR calls you in for a heartfelt talk — "If you don't want the job, you can go";
• You worry like a drug dealer and get paid like a cabbage seller: once the five social insurances and the housing fund come out, the salary on your offer letter barely covers two months' rent, and the raise schedule you were promised slides from six months to a year, then from a year to two. Very punk rhythm.

A job like this makes it hard to find any motivation to improve yourself. You're mired in daily annoyances, plagued by these keywords:

1. Hukou registration: A single need so heavy that it alone outweighs questions like "Should I buy or rent in a first-tier city?" and "Do I need a place in a good school district?"

2. Business trips: At first you have the illusion that you can see the world while you work, but you quickly discover you can't gallop across the grasslands of Hulunbuir while putting together a slide deck. The best you can manage is a glimpse of a lit-up bell tower while stuck in traffic, as you quietly mourn what little sleep you'll get that night.

3. Five-star hotels: Only after enough time out on projects do you understand that "five-star" means you get to lie in a king-size bed at the Westin for an average of five hours a night, and that the stars are still clearly visible in the sky both when you leave and when you get back.

4. Frequent-flyer miles: You've racked up enough mileage on business trips to fly to Europe — except you have no vacation days.

5. Paid annual leave: Even if you take it, nobody can cover for you. You're the only person at the whole company who does what you do, so you work overtime year-round and never really take time off. Annual leave? Sure, go ahead — just get the official account post written and published on schedule, and make the layout look nice. It's exactly like any other day anyway.

6. Housing provident fund: The blood-pumping excitement of your boss saying "we're a startup, everyone just has to rough it for a while" turns into your heart bleeding after you tour a round of apartments in the city.

7. Quitting: You're not afraid of being fired; you're afraid the company won't raise its next round and will fold at any moment. You don't exactly love the job, and you keep worrying you've left it too late to switch tracks. You seriously consider quitting a hundred times a year, and usually think better of it. In short: high standards, low ability, no legs to walk out the door. And the moment you mention changing jobs, your parents launch into the well-worn lecture — settle down already, stop messing around, you don't even have a partner and now you want to be unemployed too?

8. Bento boxes: You order the prettiest bento box available, cherishing a lovely vision of yourself elegantly eating homemade salad every day — but you never have time to make the salad, and you're still fighting four office towers' worth of people for a FamilyMart bento every day.

9. Coffee: To keep from getting hooked, you hover on the edge of drinking it or not — and usually you drink it, because without it you're basically a zombie.

10. Travel pillows: A U-shaped neck pillow keeps your midday nap from leaving you bloated from slumping over the desk, but it only works if you've mastered the art of controlling your face while asleep; otherwise some malicious coworker will snap an unflattering photo and ruin your good name forever. Honestly, if someone opened a nap shop downstairs from the office, I'd be the first to buy an annual membership.

11. Expense reports: Taping receipts onto forms is, so far, the professional skill I've mastered best.

12. My college-application choices: The rational conclusion you reach after painfully reflecting on your current job, containing two hard-won lessons: "If I could fill out that form again, I'd go back and learn a real, usable skill" and "If my kid ever wants to study the major I did, I'll break their legs."

13. The new hire: Younger than me, doesn't earn more than me, but spends more than me; seems to know how to do everything and has been everywhere, has more experience and more skill points than I do, and still leaves the office earlier than I do every day. I hesitated for two years and never quit; they've been here two months and quit the second something rubbed them the wrong way. How do they have that kind of nerve?

14. Book discount promotions: You resolve to read and learn new things, and join every "spend 200, get 100 off" sale on Amazon and Dangdang — then find, at your year-end Douban tally, that you read two books.

15. "Mark": The first step toward raising your level of knowledge, and most of the time also the last.

A Quarter-Life Relationship Crisis

On the subject of "getting old," the most famous cliché is "You're almost 30, it's time to find someone and get married." On the subject of "finding someone," the most famous urban legend is "If you don't date in college, you'll be going on arranged blind dates after 30."

Turning 30 is treated as a monster to be feared: if you haven't managed to pair up by then, you'll have to face an entire lineup of bosses alone — parents lamenting the family line at Chinese New Year, classmates' weddings, classmates' kids' first-birthday parties, cash gifts for classmates' kids acing the college entrance exam — even though, in fact, if you had paired up, all of it would simply come in double.

The main relationship worry at this stage of life is how to find "the one," and after that, how to build a stable relationship with them. Unlike the irreconcilable marital conflicts and burnout of a midlife relationship crisis, what the two of you handle between 25 and 35 is mostly "whose turn is it to wash today's dishes" and "exactly how long on the PS4 is too long."

