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By Cuauhtemoc Ortega

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

If the authors of “Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties” intended for the book itself to be one of those “unique challenges,” then they’re correct – the challenge is in trying to find valuable substance in the book.

The authors, Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, target the book at college graduates and young adults attempting to formulate the foundations of their career – the time when the quarterlife crisis most frequently occurs.

The term “quarterlife crisis” is a derivative of the more commonly known midlife crisis, which usually strikes sometime between the late 40s and early 50s. It is characterized by an onslaught of doubt and regret caused by the realization of life’s shortness.

Adults going through the midlife crisis feel they need to use the remainder of their lives to compensate for goals they didn’t achieve in previous years – this results in episodes that can vary in extremity, from purchasing expensive material possessions to having extramarital affairs.

“The midlife crisis revolves around a doomed sense of stagnancy of a life set on pause while the rest of the world rattles on,” the authors write.

According to the authors, the quarterlife crisis occurs for the opposite reason.

“The quarterlife crisis occurs precisely because there is none of that predictable stability that drives middle-aged people to do unpredictable things,” say Robbins and Wilner in the book.

Robbins and Wilner explain that, while in college, young adults have a clear idea of what needs to be done because it is outlined for them by the university – that is, the requisites for attaining a degree are definite and usually unvariable.

This sense of direction establishes the foundations for what the authors called a real-world “culture shock” – namely, the realization that finding employment is not as automatic a process as going through college.

Experiencing the culture shock creates “overwhelming instability, constant change, too many choices, and a panicked sense of helplessness,” according to the book.

The book attempts to justify the feelings people undergoing a quarterlife crisis experience by explaining to readers why their emotions are natural. The authors do this by presenting over a hundred anecdotes of people who have undergone, or are undergoing, their quarterlife crisis.

Most of the stories involve recent college graduates and their struggle to find a career, something almost every student will undergo.

However, what all the anecdotes really do is allow the reader to commiserate with other people. Unless the reader considers it valuable to peer into the lives of over a hundred people undergoing one of the most miserable periods of their lives, the book doesn’t provide much else.

Even when readers can sympathize with one of the people interviewed in the book, the authors fail to make a substantive link that provides information people don’t already know. They connect the anecdotes with broad and obvious generalizations such as, “But even if it seems like everyone knows what they want to do at this point in their lives, there’s no guarantee that what they want to do now will be what they always want to do,” and, “A major factor of the quarterlife crisis is that real life does not turn out to be what many twentysomethings expect.”

It’s difficult to provide answers for a phenomenon that has yet to be thoroughly researched or explained – the book’s content demonstrates this well.

The book is ideal for someone seeking a basic explanation of what the concept of the quarterlife crisis is, but young adults already undergoing the crisis shouldn’t expect to learn much from it.