Competition and Quarter-Life Crises

Part of becoming an adult is learning how to (be able to) do what you want.

It's not an easy transition, from one of having your identity and goals shaped by others (family), and being released into a world where you define your own identity and goals.

Maybe you'll be happy with your achievement graduating from a good college, and use that education to do satisfactory work and earn a satisfactory living, and pursue your passions and hobbies.

Maybe you'll never be satisfied and will continue to work your way up the ladder, and die as a CEO working all day every day at 80.

Neither one is 'wrong', but it's up to you to define what you want and what makes you happy. And not just choosing things that will make you happy, but choosing to be happy with your choices.

You might envy the F/G engineer in a lie-flat bed. You might even be right (I flew business class internationally once, it was amazing). But still, they have a choice -- are they happy with what their striving has gotten them, or are they staying up the whole flight working on the next project to achieve the next promotion that they imagine will bring fleeting happiness, until they choose a new goal, making them again unhappy with the promotion they just achieved?

That was an interesting read. I enjoy it when folks write about things other than the technical. We're human; first and foremost.

For myself, I won't get into it, but I have spent the last 40 years living a life of rigorous self-honesty, and self-evaluation. I take daily personal inventory, and often immediately admit wrong and move to correct any errors.

I'm not very competitive. In order to compete, one must win, and when one wins, someone else loses. I have found that we can often work together to achieve far more than is possible alone; no matter how talented and energetic we are. I can be on a team that may be competing against another team, but often, there's no need for competition, and I never compete against my team members.

I've also spent that last 40 years helping others, and being of Service. Many of those I help have been the victims of someone else's competitiveness, so it gives me a good baseline to reflect on what "competition" looks like, on the losing end.

My lack of competitiveness has often been read as weakness. People that know me, know that's not a particularly helpful approach, when dealing with me.

I just find that we get a lot more done, when we stop trying to beat each other, and see how we can use our differences and orthogonal viewpoints as a concrete mix.

I think this post boils down to two things: finding meaning in one's life and using external validation to define oneself. I think the shift to "competing with oneself" is an attempt to move away from the external validation to give one meaning.

That said, I think these are issues that are always going to come up in life. I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a quarter-life crisis. The crisis part is the realization that these are real issues one has to reckon with, essentially forever. That's life.

I think with age (being 42 and knowing how much more driven I was in my youth), you do eventually start to realize competing with others or even oneself is not necessarily a great goal. Life is about experiences and living. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they don't. A lot of it isn't in your control.

Trying to be better than others or yourself a year ago is very hard to sustain. You eventually have to be okay with who you are where you are right now. That doesn't mean you give up on dreams, just that you hold them in their proper context.

I do not believe for a moment that this has anything to do with competition.

I have lived in China and kids there are booked fully. Their parents sacrifice everything for their only child but at the same time they put a very high burden on them booking every space of their lives.

Just letting the kids fool around, experience what interest them, play and make mistakes is inadmissible.

Usually the parents work all day and only grandparents could take care of them, so making them go to some class or another is a way to have their kids busy all day.

Because they have only one child, the child needs to be perfect all the time, and the bet must be risk free.

This creates children than don't really know what they really want, and with zero creativity, incapable of making mistakes or take their own decisions.

Also when they don't have external pressure they just laze, because they lack internal motivation.

This particular person is happy on the work because he is told what to do, I suppose he works at Microsoft. Only when he is free to do whatever he can do he feels uneasy.

Like adult people(over 40) in Russia when Soviet Russia collapsed, they felt uneasy when there was no one taking all the decisions for them.

They just had not the training to deal with freedom.

As a kid, when I finished school, I was free, My friends and I decided what we wanted to do all the time. If I joined a competition, I did not tell my parents.

Over time you make lots of mistakes,exploring new territories, experiences and dangers, but develop autonomy and learn to deal with chaos.

After university I had the opposite problem to this man's, I could not stand people at work telling me what to do, specially when I considered they were taking bad decisions, so I started working on my own.

Competitiveness of any kind, with others or with oneself, whether physical or mental, seems to me like a crutch rather than a path to happiness.

If you can only feel good about yourself when you're on the up and up, what happens when you start getting old and can no longer keep up with the young blood?

Competition saddens me. I've always found it boring. Most often it doesn't lead to growth or betterment. I prefer creation and understanding to it.

There is much to explore, plenty of new things to invent, plenty of stories to share.

Our elites have successfully failed. They cornered themselves into zero-sum games where they pocket all the wins. You don't have a choice anymore but to compete or die.

Every creation gets corrupted to bring the level down to tic-tac-toe. Hopefully creators can still see the stars when they die in the gutter.

