Quarter Life Crisis

A boy in a village is given a horse. Everyone in the village says it’s a great thing. A wise man of the village says, “We’ll see.” Then the boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg. “Everyone in the village says it’s a terrible thing. The wise man says, “We’ll see.” Then there’s a war, all the other boys are called up to fight in the war, but the boy can’t because of his messed up leg, blah blah, you’ve probably heard this. I’ve always hated this story, because the very lesson that it teaches is that we may never know if the things happening to us are good or bad things. The moral of the story doesn’t seem to be to look for the good in things, but merely wait and wait to be able to draw a conclusion that may never actually be realized. What if the boy actually wanted to go to war? What if all of his friends went to war and were killed but the boy would have helped save a few of them? What if the friends all come back and it turns out they really like wars, and they’re all like, “Aww, man, you missed it, that shit was awesome! You gotta come to the next one!” Or what if the people they are fighting a war against really need to be fought? The story portrays the going to war part as something best avoided, and that’s just doing more assuming of the boy’s fate, thus the final “We’ll see.”

Assumption: We’ll see in time and understand which were the good things and which were the bad things. We may never see if any of this means anything. If the boy gets stabbed a year later after all the soldiers return from war, was the horse a good thing or a bad thing? How do you even determine which things make a difference?

Better yet, why do you? Are we really so entitled to understanding the world that we deserve to know our own meaning? We constantly ask what the meaning of life is. Assumption: life has meaning. Or maybe the assumption is that life can, or is even supposed to have meaning. If life has meaning, that means all things that are given life have some sort of purpose. And I’m not even talking about people that live shitty, painful lives with illnesses and defects. I’m not talking about murderers and psychopaths that basically make life horrible for others before dying. I’m not even talking about babies that get to live for a week before fading away without the slightest clue of what time on earth really entails. If life has meaning, lives of animals have meaning. Dogs, cats, squirrels, racoons, deer… their lives mean something. The zoo animals? That’s actually easy to see. They entertain people too chicken to go out into the wild but who still want to see animals. But animals out in the wild? That get hunted and hunt, that stalk and kill their own food just to have something do the same to them? There’s some sort of meaning, apparently. It’s not just chaos and entropy on the Serengeti plains, there’s a plan. Like a football play, where this lion hunts that wildebeest, and then these 3 hyenas pick at the carcass.

I could go on with this idea, but the point is really this: we constantly make an assumption of the fact that our previous assumptions were wrong, or at least that we were flawed in thinking them at the time. Take the point of all this writing, for a perfect example.

A Quarter Life Crisis.

So I am only ¼ the way done with my life right now, based on my ‘calculations’. Hell, have you checked out mother nature? I might be over half way! I’m 26 now, I may not live to see 50. This could very well be my actual midlife crisis and I would have no way of knowing. I’m not even sure if I want to live to be 104, although I may actually have the genes for it. My grandmother on my dad's side lived to be 79 despite the fact that she smoked since a relatively young age. My great great grandmother lived to be 109. The fact that I met my great great grandmother bodes pretty well for my lineage. But on the other hand, I saw the condition she was in, and I don’t actually know if I want to live to go through THAT.

I’m thinking in all of this though, what is the point of all of this?

My personal crisis, does this mean anything? Is this doing anyone any good to read this?

I have absolutely no idea.

I’m not writing this, at least as a whole, to be read. I’m writing because I need to write. These are all thoughts that need to get out, even if they end up going the wrong way or to the wrong direction. But the expression, that’s what needs to happen from where I’m sitting.

In my experience, expression can save your life. Getting these thoughts out of your thick skull may be the thing that allows you to stay sane in your own right. Which is interesting, because a lot of the thoughts we share sometimes make us actually appear crazy, but it still lends a hand in making you less crazy than you would have been. Think of the people you know that say crazy things. Now think of how crazy they would be if they had to hold all of that in, if they were forced to be normal all the time. Think about if artists had to only draw inside the lines, songs that had to use simple rhymes that everyone knew before they were even said. Coloring books and country music, that’s all that existed. For some people, maybe that’s fine, but for others, it would be mind-numbingly painful. Imagine that you no longer get to express yourself as anything different than what has already been expressed. Every emotion that you feel needs to simply be likened to something that has already happened. Is that scary for you or relieving? It better be scary. Who the hell wants to give up their right to feel different? You have a right to complain, a right to say, “Hey! That’s bullshit!” or say it calmly and eloquently, I don’t care. “Pardon me, but in my own estimation, that’s quite pure manure.” Whatever you want.

And some crises aren’t really crises.

Some things only seem like problems while you’re in them. And then they end, and instantly perspective allows you to see that they were just things that happened, that don’t even matter. Sometimes we assume we have a great story to tell, and then we share it and the audience hates it, and upon reexamination, we realize that what we shared isn’t really a great story at all but just stupid, or something worse, like admitting that a crime took place, something like that. You may ask, and of course I have a ton of stories like that. Here’s a tame one.

I once tried to start the wrong car. As in my friend gave me her keys to go and pick up her car, and I in turn took them to the incorrect car and tried to turn the engine on. And I don’t think it was completely my fault either, because they left their car unlocked. Why would I not think I had unlocked the car? That’s all I’m saying. The lock seemed to disengage, so I thought I had the right keys, I get in, and the keys do nothing for the car. And I thought I had done something wrong with the keys and then I realized by looking around the car that there was no way that this was my friend’s car. But I had already called her to say that the car wouldn’t start, so I jumped out of the car and pseudo wiped my fingerprints off of everything i thought i had touched, not so much because of anything I had done but because I didn’t know if the car’s owner was ever going to be implicated later and the entire car would be dusted for prints, who needs that shit?

The point is, there was nothing wrong with my friend’s actual car, but there was a crisis in determining that. Plus she ran over to the area, frantic, and decided to flag down a nearby police officer, and her exact words to the officer, I was told later, were, “Officer! Have you seen a black kid in a black jacket and black pants trying to start a car over here?!” The officer, clutching his holster, replied, “No…” as if he was going into arrest-making mode. So out of just needing to locate the right car and there not really being anything wrong, a crisis of sorts was created, and then another potential situation was lopped on top of that afterwards. 

This is what i do. Or what I can do. Create chaos where there was none. It's not like I was doing anything else that night, this way I will remember that night for the rest of my life. That's one thing I have noticed about these so-called crises. They stick out much more than the normal days. You know, you won't remember so many individual moments that are easy. A crisis will probably be noteworthy a few days from now. I might always remember being told after the fact how there was about to be a call made out to local authorities to find and detain (and likely beat the shit out of) a young man with my description in the area. But hey, false alarm, right?