11. Uuuuuuuuunay!

I really didn’t enjoy leaving Uni.

I tried to cling on for as long as I could, as the following Facebook post from 2013 reminded me.

(52 likes and 8 comments in 2013 by the way, good form that!)

I did 4 years of undergrad, then did a postgrad, and then lived in the small city that I studied in, Stirling, for another year. I bloody loved it.

At the time, the lifestyle suited me to a tee. I was a fan of not really having a routine, and not really doing much in general (other than thinking about the next sesh, which was never too far away hehe).

In hindsight, albeit probably more subconsciously, I think I also liked the fact that, despite it not being the most challenging of lifestyles, it had a degree (hello pun!) of purpose to it.

Everything was always geared towards a goal; whether that was coursework, exams or a dissertation.

Of course, this isn’t just the case for Uni, but for wider education in general.

Whether or not we enjoyed it, it did provide us with a bit of direction, something to work towards, and in result, some sense of purpose.

In Blog 8 (hilariously titled 'Finding our pawpose'), we had a look at that clichéd old word 'purpose' in a bit more detail.

To save you the hassle of reading it, the summary of that post is: purpose is good.

To showcase the point, let's get a bit deep and meaningful for a sec, and pull out a Blogs and Dogs' fave, Viktor Frankl, quote "Life is never made unbearable by circumstance, but only by lack of meaning and purpose”.

So whether we knew it or not, it seems that one of the key pillars of happiness was covered by default when we were in the education system.

As this education system is where we spent the vast majority of our formative years, it may have possibly conditioned us to subconsciously think that our 'path' in life was always going to be laid out on a plate.

For many of us, the first 20 odd years of our lives went something like this:

1. Be born.

2. Head off to nursery a couple of years later. Once we’d bitten enough other kids there, we’d graduate into Primary School.

3. In Primary, once we’d ploughed through Biff & Chip, and smashed our times tables, it was time for Secondary School. Big boy stuff.

4. Here, we’d meet a careers advisor who’d pull a potential career out of their… hat (and to which we’d pay absolutely no attention), and it was time to start thinking about courses to study at Uni.

5. At Uni, we’d bag a second-class degree (and an honorary first-class in strawpedo-ing blue WKDs), then it was all about getting a job.

6. We’d have the honeymoon period of having a job and being a real person, and this was great.

Until the honeymoon period of being a real person wore off, and we realise that we’ve got to figure out the next 40 odd years by ourselves.

Fuck.

Suddenly, our path isn’t so clear. Figuring stuff out for ourselves!? We’ve never had to do that before! What on earth do we do!?

• Do we buy a one-way ticket to Bali, and go off travelling for the foreseeable? No, then we’d be too far behind in our careers!

• So instead, do we smash out regular 80 hour working weeks to fast-track our careers? No, we can’t do that, we’d be wasting our youth!

• Got it, we #yolo and spend our 20s on the lash!

• Can’t do that, imagine how disappointed our parents would be!

Urgh. So what do we do, where do we do it, and how on earth do we go about doing it?

Hello quarter-life crisis.

The privileged position of what I’m about to say makes it sound almost ridiculous, but it feels like the sheer quantity of options of where, why, when, how and what we should do, and the resultant lack of a clear direction, can provide a hell of a lot of angst to us in our 20s, and into our 30s.

This angst is a bit of a ballache. However, it can also tell us a couple of things.

Firstly, as much as we all know it (and not just cos I've said it about 38 times in this post already), but the importance of having some sort of thing to aim towards, and the resulting sense of purpose that provides.

And I suppose this ‘thing’ is probably best to be something based on our own individual values, and not comparing ourselves to Pedro backpacking around Vietnam, or that 26-year-old Senior Vice President we’ve just seen get promoted on LinkedIn.

Secondly, it’s not really any wonder we've seen the growth of this "quarter-life crisis", and I don’t think we should beat ourselves up for it.

For a large part of our lives, our path was pretty clearly laid out for us, and we didn't need to think about it too much. This may have subconsciously conditioned us to assume that that will always be the case. Which, as we get into the real world, becomes abundantly clear that it's not, and we've got to try and figure it out ourselves.

And if you're anything like me, you'll still be trying to work out how on earth to actually do that.