Depending on your relationship status, one of the following crisis keywords is bound to fit:

1. Dying alone: An extremely melodramatic persona to adopt, but plenty of times I genuinely suspect it will come true.

2. Blind dates: Along with arranging the date, your parents throw in some balmy words of wisdom, such as: "What is 'chemistry'? Can you eat chemistry?" "What's 'good-looking'? Can you eat good-looking?" "What's 'love'? Can you eat love?" In short, the marriage they have in mind has very little to do with "chemistry," "looks," or "love," and a great deal to do with food on the table.

3. Wedding-season pile-up: Almost every public holiday, you're heading home or off to some island resort for a friend's or relative's wedding, so every National Day, Labor Day, and Chinese New Year turns into involuntary wedding leave. You're too well liked: you've been a groomsman or bridesmaid seven or eight times now, and you've never once caught the lucky bouquet the way it happens in the movies.

4. Airports: There's no final verdict on which matters more, your partner or your career — though at this stage nobody has much of a career to speak of — and giving up a city is never easy. So you and your long-distance partner have never once taken a flight together; even your trips together start from different cities, and on the way back you say goodbye at the airport and board separate flights. "Our relationship has mostly happened at airports" — a bittersweet kind of romance.

5. Breakouts: You used to get pimples because of puberty. Now you get them because you don't have a regular, stable sex life.

6. Proposing: We'd been together several years, so eventually I started to get a vague feeling that it was time to propose — mostly because she kept saying "If you don't propose soon, we're done," fifty times, every month.

7. The wedding: In your dreams it's very fancy; when your turn comes, you just want to get the formalities over with. If you really want my opinion — can we throw one wedding to satisfy our parents, and a separate party to actually have fun with friends?

8. Soulmate: You used to think the point was gentleness, thoughtfulness, understanding. Now you've found that you can only keep a relationship going if you agree on the major issues: "how often should you wash your hair," "what temperature should the AC be in summer," and "should the toilet seat be up or down."

9. Period panic: A recurring small-scale, life-or-death panic that comes in several forms: "My period's here!" "My period's late!" "My period's here again!" "My girlfriend's period is here!" "My girlfriend's period is late!"

10. Folic acid: Your boyfriend's parents keep hinting, none too subtly, that you could start taking folic acid now. And you don't even want kids yet.

11. Bratty kids: You're busy being a devoted "mom fan" of Noe, the adorable celebrity toddler on TV, while complaining nonstop about the bratty kids who wreck your figurines and scream on the subway. Round little kids are cute, but why is it that the moment they gather in a group they switch into running-around-shrieking mode? Human offspring are terrifying; it's hard to imagine what it would be like to capture one or two and keep them around.

A Quarter-Life Premature-Aging Crisis

The most common ailment among people in their twenties has to be premature-aging syndrome. You'll be startled to realize you've already passed the age your mother was when she had you, and you'll begin to feel, somewhere in your head, that going to bed at 10 p.m. ranks above sex and money. These symptoms work like a tipping point: once you cross it, you start to seriously dread getting old.

QDaily Research Lab once ran a poll on "What does premature aging feel like?" and collected 2,588 responses. Most people, it turns out, discover their hearts have aged only once their bodies can't keep up. 23.53% had known the despair of "wait, what was I about to do?"; 11.24% had stared down with a wry smile at the bulge of fat on their stomach; and 12% felt they had no choice but to control their diet, and swore off late-night snacks in favor of vegetables, sincerely this time. Memory gets worse, digestion gets worse, you can't pull an all-nighter anymore — who knew it would all arrive this fast.

Here are your quarter-life premature-aging keywords:

1. Getting fat: All your friends are purging their diets, and thinking about your own steadily rising weight, you resign yourself to swallowing chicken breast and skim milk so bland it makes you want to give up on life, tearfully accompanying yourself with the old refrain: "I hold cornbread in my hands, and there's not a drop of oil in the vegetables …"

2. Vegetables: It seems to have taken only a few years to go from a teenager who couldn't eat a meal without meat to an uncle fixated on his health. What bothers you most these days is that delivery apps never offer enough vegetable dishes.

3. Hairline: You can't bring yourself to admit you're going bald, and console yourself daily with "it's normal for an adult to shed 200 hairs a day," insisting your hairline has merely been adjusted upward for technical reasons.

4. Anti-aging: You don't believe the nonsense that "your skin starts to go downhill the moment you turn 25," but using some anti-aging products now still feels like planning ahead.

