Monday, August 9, 2010

quarter-life crisis

I have a friend who was in investment banking for a number of years. He worked at Lehman Brothers and when it went bankrupt, he got laid off. Something of a regression occurred in him and now he lives like a teenager stuck in high school. He listens to pop music that teens listen to, not people in their late twenties. He drinks and parties like a college freshman and while drunk on alcohol starts fights. He speculates on the stock market, gambles at casinos--the insecurity, the Napoleon complex oozes out of him, like an aura, a stench.

Is he trying to prove something, to make up for the loss of identity and esteem that went away when he was laid off from Lehman? Or is this an attempt to win back a lost time during adolescence when he could not play and party like his peers because he was focused on his studies? Probably a little bit of both, probably more the former than latter.

Because he can no longer look to his job as his source of esteem he has shifted back to a more elementary, a more primal hierarchy of value: how many girls he can score with, how many fights he can pick and win, how many dance moves he can show up. Am I hanging out with a twenty-seven year old?

Status anxiety.

Who am I to judge him? Whatever works for him. It’s his life. But there are alternative hierarchies of value that are less self-destructive, less expensive and more fitting for someone who is unemployed, and perhaps, less immature and juvenile?


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