Quarter-Life Crisis.

I’M HAVING A QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS. I’m not alone here. I think most guys between the ages of 25 and 35 experience this gloomy condition at some point. It starts slowly, evolves desolately and ends universally – killing our boyhood spirit like some sort of attitude cancer. It’s not bad – it’s the way of things – but it is a crisis. And there’s no avoiding it. No self-help book. No 12 step plan. No ‘fall back, I’ll catch you.’ Nothing. Just the process of growing up, falling down, growing up some more and those misunderstood moments of masculine menstruation that throw us for a loop along the way. It’s all a part of the very THEATRICAL process of BECOMING A MAN: waking up one morning realizing it’s time to stop pushing our own ego and start pulling our own weight.

A man’s quarter-life crisis is best understood as a period of grumpiness and change: an up-the-nose eight ball of stress chased with a sinister cocktail of financial uncertainty, moral chaos, professional hesitation, romantic pandemonium, self-suspicion, and social diffidence. Men don’t like change. We especially don’t like our revolutions up-the-nose. But I’ll get to all that in a minute.

The quarter-life crisis is, basically, the uneasy process by which a man realizes that his adult life is going one way, his childhood dreams another. We’ll never play shortstop for the Yankees, bass for Jack White, pen the great American novel, or drive one of those NASA dune buggies on the Moon. It’s enough to leave even the best of us just a little disappointed.

The quarter-life crisis shapes men differently. Some emerge half-broken, half-confused or just plain huffy. We know these men as the majority. Others emerge as optimistic and energetic as they were before their crisis began. We know these men as the unemployed…

The truth is that most men emerge finding themselves settling in on a classical temperament: enough patience to survive a weekend with our wife’s parents but enough edginess to throw a tantrum at our son’s little league game. We seem to find ourselves become a little more like, well, like our fathers.

The quarter-life crisis transforms us from the young, bright-eyed boys we once were, to the grown-up, steel-eyed men we all said we’d never become. Things just…change. We get lines on our face. Hair starts to grow out of our ears. We hurt longer after workouts. We take naps and read. We boast about things like our lawn and getting good gas mileage. Last night we tried our hand at a nice casserole. Delicious! We know the number of calories in the beer we drink and might stay in on Friday night because we’re tired; it was a long week at work, after all. But hey, let’s hit the old golf ball around on Sunday. We might or might not be married. It doesn’t matter. One way or another we’re making some poor girl’s life harder than was advertised. We are young men in motion, making a complete mess – menstruating all over the place.

At the end of it all we garner a cheerlessly realistic sort of collective wisdom: the Yankees have a short stop, Jack White a bassist, NASA all the astronauts they need, Playboy’s going out of business and male enhancement pills don’t work as advertised. Mom lied – we can’t be anyone we want to be when we grow up.

The quarter-life crisis is characterized by this sort of untidy friction along the classical fault line of ‘boy’ becomes ‘man’ – that irreverent moment in time and space where our wonderfully intact (and inflated) egos collapse like an old Vegas card house dynamited in slow motion. Over and over and over again…

Ladies, want to know if the man you love is in the throes of his very own quarter-life crisis? Look for sudden outbursts of unpredictable agitation. Yesterday at the gym, a guy cut in front of me on the cable machine. I imagined myself grabbing his hand and running it through the pulleys as I finished my last set…10 minutes later, on the bike, a really heart-warming USO commercial came on and I teared up like a girl watching The Notebook. By the way, having seen The Notebook, like I have at least 5 or 6 times now, is also an indication of your man’s delicate emotional state…

Everything bothers a guy in quarter-life crisis. Real stuff bothers us, like having our rules of engagement posted on open source internet for our computer literate enemy to study and use to their advantage JUST AS unreal stuff bothers us, like knowing that 80% of Americans know that TV broadcasts are scheduled to switch from analog to digital in 2009, but that 77% don’t know John Roberts is the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. We could read an old speech by Robert Kennedy for some insight into the nature of the contemporary American experiment, but get all the perspective we think we need by listening to Kanye West’s Jesus Walks on our IPOD. Our mothers tell us we’re being a little grumpy. George Carlin reminds us we’re just pissed off, which is ok, just so we keep laughing. At you. At him and her. And that thing over there. And most of all at ourselves…We become a walking Larry David episode. Everything becomes disconcerting. Our tolerance for the idiot lowers; our temperance for the ignorant thins – along with our hair and our patience. And it’s all a part of the process.

WHEN IT COMES TO EMOTIONAL MATTERS the bulk of research is dedicated to women who, it seems to me, have the ability to transcend moodiness into the sphere of crazy, and yet somehow still maintain a grip on everyday reality. They seem to roll well with nature’s hormonal punches. They have their ups and downs. And find girlfriends on reverse cycles. When times are bad, up-cycle forces down-cycle into a pair of heels; off they go to a nightclub, step onto the dance floor (hand-in-hand) forming an impenetrable estrogen defense, a phalanx of feminine hip-hop motion. They drink Cosmos we buy them, and flirt with someone else. They pile into a cab, watch Sex in the City, fall asleep with their make-up on and hug it out in the morning. I love you. No, I love you. Seriously girl, I love you…Wow, do I feel better. I love you…

Men handle down-times differently. We couldn’t tell you if another guy’s in a bad mood. Maybe he’s pissed off at something? Good, I’m pissed too. We don’t ask what’s wrong – we don’t care – but if you must force your misery on us, we welcome it…we’re just happy to know there’s a chance your problem’s worse than ours. We’ll say something comforting like ‘dude, you’re acting like a chick’ or maybe ‘I’m sorry man, were you saying something?’ Or, ‘so, then you wouldn’t mind if I called her, would you?’ And if you’re looking for a hug – ask my roommate Geoff, he gets real touchy-feely after a couple of beers.

