My Mid-Youth Crisis

cognitive dissonance and the existentialism that is

Recently I have found myself wondering what it is that makes us go from point A to B, that nagging in our heads that we have some sort of purpose, some sort of reason to end up at B. This evanescent feeling of expectation to succeed is glorified through the stresses of education, job search and the undeniable need to feel absorbingly loved. I realized that these creations, these mentalities and feelings, are self-taught expectations that are not only garbage but they are simply exacerbating themselves to an unreasonable level of self-doubt and fear of the future. We stand here in our mid-to-late twenties not knowing where the hell we will be in a moment, let alone where the hell we want to be tomorrow, in a week or a year. So what is this? This is a mid youth crisis. It is our need to find purpose without hurting our potentially joyous memories, our desire to feel passion and not fall behind, our undeniable interest in success without the loss of social connection.

I reverse engineered these feelings to our incredibly successful baby-boomer parents that scare the living shit out of us. They succeeded and we spend their money, and yet when will we succeed, will we? will the world allow us to succeed like it did for them? First of all, YES, we will succeed, and we will do it in a way that our parents couldn’t dream of. Maybe that in itself is the reason we are so scared, chalking it up to simply being different. Simply wanting something more complex and less organized.

This constantly overwhelming feeling of expectation puts me in an out of body experience quite often, be it rolling around at night for hours not knowing if I am awake, or simply walking alone and not knowing where I am going and why.

I can’t help but describe these feelings through a recent experience:

I’m standing in a field screaming at the top of my lungs and no one can hear a god damn breathe of it. I’m screaming for nothing, for something, for everything but who cares because my expectations are artificial and meaningless. I pop my headphones on an turn the volume to max while walking through the busiest part of town and you smile right at me. You, someone I have never met and don’t care about at all. The level of cognitive dissonance that I experience in this moment is beyond surreal it’s existential. It’s fucking exhaustingly real to the point I cannot fathom.

I say to myself, “seize this shit, take it in and feel it because soon enough you’ll be a zombie craving out of body experience”. We only get one opportunity to be young and feel the ever-so-short dimension of surreal life that we call living. There will never be a time again when any of us can truly be alone and ok with that, truly be unsynced with societal norms and live on, truly be free to know nothing at all and yet have the world at our fingertips. So what the hell are you waiting for? Go out there and feel nothing and yet feel everything all at once!