With my 25th birthday just around the corner, I keep coming back to the same thought: shouldn’t I have this all figured out by now?
Young people are often encouraged to find their “purpose,” or throughout their lives come into a “true self” that is completely real, unchanging, and content. Like my peers, my inability to achieve this highest version of myself has led to natural feelings of anxiety, which are only heightened by career doubts, relationship shifts, and general identity confusion as I drift away from beliefs, hobbies, habits, and patterns I once thought made me “me.” These feelings of restless uncertainty have at times led me to the conclusion that I am amid my “quarter-life crisis.”
And yet, I can’t help but question that framing; what if nothing is actually going wrong, but instead, everything is simply changing?
First, I must reframe the supposed “crisis” at hand. A life crisis is often defined by feeling behind, stuck, or even completely lost. Personally, even when I know I am moving forward, I struggle with the fact that I don’t truly know what I am moving toward. It is easy to label this lack of direction as an emergency of sorts: a failure to be addressed and subsequently “fixed.”
From a Buddhist perspective, uncertainty is not a failure, but rather, just a reality of life. Discomfort is natural, and that in itself is not worthy of being labeled a crisis. Nevertheless, we tend to slip into emergency mode when we resist and struggle against the natural growing pains that come with change.
The core understanding here is the law of impermanence, which teaches that everything is always changing and nothing lasts forever. From our emotions and thoughts to the very cells in our bodies, and even the natural world around us, everything is continuously shifting, dissolving, and becoming something new—in this moment, the past, and all moments to come.
So if everything is impermanent, that also includes the parts of life we believe give us meaning, which are the very areas that cause the greatest emotional turmoil when they don’t feel certain. For example, careers, relationships, communities, emotions, interests, hobbies: these things are all constantly changing, and we are quick to label these changes as instability. But change—not instability—is not a crisis, but rather a beautiful reminder of what it is to be alive. My life at nearly 25 years of age is vastly different than it was at 22, and I hope that by 28 I have grown, changed, and learned that much more.
And while that change will inevitably include aspects of pain and loss, it is not a falling apart but a continual becoming.
Thus, through an understanding of impermanence, we might realize that the misconception of the quarter- (mid-, or three-quarter-) life crisis is incredibly problematic. If things are constantly changing, then life is always uncertain, but if uncertainty is crisis, then by that logic, life is nothing but a neverending crisis.
That said, it is only natural to cling to how things were, or how we believe they should be. Our attachments to the steady ways we want things to be are why change can feel so scary that we label it as an emergency. This, combined with the Western pressure to “figure things out” and become our “true” selves early, creates standards that are nearly impossible to live up to. Our culture teaches life expectations in a very linear and seemingly logical way. We complete our schooling, pursue a career in our desired field, and work our way up in the workforce; all the while, meeting our lifelong partner, with whom we eventually get married and have kids. Ideally, both of these paths align nicely, and we are all quite well-established at this point. Additionally, by then we should also have regular community spaces, hobbies, and routines, and all of these factors combined create what we call our “identities.”
While this path does invite some change, there are many aspects of impermanence that are overlooked. For example, sometimes the partner we meet in our 20s isn’t the person we end up marrying, or maybe the field we enter straight out of school grows stale and we no longer envision ourselves in that career for the rest of our lives. Perhaps we even outgrow many hobbies and interests that once ruled our lives. It is only natural to experience these losses and stumble upon new beginnings. Nevertheless, society often looks down upon people who change direction past the age that is commonly deemed appropriate for “starting over.”
So we either resist these natural and inescapable changes, or we acknowledge them in a self-deprecating way by labeling them as crises. In either case, we suffer as a result.
Instead, we should begin by simply seeing these experiences for what they are: change unfolding in real time. From a Buddhist perspective, the invitation is not to eliminate discomfort or rush to “fix” what feels uncertain, but to meet it with awareness rather than resistance. When we stop immediately turning experience into a problem to solve, the intensity of suffering begins to soften.
A career shift is not failure, but change revealing itself. A relationship ending is not something going wrong, but impermanence in motion. Even the shifting sense of identity in our twenties is not evidence that we are lost; it is evidence that we, too, are impermanent.
In this way, mindfulness becomes less of a concept and more of a practice of staying present with what is here, even if it is unconventional or uncertain, without adding the story that something is wrong.
We can begin to incorporate this mindfulness practice into our lives by first rethinking the way we frame change. When we feel lost, instead of labeling it a failure or entering panic-mode, we might instead acknowledge the law of impermanence and ask ourselves what specifically is changing, noticing the dissatisfaction without grasping at an immediate solution. Instead of rushing to closure or distraction, we should sit with our emotions, understanding that they, too, are impermanent. We also have the power over our own mind states to approach uncertainty with curiosity instead of fear, making it a more empowering experience.
Lastly, asking ourselves honestly what it is we are holding onto, and then working to let go, also known as the practice of non-attachment, has the potential to fundamentally shift the way we respond to uncertainty and ease the suffering it creates.
Quite honestly, I don’t currently feel “settled” in life, and I might not for a while. While I am still not always entirely comfortable coming to terms with that reality, I am making essential progress in working to understand that not only is it natural, but perfectly okay. Real stability is not the absence of change, but rather the ability to experience comfort and joy within it. Since we will never truly eliminate uncertainty, we should instead work to relate to it differently.
So, with this in mind, maybe it’s not a crisis after all, and maybe there is no such thing as a reality that “should” be, because all that we have is the one that is. And with that, I am learning to meet my life as it is—imperfect, shifting, and uncertain—with a little more openness, a little less resistance, and the quiet trust that nothing here is fixed, including me.
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