And a man’s quarter-life grumpiness includes more complex hazards than getting felt up by Geoff. We find ourselves navigating an unfamiliar landscape of sensitivities and emotions. We’d rather just have a cold beer and watch an old John Ford film. Things such as our emotional IQ (the ability to love, be loved, accept and provide intimacy), our spiritual IQ (the ability to identify and communicate with a higher energy in man and nature, a God), and our moral center (the non-negotiable, though often tested and sometimes compromised moral imperative of our own sense of honor and character) prove tricky challenges for young men battling the quarter-life’s obstacle course. All this, and did I mention you won’t be playing for the Yankees this spring?

IT ALL BEGINS with the son's burden of his father's expectations. This is a heavy weight for a young man to carry. As a man reaches his quarter-life, he either sinks beneath this pressure (and drinks a lot) or somehow manages to leverage it to his advantage and pass it to his own sons (and they drink a lot). It’s a noble burden. Some guys shake it and make it, some don’t. And that’s where it all starts. AYE, TO BE KING. But the extent to which the quarter-life crisis affects a man has only a little to do with all that and a lot more to do with his personality type.

History gives us some insight into the matter. Abraham Lincoln was grumpy. Back then they called grumpy people "melancholy." In Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln's Melancholy, the president's life is explored through his manly grouchiness. Shenk argues it’s what fueled his greatness. The popular opinion of the 19th Century was that melancholy was a strong personality type. Grumps were considered thoughtful and sincere. They were respected for being so troubled by the madness of the world that surrounded them. Nowadays that personality type is treated as a psychosomatic problem and you’re medicated. Bad for the understanding of our own quarter-life crisis – good for the women we live with. Bad for the advancement of art, politics and culture – good for decorum in elementary school classrooms.

And some men are Lincoln at heart. Lucky are those miserable bastards that trudge forward beneath life’s darkest clouds. At least they always know to dress for rain. But most of us are generally a glad, thankful lot, only recently menstruating, and in need of a little understanding. What’s the solution for quarter-life grumps like us? Guys who don’t wear heels (there was that one time in Guam), hate Sex in the City (ok, the movie wasn’t that bad), and don’t want to hug it out (though I hear there’s a sergeant in the Company who gives a great post-patrol back massage: no terps, no happy endings). What makes this quarter-life tonic – one part fear, one part aggravation, one part disappointment – easier going down? Who’s to say?

And we’re men, so who’s to care?

And so we don’t care. And we go through life having other people explain our downs away. When we're boys and we get grumpy it's rationalized, "boys will be boys." When we're teens, it's excused. When we're in our early 20s it’s altogether overlooked (mostly because we're too drunk to know the difference). When we're in our late 20s and early 30s the elaborate architecture of our ego collapses and we plunge into our quarter-life crisis. By our late 30s we recover and amass huge sums of debt predicated on the understanding that everything from the big house to the wife’s new Jimmy Choo shoes are an “investment”. In middle age the things that used to make us happy, make us grumpy – a bottle of Scotch and the History Channel our only refuge. Then, with all its misplaced glory, comes the renaissance of the mid-life crisis; and we resurrect our adolescent ego and try all over again. This fails (of course) and the wife makes us turn in the Harley for a hybrid. By this time our own son’s in his quarter-life crisis and we find some fatherly comfort knowing we’ve been in his shoes. And one day, by some unknown providence, we become sagacious and celebrated and drunk (again). We wear bad sweaters and remember that laughing feels better than being pissed off. We hold court at family functions and only pass on advice if it was spoken by Don Corleone or sung by Frank Sinatra. And life starts to make sense…

WHICH MAKES ME THINK, maybe it’s only by seeing the quarter-life crisis as one in a series of many crises that a young man can assemble the sort of courage required for life’s all too brief journey. I suppose those hallmark quarter-life moments of becoming a man – things like shaving, getting thrown out at 2nd base by your first girlfriend, combat, various professional and personal failures, and spending way too much money in bad Baltimore strip clubs as an undergraduate – are all just learning points meant to teach us what the Ancient Greeks, Mario Puzo and our dad were trying to teach us all along: that challenge, let-down, loss, failure, pain, and women who take your money and leave you unsatisfied, are not exclusive to a man’s quarter-life, but inclusive to his complete evolution. And while we men don’t care for our life’s change to be the up-the-nose revolutionary sort, we should be willing to take such change in stride, and such crisis with a good laugh, and preferably in a bad sweater, drunk, and surrounded by family and friends that love us despite it all.