is this what my life is? Do I wake up every day, commute an hour to work, work 9 to 5, commute an hour back, have 45 minutes of recreation time, and then go to sleep because I need to eat, get eight hours of sleep at night?

Is this what life is? This is not what I was promised.

This is not what I thought. I thought I was going to be free and having fun. So, I went through a quarter-life crisis a little bit before it was cool, about 20 years ago.

I was stuck. I was failing out of college. We'll get into some details. I went to India.

I found myself, and today I'm very happy. And what I see in the world around me is that so many young people have no idea what to do with their lives.

They're living in a world where they were taught these expectations of, if you do A, B, and C, you will be happy, you will be successful.

But it seems like this is a huge scam. And so they end up having this crisis, this existential crisis in their early 20s or mid-20s.

They don't know who they are. They don't know what they should do.

They don't know how to take risks. They don't know how to make choices. And at first, I thought that this was like a minority of people, right?

I thought I was the exception because 20 years ago, not everyone was doing it. But if you look at research today, quarter-life crises are one of the most common experiences of young people.

One study by LinkedIn actually found that 75% of people go through a quarter-life crisis.

And this is what I see: there is a generation of people who don't know what to do with their lives who don't know who they are because y'all were given a script, right?

You were told, "Do this: go to college, get a job, find love, buy a house, get a mortgage, do all these things, and then you will be happy." And y'all did what you were supposed to do.

You did everything that the older generation told you to do, but now you find yourself in your mid-20s, maybe a little bit older, maybe a little bit younger, and 75% of y'all, and you have no idea what to do.

You don't know who you are, you don't know what you want.

You are watching all these freaking videos on the internet from gurus who are telling you, "Do this, do this, do this, do this." You chase those things, and for some of y'all it works, and for some of you it doesn't.

And that's the real tragedy of a quarter-life crisis, which is that a quarter-life crisis is not a bad thing.

If you look at the Chinese character or the Japanese kanji for crisis, it is two pictograms put together.

It is danger and opportunity. That's really what a crisis is.

And what we know from the research on quarter-life crises is that they are something that is a very powerful developmental tool. The problem is that navigating the quarter-life crisis is not something that we know how to do.

Sometimes people will ask me this question: "If you could go back in time and give advice to your younger self, what would you tell yourself?

" And I tell them, "I would not tell myself a damn thing, because everything that I went through made me the person that I am today." So in my case, I had no idea what I was doing.

I failed out of college, went to India, found myself.

Now I'm happily married, I have a job that I love, I work really hard. My external environment and my internal environment are in sync. And I'm pretty happy today, thankfully.

And that's what we see with a quarter-life crisis is that some people successfully navigate it and are so much stronger at the end.

All of us are looking for solutions, but the problem is that the solutions seem to work for some people but don't work for other people. A great example of that, this is, put yourself out there, right?

So when you talk to people who have successfully found relationships or found their career, and you ask them, what do I need to do?

They say, you just have to put yourself out there. And then you may try to put yourself out there, but for some reason it doesn't work for you.

And then you're left scratching your head, I don't know, is this like, are they different?

Am I different? Why does it not work for me? Am I doing it wrong? We're struggling with all of these questions.

But this is what's really cool. In the last five years, there's been an explosion of research on the quarter-life crisis because so many people are experiencing it.

And what we figured out is that there are actually four to five stages to this process. And it is textbook.

I will tell y'all a little bit about my life, and as we go through the stages, if y'all have been watching this channel for a while, you'll have heard me talk about each of these steps.

And the problem that we run into is not that the advice doesn't work, but that we sometimes apply it out of order.

That putting yourself out there only works if you do a set of things first. That's what makes it successful.

Hey, all! If you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr.

K's Guide to Mental Health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a Choose Your Own Adventure format.

So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So let's start with the goal. So a life structure is a developmentally achieved integration of internal structures such as values, goals, and beliefs, allied to external structures such as roles, commitments, relationships, and activities.

So what are we looking for? What's the basic problem? The basic problem is that this thing in here and that thing out there don't fit, and there's a really good reason for this.

So if you look at the research on quarter-life crises, what you find is that early on we're teenagers, right? And when we're teenagers, we don't have freedom.

Oh my God, my parents are telling me to stop playing video games. They're telling me I don't want to study.

I don't want to do it. Me, I want to be an adult, and when I'm an adult, I get to do whatever I want.

And then what happens is you become an adult, and then you discover that despite you having all of the freedom, you have no freedom at all.

You thought that the moment that you became an adult, everything becomes easy. But what I see more and more and more is constantly these posts of, is this what my life is?

Do I wake up every day, commute an hour to work, work 9 to 5, commute an hour back, work out because I'm supposed to work out, have 45 minutes of recreation time, and then go to sleep because I need to eat, get 8 hours of sleep at night.

Is this what life is? This is not what I was promised. This is not what I thought. I thought I was going to be free and having fun.

And so this is where the quarter-life crisis starts. We have this conception that as we grow older, we will be free. But as we grow older, we discover our freedom is restricted by the world around us, that we actually need some way to fit into the world.

So, as teenagers, all we want is freedom.

And then once we get our freedom, what ends up happening is we realize we need to fit into the world around us. And that leads to stage number one, which is locked in.

So, oftentimes, when we're trying to figure out what we want to do in life, we don't know what we want.

We don't know who we are, right? Because we haven't lived life yet. So we look to other people.

So, for example, when I was nine years old, my dad told me and my brother, "One of y'all is going to be a doctor and one of y'all is going to be a lawyer." My brother was older, he went to law school, so I felt like I had to become a doctor.

I was genetically premed. And so phase one of the quarter-life crisis is called locked in, and it's a sense of being trapped.

