Always Talk to Strangers

The biggest question at the heart of the post-collegiate twenty-something crisis seems to be: Now what? What do I do now that I’m done doing everything I thought I was supposed to do? If my identity no longer revolves around all the things I used to do, who am I now?

Naturally, because “It’s not who you are, but what you do, that defines you” (some families quote Shakespeare and the Bible, mine quotes Batman and The Simpsons) finding a career seems like a good way to begin answering these questions.

Find your calling! Follow your passion! Get on a track, a career path, and rest assured that by gleaning out the path and direction you’re seeking, the rest of life will work itself out.

I think this dilemma divides our twenty-something peers into three camps: The kids who’ve always known what they wanted to be when they grew up; those who’ve always had a ‘calling,’ a ‘dharma,’ a ‘destiny’ or whatever you want to call it.

Then there are the kids who realize after graduating college that the kids in the first camp have it the easiest, so then they choose a ‘calling’ for peace of mind and, for the most part, will convince themselves, and you, that they really did know all along that during those romantic poetry seminars, tax law was their real passion (true story).

And then there’s the third camp, in which I find myself: those that don’t have a clue, nor do they have the heart to fake it yet. I find comfort in constantly being reminded that, whereas the feeling of being on a path is a reassuring one, life itself very rarely follows neat linear lines from one point to the next.

One of the greatest things about traveling on a budget so low that the line between budget traveler and homeless person can at times get a bit blurry, is that it often throws me and my travel partner, Maria, into the path of random acts of human kindness.

I remember our first day of hitchhiking though Europe, I reluctantly walked up onto the road as if I were being led to my death, sheepishly stuck out my thumb and tried to fain enthusiasm while internally pleading, “Oh god, please don’t pick us up! Please don’t pick us up! Keep driving, move along, move along, nothing to see here!” I was adamant that we were going to wind up hacked to bits by a serial killer or sucked into some sort of underground sex slave trade, at the very least.

Thousands of miles and hundreds of rides later, I’ve emerged unscathed and shocked to learn that people are, for the most part, incredibly good and generous, even to strangers they’ve only just met. My latest brush with this unexpected hospitality occurred yesterday when a man named Robin noticed my friend wearing a cap bearing the logo of our alma mater while we were enjoying the free wifi at the local Safeway in Sedona, Arizona.

Within ten minutes of meeting, he was inviting us over to his home for dinner, beers and a movie night with him and his wife. Seeing as he said he graduated from our college about 35-40 years ago, I was shocked to learn that he and his wife make their living as professional bloggers.

I’d heard that companies were starting to employ people for the sole purpose of blogging and ‘Tweeting,’ but assumed that they were all young, Gen-Y’ers who were just happy to finally be getting paid for all the time they spent on Facebook and Twitter while at work.

Robin’s life story turned out to be an eclectic one made up of many different jobs, three marriages, a myriad of interests and a long-held idea for a novel/screenplay in the works. Later in the evening, two of his friends came over. They also had life stories that detoured more than once, but all of them seemed to be very happy, successful and well-adjusted real live grown-ups.

This led me to thinking, one again, that life doesn’t really follow the point A to point B path that we might sometimes wish it did. And, yet, that’s exactly what so many twenty-something’s are looking for.

The path! THE PATH! Where did it go? Birth to childhood to painfully awkward adolescence to slightly less awkward high school to college to early adulthood and then what? It’s pretty disconcerting to spend your whole life thinking you’re a strong individual, only to realize upon graduating that you don’t have a freaking clue what you want and maybe, in your entire life, you’ve never really made an important decision for yourself on your own!

Liberating and terrifying: There really is no path, just life and whatever you want to make of it.

Twenty-Something

My life's not that interesting, but what I do think is interesting is this "post-collegiate twenty-something haze" in which so many of my friends and I currently find ourselves. Is this a new phenomenon? Scores of directionless quarter-lifers drifting in the real world: well educated, young, able-bodied, totally terrified and comically confused? Why in an age of endless possibility does it seem like slowly, but surely, everyone is getting married, going to grad school, leaving the country or going on meds? Those aren’t the only options, but how do we accept and cope with the idea that maybe there’s no formula for the happy lives we all (I’m assuming) want?

Was there ever a formula? According to my grandparents and my parents in their idealistic youth, that formula was: job stability + marriage + babies= life fulfillment. Times have undoubtedly changed. Maybe the advancements human beings have made in the last half-century or so have made life too long, too leisurely and too complicated for such a simple equation to hold up anymore.

Whatever the reasons for this breakdown, our grandparents seem to be the product of this equation. Our parents’ generation seems to have followed in their footsteps to become the product of this equation’s increasing failure to compute. Amidst the baggage of their mid-life crisis’s, divorces, career changes, regrets, remorse, and ‘reinvention at 50,’ our generation is cast into the 20-something oblivion, cautious and weary of committing to anything while we’re too young, but also staring ahead blankly at the path that our elders have burnt down behind them.

Quelle surprise, right? Blame the parents? That’s exactly what one would expect from a twenty-something who is young enough to be the product of today’s overindulgent, ‘everybody’s a rock star’ method of raising children, right? No. If I wanted to go on and on about how my parents ‘fucked me up,’ I’d get a therapist. We are human and a product of our time- so are they.

Although times may have changed, people seem to be pretty similar in terms of what they need. For the past year, I’ve been pursuing my quarter-life crisis whole-heartedly, living off my savings and out of a backpack, traveling all over Europe, and now America. Total freedom. Little, if any, responsibility or direction besides that of life on the road. After two post-collegiate years of moving from one job to the next, planning one career path after another, weighing every decision against how it could affect the entire rest of my life(!!!) I decided to own my aimlessness, flaunt the transience of my life right now, pick up and just go.

In the last year, partially because my primary mode of transportation has been hitchhiking, I have met hundreds of people of all different nationalities, ages, occupations, backgrounds, etc. One clear common denominator among them all and, I think, everyone in general, is they all have something, or are looking for something to create a framework that ascribes meaning to their life and they are usually eager to tell you about whatever it is within the first ten minutes of meeting them. Whether it’s family, career, religion, the quest for enlightenment, addiction, ambition or training carrier pigeons towards Belgian stardom (no, I’m not kidding), everyone seems to need something that steers the navigation of their existence.

Whether you’re a twenty-something that is blatant about the lack of this singular purpose, like me, or you think you’ve found it, or you’re awaiting your next existentialistic crisis, I hope this blog, which has yet to take shape (sort of like my life…), will at least serve as a place for the amusing anecdotes and observations that can be found in twenty-something-stories.