Quarterlife

since academia has extended the length of structured, external development well into people’s twenties, the concept of living guided by instinct has become undervalued and is now just viewed as aimless wandering.

Experience is the basis of finding one’s own life, a life that, by nature of it being entirely unique, does not have its own map or clearly defined path. As the mythologist Joseph Campbell said when reflecting on the journey of life: “If there is a path, it is someone else’s.”

Even when a person is spared trauma, a lifetime in school with an emphasis on left-brain learning and high-stress competition, combined with a regular if not constant relationship to digital devices, can dissociate a person from their physical body, as well as any experience of their inner life and imagination.

I encourage clients to listen for resistance, fear, longing, excitement, exhaustion, curiosity, and bashfulness when they arise. Before asking what any of it means, I suggest acting as a nature observer, simply attending to one’s own experience in the world.

Hero’s Journey stories convey the transformation of a person—almost always a Quarterlifer—from one level of consciousness to another. It’s a transformation that occurs through some combination of risk-taking, happenstance, hard work, and magic; never through pure logic or planning alone.

He didn’t need to just shove those feelings away and cope, find substances to make it better, or try harder and harder to adapt to the very environment or relationships that were causing him pain.

This Goldilocks method means allowing curiosity about everything from food to music to climates, cities, ideas, authors, artwork, relationships, and communities.

Practicing listening in Quarterlife is changing the focus from achieving a goal to indulging curiosity—in order to understand the path itself. It’s a practice of gathering information about one’s own specific nature. Do I like this activity? Do I like time alone in the mornings? How do I need to challenge myself to grow? Whom do I admire for their

Like the story of Goldilocks’s physical testing of her environment, many Quarterlifers, particularly Stability Types, need to practice how to feel things out versus figure things out: too hot, too cold, just right; too small, too big, just right.