Entry #7 or Life?

Before we start, can we acknowledge how much you, reader, and I, Dani, both want to smack Dani across the face for pumping out these dramatic, wannabe groundbreaking, and highly clickbaity titles? It's nothing more than Dani's little lost teenage self stuck inside her aging body, finally and painfully exerting her creativity.

On a serious note, I always feel like I'm just practicing to become the most obnoxious, pseudo-intellectual, elbow-patch-and-tweed-wearing rambler of all time.

On an even more serious note, life? Yes, life. That one, yeah. Exactly. See? You're getting it.

So what do I, a 27-year-old, first-world-dwelling rando, have got to say about life that demands to be digitally recorded forever and ever and ever?

Reader, I'll tell you now: not much. You can quit while you're ahead.

Or

you can stay.

Why wouldn't you stay?

Why not?

That is a beautiful question in itself. I would argue that "Why not?" is already a thought-provoking but also comprehensively descriptive answer to "Life?", which is what any written piece of thought should inspire in its reader.

You are so turning red right now! I see you. Calm down, I'm done kidding around.

I come to you today to talk a bit about my own personal experience with something all twentysomethings seem to have gone through, are currently going through, or will undoubtedly go through before their decade is up.

I am talking about a quarter-life crisis.

Oh, what a weird thing that is, to wake up and find yourself thinking, "What the fuck?", and then have to put on polyester pants and work your internship-turned-job until 6 pm, and do it again the next day.

In my own experience, I used to particularly dread my office's elevator doors. I wrote quite a lot about them at the time. They were tall, metallic, and located in a dark part of my office's entry hall. There were three doors on each wall, and they faced each other. Every day, my colleagues and I would make a neat queue in front of these doors. Someone would press the call button. And when that ding dinged, we would march into each open door until we couldn't fit another soul in there. It was so slaughterhousy. I felt like I was a stick-figure character in one of those newspaper cartoons criticising late-stage capitalism.

My life was a revolving door of grey, polyester, and overcrowded trains. I felt like I lived permanently in rush hour.

Don't you see it? You spend 8 hours a day (the lucky ones, at least...) working for a wage that allows you to have fun for the 4 hours you manage to stay awake after your work day. I don't want to spill more Marxism over this page - this is my food for thought anyway - but, BUT, a salary is in fact an exchange for your social time. In other words, your life.

Beyond being extremely disappointed with modernity, I also was at the end of a saturated list of heartbreaks. I had gone through two major breakups in a space of 2-3 years. Those breakups that change your entire outlook on love, life, and everything in between.

Even though my life was being sucked out of me for 8 hours a day, I could still cuddle at the end of the day. And I was experiencing love that made you feel more yourself. The type of love people say looks good on you. The type of love that made grey, polyester, and blah blah blah worth it.

It ended and I felt sick.

Ultimately, I felt like I was standing on nothing. Not in a I'm floating way. More in a my whole universe is a void filled with nothing way.

You could argue that I put myself in this situation. I was void of hobbies, friends, and other things that gave you meaning. I was holding onto work & wife, nothing else. But I wasn't void of any of these things, and I had plenty to hold on to. Yet, my itty bitty arms weren't strong enough to hold it all. In fact, I think the issue was that I was too tired for it.

Tired. Tired. Tired. I pushed myself after work and on the weekends to enjoy all the waking moments that made life fun and exciting and beautiful and worth it. But the weight of it all eventually got to me. And it felt impossible to do it even one second more.

I put what made me happy first. So I quit, I waved goodbye to my landlord, my friends, my family, and my country.

And I left for a year. I went fully trippy hippie, van-lifer, farm worker, hostel dweller. I washed my hair in glacial lakes and the Pacific Ocean. I got addicted to snus and chillies. I itadakimasu-ed myself through the hearts of my Japanese hosts. I had bad dates and questionable flings in the southern hemisphere.

Oh, I had fun, my dearest reader. But that fun funs out too.

The instability is enticing but demanding. The lack of routine is inspiring but also somewhat empty. The new friends you make make you miss the old ones even more. You escape your life because you need it, as if it were the medicine you were prescribed to fight against the symptoms of modernity. But your body eventually gets used to this medicine, and it stops having an effect on you.

I found myself on a beach in Split, split on what to do next. Living while tired weighs on you, but living while escaping weighs on you too. All I wanted to do before was to run away from my life. Now, all I wanted to do was to escape this limbo I had nested myself in and run towards a new life.

A crisis is just that. A moment. Passing. Fleeting. Transitional. Scary. Heavy. Important. Eye-opening.

A lesson. Are you curious to find out what I learned?

• If you are too relaxed, you don't sleep well. You gotta be a bit tired for it.

• You have to work; that's unavoidable. But you can pick what you do. And that holds a lot of power. Use it wisely.

• Don't keep it all for the weekend or that one week you took off in summer. Do it now.

• Take the risk and stay out until 5 am on a school night. You'll be so tired the next day, but isn't it fun to tell that story?

• Go further, take the risk and quit. Get lost in the world and in yourself.

And most importantly, do not forget: you can do all this because you are lucky enough to have access to food, water, and a house. You can have a quarter-life crisis because you were born in the right place and time. You can question life because you don't have to fight for it every day. There is no need to feel guilty about this privilege, but it is important to recognize it and carry this knowledge with you wherever you go.

Reader, take whatever you want from my learnings. But I do advise you to try it all out for yourself: the job, the house, the love, the sickness, the limbo, the travelling, the burnout, the newness. Better than reading about it, you should live it.

The planet has so many living things. We are just one of them. I have said this many times before, but you don't know me, so here goes: there is so much freedom in insignificance.

Life? Yes. Live.