Existential fear , unfulfilled expectations , and a sense of sorrow can do strange thing to a person , although the good word is that you no longer have to wait until your forties to have a wobble , as the quarter - life crisis ( QLC ) is now a thing . Rather than run off with the circus or taking up base jumping , however , people going through a QLC run to take out their frustrations by rave on social media about their confused emotions and career struggle .
A novel written report in the journalFrontiers in Psychologyhelps to build a picture of just what it feels like to go undergo a crisis in other maturity , by analyzing 1.5 million tweet by over 1,400 citizenry aged 18 to 30 who have come to to a QLC .
sure paper were found to be in particular prevalent in these Tweets , particularly when compare to Tweets written by a second group of mass that had not take to be experiencing a life crisis . For instance , the word “ work ” was most strongly associated with the QLC mathematical group , as uncertainties and exasperation around employment appeared to roleplay a major role in driving existential insecurity in young adults .
A heightened enjoyment of personal pronouns – such as “ I ” , “ my ” , and “ me ” – was also a strong predictor of QLC . According to the study authors , this was to be expected as old enquiry has reveal a propensity for excessive focussing on the self in people experiencingmental health emergence .
Finally , after look back the scientific literature on the subject of early - adulthood crises , the research worker identified 20 terms that they hypothesized would feature more heavily in Tweets made by the QLC group than the control group . The analytic thinking revealed that this held on-key for 16 of these terms . These were “ stuck ” , “ trying ” , “ go out ” , “ vary ” , “ unemployed ” , “ lonesome ” , “ hopeless ” , “ overwhelmed ” , “ unfair ” , “ fail ” , “ coping ” , “ failing ” , “ dept ” , “ meaning ” , “ trapped ” , and “ try on ” .
The authors mark restriction to their study , let in the fact that the Twitter drug user may not lay out a full range of socioeconomic status grouping or may be unlike from the oecumenical universe in other ways . They also filtered for English - only tweets , despite cultural origination , which could have introduce cultural confounds in spoken language .
While feel a life crisis is patently not pleasant , it is also not rare , with arecent surveyindicating that about 70 percentage of British people in their 1930s underwent a QLC during their twenties . Fortunately , these live on an norm of one class , which means there is alwayslight at the end of the tunnel .