So, early on in life, you make decisions based on extrinsic motivation, right? You're told to study this. People say, "Oh, this is going to be a good job.

You should do this thing. You should do this. Should, should, should, should, should, should, should." And you're like, "Yes, sir, I will do it.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. I will do it. I will do it. I will do it." You follow all of these external scripts and then you find yourself in a place that you don't like and you feel trapped.

So phase one is defined by a central commitment or set of commitments within a life structure that is no longer desired but which is not yet perceived as a realistic target of change.

This leads to a felt sense of powerlessness and being trapped.

So what ends up happening is we're following these extrinsic motivations, and we find oursel we wake up one day in a life that we no longer like.

So there are many things that can trigger this feeling. Sometimes it's a relationship.

We started dating in high school, and we've been together for seven years, but I don't know if I want to be with this person.

I'm kind of operating based on momentum or inertia. I'm operating, I'm living my life based on autopilot.

Or it's something like a career where like, now I have this job, I majored in this thing, I studied this crap for four years, I got this job.

Now this is the only thing that I know how to do, and I don't enjoy it anymore, but it feels like it is impossible to realistically change.

So I see this a lot in residency. So I work with medical residents. These are people who are pre-med in college.

So they spent four years planning to become a doctor. Then they do four years of medical school where you learn about being a doctor. And then they're halfway through residency, they're on year three of their surgical residency.

Now they've devoted 11 years of their life to this career path, and they wake up one day and they realize, I don't like being a doctor.

Right? So the first four years of pre-med you're like studying literature and organic chemistry.

That's not being a doctor. Med school isn't really being a doctor, it's learning about medicine. Then you start actually practicing medicine and then for the first year, you're like, "Oh my God, it's so hard and I'm so burnt out and it's so stressful.

It'll get better." And the second year rolls around, "It'll get better, I'll get used to it." And people tell themselves these kinds of things, and they wake up in year three, 11 years of investment at this point, and they're like, "I don't like this, but it's too late.

I feel incredibly trapped." This is what triggers the quarter-life crisis. And when this crisis gets triggered, it also affects the way that we see ourselves.

So in terms of identity, a person in Phase One experiences a sense of outward identity that has been formed to adapt to the role they are in, which conceals a more authentic sense of self.

Now, this is no longer what I want, but it is something that I have to do. This is where the quarter-life crisis begins.

So during this first phase of the quarter-life crisis, called "locked in," we see that it also affects someone's identity. A person in Phase One experiences a sense of outward identity that has been formed to adapt to the roles they're in, which conceals a more authentic sense of self.

And this is why a quarter-life crisis is so, so important. We view it as a problem, but it is critical to our development because without this sensation, we would stay trapped in that in our life.

If we actually look at the research behind crisis, what we find is that a crisis can help overcome the change inertia that has been found to characterize adult life structure.

So this kind of goes back to this, uh, you know, this kind of crisis which is danger and opportunity.

Without this internal sense of unhappiness, we would be stuck in this life of autopilot. And it is this sense of unhappiness which actually prompts us to change.

The challenge is that unless we know how to do it right, we'll get stuck. There's another feature of phase one which is really, really interesting and may resonate with y'all, which is that phase one frequently involves compulsive activities such as drug or alcohol use, particularly in males, which may add to the sense of being out of control.

And so this paper was written in 2013, so back then social media, technology, video games weren't as prevalent as they are now.

But this is the other thing that happens in Phase 1: is that we feel internally trapped.

We don't enjoy our life. So what do we do? We go to these compulsive activities: drugs, alcohol, video games, pornography that help us cope with this life that is unfixable.

This is literally in the scientific research. And then we move on to phase two, which is separation.

So in Phase 2, we either physically or mentally check out of our situation. So internally, I don't want to do this anymore.

Externally, I'm trapped in this life. I can't change it, right? I can't really go back. I've wasted 11 years in this medical career.

I've wasted seven years in this relationship. I can't change it. So what do we do? We mentally or physically check out. This is actually a developmental step.

Now, this is what's crazy. So checking out is actually the process of the quarter-life crisis. It is something that is not a problem to be fixed, it is a phase to be gone through.

The separation phase is the most affectively intensive period, that means emotionally intensive period of a crisis.

emotions experienced may include guilt, sadness, anxiety, excitement, relief, and shame, while self-evaluations may oscillate between upbeat self-confidence and self-disgust.

So I see this so much where everyone's like, "I'm so checked out of life. I'm so burnt out. How do I find motivation? How do I make this checked-out-ness go away?

How do I find this intrinsic motivation?" Which, by the way, a quarter-life crisis, going through a quarter-life crisis is literally how we move from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation.

And so what we are filled with is all kinds of piles of emotions. I'm worried about my future, but I feel guilty for like, I don't like, I'm not putting forth the effort that I need to.

And y'all may be confused by this oscillation between confidence and shame, or feeling upbeat and feeling depressed. But this is something that  I've seen so much in my clinical practice, right?

And I'll explain it to you all. When you're in Phase 2, you're mentally checked out, but you look back at your life and it seems good on paper, right?

So you look at this and you're like, "Oh, I've been in this relationship for 5 years.

Like, it's a good relationship for a lot of reasons. My partner is not abusive, but I don't enjoy it anymore." So there are times where you can look back, you're in your third year of residency, and you've accomplished so much.

You go to a place like Harvard Medical School and you have so much to be proud of.

Sometimes in this separation phase, we can look back and feel really good about some of the things that we did, but something is missing.

And when that thing is missing, we also beat ourselves up a lot because it's, "I worked really hard, but I'm unhappy. I feel stuck." So there, this is the most, as the paper points out, affectively intense period of the quarter-life crisis.

Why You Feel Lost in Your 20s

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Why You Feel Lost in Your 20s

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