As a first generation Indian, I grew up with the competition and abhorred it as a high-schooler. I keep far from it even now. It is not good to have a uncritical self image. Keep doing the good work, enjoy life. Nobody knows what will happen, so plan for the risks ahead, and keep chaos at bay. That's the best you can do. Rest is gravy. One of the worst things anyone can do is feel bad about things that they shouldn't feel bad over. The time spent doing so is wasted, it belittles your spent effort, and creates a poor self image. And keep away from snobs. It is not worth killing yourself over. If you are born in US, you should be able to pickup friends outside your country circle anyways. Don't fix the wrong bug. Cheers.

Dude, thank you for writing this. I had the exact same thing when I got my first full time job and I thought it was a unique problem. You made me feel way less crazy. I’m pretty much over it now, and like you, I had to set some new goals / ambitions to find a new “path” now that all my college ambitions had been achieved.

Learning to meditate was also a game changer. I do it every day before work. Also, talking to a therapist helped me realize I had been being way too hard on myself for too long. Learning to take pride in my accomplishments was another critical factor.

I hope a lot of people see your blog post. Thanks again for putting that together!

This story truly resonates with me as I am also first generation. I came to USA on my own, with $700 in my pocket and a partial athletic scholarship (played a D1 team sport). After I finished my undergrad and the sports were gone (in an organized form at least) I also struggled a bit. Unlike you, I made that step and got into grad school. That was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made (even though it didn't feel like at the moment). The main reason I've managed to accomplish everything in my life was primarily because of being involved in sports and being competitive in anything that I do, whether it is sports, academia, work or anything else. I believe that a healthy dose of competitive drive is what makes you a better self as you always strive for improvements. It certainly made me a better athlete and a better student.

Another thing that you mentioned is that you fell off the track a bit and you are never going to be in the shape you were in college. Trust me on this one, you'll hit your prime between 28 and 32 years old. That's when you could potentially be your strongest and fastest. And staying in shape is a lot easier than getting in shape. I was lucky that my grad school allowed me a lot of flexibility and I was still able to play my sport on a semi-professional level even after college. Try to find a group/community of like-minded people who share your passion for running. That will be your "hobby" and will fulfill multiple things that you are missing in life at the moment (e.g. staying in shape and competing).

Having said that, my "quarter life crisis" (or one third life crisis if you will) is kicking-in harder this this time around as I am in my mid 30s and my athleticism is slowly going away. Being in the middle of pandemic is not helping either. I used to be extremely agile, with a 40" vertical jump but this has been on a steady decline due to age and mileage and all the restrictions imposed on sports and gatherings. Still learning how to deal with it.

There's not much here. He decided to compete against himself and made a list of self-improvement items? He complained about being directionless yet had some clear choices he could make. Cat? Grad School? Girlfriend?

Sounds like this person needs a role-model and a mentor.

As a fellow 23 year old Indian American who grew up in the tri-state area this hit way too close to home. I like to think I learned a lot of the lessons you’ve eschewed during my time in grad school right now but I caught myself sleuthing on your github and LinkedIn and feeling that familiar sense of envy. Some habits are hard to break I guess.

I remember the strange feeling of uncertainty I got shortly after graduating college. Up until then, what I was supposed to do next was always clear. I was building up towards being an adult, and then suddenly there I was.

That shift from planning for the future to realizing that future was now was tricky. It took me a couple of years of aimless drifting to finally come to terms with it, and convince myself that it was time to start actually doing the things I had always planned for doing in the future.

The emphasis we put on kids to out perform their peers, get the best grades, get the best scores, go to the best colleges, is unrealistic and creates anxiety ridden adults later on. You can fail. It’s ok. What did you learn? You can skip college for some fields and be totally fine. You can even shun your old existence and live a life of a hermit, that’s cool too.

This isn’t the first time I’ve read something like this from an Indian household (or Asia in general). Yes, your family experienced great pressure to do well in order to prove they belong. But in keeping up with the “Jones’s” you aren’t enjoying it, you aren’t doing things that bring you joy, and you are doing things to conform. We all want to “fit in” but it’s when we let our diversity shine we can truly appreciate each other.

Good read though and I hope you realize it’s not all about performance, even in the workplace. Prioritize your mental health and happiness over your career. You’ll live a happier life.

I don't know man.

I just turned 31 and I feel like my life is just starting.

I'm not the smartest dude, but I try really hard. It took me a few tries to get into grad school after working a series of shitty jobs. Now that've finished my PhD (a mixture of computational fluidics and material dynamics), I've been trying to enter the job market in tech (close to family in the bay area) and it's just not happening (like almost no interviews).

