A hundred years old

Today I read a considerably depressing article called Welcome to Your Quarterlife Crisis by Kate Carraway on the young adult - those in their mid-twenties, early thirties. It discussed the lack of purpose and direction most experience in this age group. Sociologist Michael Kimmel says, "They don’t have much of a life plan about how to move from Point A to Point B. What happens very often is they have very big ambitions, [but] there is a mismatch between their planning for their lives and their ambitions.”

Feel free to read it and travel from denial to connection to breakthrough. I was later told that the psychosocial crisis of Intimacy vs. Isolation by Erickson is what is being realistically explained in this article. Apparently as the theory goes, when intimacy is obtained, one can move on to the next stage. If not, they become isolated and carry unresolved issues into the next stage, where it manifests itself into an even uglier mid-life crisis. I thought that was interesting.

You know, I really stand by the matter of humans being relational creatures. It all comes down to relationships with others, whether it's romantic or platonic. Genuine relationships with one another is bound to bring a sense of purpose and direction, which would add meaning to the work we do and the money we make. If according to Erickson we ought to be focusing on creating intimate relationships with others, this modern-day technological alternative to communication such as Twitter and Facebook is surely an obstruction to that process...isn't it? (I won't even get into that, I'm addicted to Facebook.) It makes me wonder, though, whether we are all jaded somehow, and it causes a majority of us to be dissatisfied with our situations even when we have the world at our fingertips. Are we all jaded? Is it the last of our teenage angst fizzing out of us? Because if that's the case, Carraway suggests, "it might just be time to grow the fuck up."

I think becoming jaded makes you complacent in life...not necessarily content, but merely dealing with what cards you were dealt. I definitely don't want that of myself. God forbid I become complacent in my rut. I will grow up! I think I will come out on top. Surely the human quality is more resilient than that.