5. Nightlife: Drinks? Can we be home by 10? Karaoke? Can we be home by 10? Are you kidding — night hours are precious, obviously they should go to catching up on sleep.

6. The HPV vaccine: Why is it that the moment I hear about this, I've already aged out of the ideal vaccination window? I want to cry.

7. Age-blocking: You refuse to be told the exact birth year of any hot young celebrity or star entrepreneur, automatically muting every mental bullet-comment along the lines of "wow, they're actually three years younger than you" or "at your age you can't even afford the skewers at the corner stand, and they've already raised tens of millions." But when you read a celebrity biography and see the subject was born in one year and pulled off something huge by another, you can't help doing the math, comparing it with your own age, and then crying.

8. Nominal age: These days, anyone who still counts my age by the traditional nominal-age system gets cut off on the spot.

A Quarter-Life Livelihood Crisis

A quarter of the way through life, you still feel that anything is possible and every road leads to a comfortable living, but right now your salary is your only income, and thirty more years of this wouldn't be enough to buy a house or a car on your own. At best you can buy an NFC juice at the convenience store without your heart bleeding, or renew your video-site membership without your hand shaking: a small taste of financial freedom. In our survey, 740 people said the thing that has made them most anxious since starting work is simply "having no money"; 443, a little dramatically, described the state as "having nothing, at the most vain age of my life"; and 112 confident respondents said, "The only problem I have left to solve is being poor."

Around this business of being poor, the crisis keywords you have to face include, but are not limited to, these:

1. Credit cards: Faced with the bill, you're always on the verge of tears, unable to remember what you bought.

2. Looking like a student: People keep telling you that you look like a student, and you take it as a compliment about looking young. Really it's because you never fully overhauled your wardrobe, and you're getting caught wearing the clothes you wore in school.

3. "Going naked": Every year, sorting your clothes for the new season, you conclude that this time last year you must have been going around with nothing on.

4. Finding a new roommate: Your roommate found a girlfriend and moved out, so now you have to find a new one. This apartment has now been listed for a roommate on Douban five separate times.

5. Rental-apartment makeovers: Please stop telling everyone that renting can still have dignity, that renting can still have quality of life, stop running "extreme rental makeover" contests — just stop! I'm already poor, I can't afford to buy a place, can you please stop scheming to squeeze the last few yuan out of me?

6. Yellow-tag IKEA furniture: You look down on IKEA's quality, but the truth is you can only afford the products with the yellow clearance tags.

7. A dog: You want one and can't have one. Your landlord says the couch is expensive and you'll pay for any damage; your parents say, oh come on, you can't even take care of yourself, why get a pet — cats and dogs carry all sorts of germs, and you'll be married with kids in a couple of years anyway, don't complicate things, oh by the way, that Dr. Chen that Auntie Wang introduced you to, do you want to meet him this week? … You sulk about it, but you can't get up in the morning, you travel constantly for work, and you truly have no time to raise one. So instead you tip other people's cat and dog videos every day, a well-behaved, modern-day Lord Ye, professing to love dragons from a safe distance.

8. North-south cross-ventilation: One look at your budget tells you that you could comfortably put a down payment on the windowless little second bedroom of a spacious, north-south-ventilated three-bedroom apartment.

9. Livable cities: Housing is expensive in first-tier cities, there's smog, and the old ladies in your building will switch into dialect on purpose just to make a point: "Must be hard, living alone in a big city — why not go home?" First-tier cities are terrible, but leave one and there's no work for someone in your line. So exactly where counts as "livable" remains a mystery.

Drawing on all the keywords above, we've also put together an assessment of crisis-inducing props and their destructive power:

On the whole, quarter-life crisis covers a lot of scattered, trivial ground, but at its core it comes down to the struggle of trying to become independent, the frustration of years of inspirational platitudes that turn out to be useless for solving real problems, and the pressure the people around you — peers and elders alike — apply in various forms —

The keyword for this stretch of life might be "life has infinite possibilities, but right now none of them are visible."

In the end, quarter-life anxiety usually isn't the anxiety of "I've hit a bottleneck." It's the anxiety of not having found your bottle in the first place.

So here's our parting wish: may you find your bottle soon. And if you really can't find it, never mind — once you hit 35, the system will push out a fresh batch of keywords to bother you with anyway.

You're welcome.

Images by: Lin Xiaoyao

QDaily Research Lab is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for discussing all kinds of lifestyle questions. It might look at a change or trend in how people live, or at some brand's service. You can vote, vent, and state your opinion here.