I guess it's just managing expectations. Our local police department is hiring so I might give that a shot. It's a bit of a blow to the ego but that doesn't matter.

The one thing I regret was neglecting my relationships (fiancee left me, didn't keep up with close friends/family, even one that passed away) and hobbies for the sake of work during grad school. That's something I won't compromise again.

I recommend reading Peter Thiel's writings/speeches on his quarter-life crisis, and how it resolved him to "avoid competition"/tracked career paths. I remember reading his content when I was 27, and it completely changed the course of my life.

Surprise, you now realize that there is no end-game. Life is a journey, enjoy each part.

I'm a bit of a late bloomer, and had my first "quarter life crisis" at 30. I'd like to think this means I'll live to be 120 :) I remember it was my 30th birthday in 2016 and I was taking an airplane to be at a conference I didn't care about in a city I didn't like. "Is this all?" I asked myself. As it turns out, it wasn't.

I quit that job, worked on a startup for 9 months. It failed. I got another job. Soon I'm going to start working on another startup. I started taking my social and dating life more seriously. Like much more seriously. In my 20s, I'd be lucky to get invited to do stuff every couple of months. My weekends are full of stuff these days. I rarely dated, but over the past few years I've rejected women, I've been rejected by women. I'm still not where I want to be: I'd like to build a successful startup, I'd like to have a solid long-term relationship and family, I want to leave my mark on this world.

But honestly -- as someone that's hyper-competitive -- competition isn't healthy. It makes me an asshole and even though, frankly, I do win a lot, it's not as fulfilling as a night out on a great date. Or chatting with friends about the meaning of life. Or enjoying the best damn crème brûlée you've ever had. Winning comes at a cost. Compartmentalizing competition is probably one of the most important character milestones I've achieved yet.

Having walked this same path, this blog resonates with me. To others reading, however, I would warn against the particular solution the author suggests.

I can’t help but notice the author’s attempts to find new external benchmarks against which to measure himself. I did the exact same thing, literally down to “what if I ran a marathon?”

It worked well temporarily, but it didnt get at the core issue for me: my listlessness stemmed from a disbelief in the value of the benchmark, not the inability to measure up. 10 miles vs 11 didn’t matter; what matters is doing something i believe is valuable. At the end of the day, running didn’t matter, nor did my job (consulting - lol). I needed to find what did matter to me, so that even if I didn’t stack up, I could still point to something and go - “yea, but that’s still objectively awesome”

For those reading this article and saying “this is me, now” I would encourage you to think less about competition and more about values. At the end of the day, competition is a means, not an end; a Surface-level proximal driver, not a core, distal cause.

The key question is: what do you care about right now? What good do you want to do?

Naval Ravikant has a healthy way of thinking about this.

If you are envious or jealous of someone's accomplishments or wealth, you must realize that it's impossible to be in that individual's position without taking onboard all the baggage that comes with it. Sure, Warren Buffet is rich, but would you like to swap with him and be 90 years old? Sure, that engineer is getting promoted faster than you, but do you also want their mental health issues?

It's a pernicious fiction to only imagine swapping a single characteristic (their success) and forgetting or not knowing about all the ways in which you're better off (fitness, friends, family, mental health, age).

I'm going a bit off-topic compared to other comments, but I had never heard about Seattle Freeze. Is it really harder to make friends and acquaintances in Seattle compared to other cities or States? Any Seattleite to confirm?

For anyone else curious, OP's average pace for his last three runs were 6:53 (8.4 mi), 7:08 (5.4 mi), and 7:22 (6.4 mi). He's clearly living the post and doing well at competing against himself.

My answer to this dilemma is Thriverism: https://www.sonyasupposedly.com/thriverism/

Accompanying HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330086

Sounds like you ran out of hobbies. Find a new hobby.

I had my first quarter life crisis at 18, when I came to grips with the fact that I had accomplished nothing in my life so far, as evidenced by my lack of good college admissions - I graduated only 2nd in my class with just a 1500 SAT, which isn't good enough for top schools.

Unlike OP, however, it was less of an aimless drift and more of an aggressive, angry depression. Had another one at 20, when I realized that not getting into a FB internship would probably set me back permanently from my goals.

Now I'm 24, work at Amazon and widely considered a disappointment to people in OP's social circles. The pain has waned a bit, but the crisis is just constant now, like the roar of an engine on a long airplane flight in coach. Eventually the discomfort of the resting your head on the window and the anger you feel at the people with lie-flat seats paid for by Google and Facebook overpowers the rest.