I am precisely 24 and one half - my half-birthday falls between 4/30 and 5/1, which was yesterday. Sometimes I quarter-life-crise about it. Like "why aren't I more on the path that I should be on?" and as mentioned in the thread ButterflyEffect linked, "should I buy a house?" "Am I doing enough?" is the question I tend to grapple with in these moments, not so much "Am I doing the right thing?" teamramonycajal. I saw that you are baffled about people with a lack of direction. For me it is not that I have a lack of direction; it is, how do I obtain what I want without sacrificing what I need to survive? What do I truly need? Am I working enough towards long-term life goals like "permanent housing" without sacrificing too much in the short-term? And for me there is also the element of: I am doing so much work, but will I succeed - will it pay off? Those are the kind of quarter-life questions I have, not "what do I want to do with my life?" I know what I want to do. I just have to weigh it against the rest of my life and see if it's actually achievable.
Well, what do you want that you think conflicts with what you need to survive? Does it really conflict? Are the odds of success - as you define it - slim enough that they terrify you? EDIT: Your website indicates that you're either the person going for the MFA in creative writing or the BA in English. That kind of explains it, I guess, insofar as what you want maybe not paying the bills so well. And I don't mean this as some kind of snarky insult, even though it might sound that way given the tendency of people to think English majors and MFAs are going to end up making lattes for everyone else. It really does seem like liberal arts folks struggle more than us STEM folks these days. To which I can only say, given the fact that I'm in a whole 'nother subject, my best advice is to sit down with your professors and possibly also the career center and have a chat about what you want, where you're going, and how you can survive doing it. Because they're the ones most likely to know.
I have a BA in English; seriously considering an MFA except - can't justify it. Because you're completely correct, what I want isn't going to pay the bills. I write poetry. The only way you're ever going to make any money in poetry is well after you done and got "famous." Airquotes because poetry famous isn't even author famous most of the time. I graduated a few years ago actually - I have a good job in a completely different industry, banking. It's not fulfilling but it pays all of the bills. My compromise is that I write and blog and do everything poetry I can in my downtime. The only way to "survive" doing poetry is to teach; the only way to teach is to go to grad school; after that I'd end up either teaching high school or slaving away to make barely above the poverty line as an adjunct professor at one (or maybe two or three) probably third-tier or community colleges while writing and publishing on the sideline. No thanks - for now. I'm toying with the idea of trying to find other jobs in writing but there aren't very many unified resources for stuff like that. Til then I just devote myself when and while I can. Yes, the odds of success are really that slim. Just the odds of becoming an actually tenured college professor these days are really slim. In poetry? Phew, you can fuggedaboudit.