Are you having a quarter-life crisis?

Earlier this year, a few weeks short of my 29th birthday, I decided to leave my perfectly good job at a newspaper in favour of… well, what I wasn’t sure. ‘Adventure’ was the vague catch-all I gave. In truth, I had no idea. When I emailed a friend with the news, she replied: ‘Wow! Are you having a quarter-life crisis?’

Was I? I was in my late twenties, soon to be unemployed. I’d been in a relationship for the best part of seven years, but lived alone, the thought of ‘settling down’ making me panic. I had no savings to speak of. I’d spent the previous year itching to do something different, while worrying about giving up what I thought I’d always wanted — a stable career on a national newspaper that I’d been building for six-and-a-half years. In fact, I’d come to realise I had no idea what I actually wanted to do when I ‘grew up’.

All archetypal of a quarter-life crisis, according to Dr Oliver Robinson, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Greenwich. Common symptoms, he says, are a ‘nagging sense of falsity’ (that you may have entered the wrong adult role) and feeling that one is ‘still a kid’. But if I was having a QLC, I wasn’t alone. The fact is, your twenties are weird. You expect them to be a time of steady progression, professionally, personally and privately. In reality, they’re often marked by anxiety (experienced by a third of twenty-something women and a quarter of twenty-something men, according to recent research) and fear of failure (felt by 86 per cent of twenty-somethings questioned in an online survey). No wonder a recent study co-authored by Robinson and published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development found that 39 per cent of men and 49 per cent of women reported feeling in ‘crisis’ in their twenties.

So established in the cultural consciousness is the image of the existentially challenged twenty-something that it’s the subject of a forthcoming film. Released next month, Say When (called Laggies in the US) stars Keira Knightley as a 28-year-old whose high school reunion triggers a crisis so severe, she winds up abandoning her life for a week to hang out with a free-spirited 16-year-old, played by Chloë Grace Moretz. Psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos (remember her from the original Channel 4 Big Brother?), meanwhile, has just released a new guide for twenty-somethings, Whose Life Is It Anyway? Living Through Your 20s on Your Own Terms. And then there’s Lena Dunham’s new book, Not That Kind of Girl, a collection of musings on the tribulations of growing up from the queen of twenty-something angst (think break-ups, her first nude scene in a college film and ill-fated diets featuring health foods and laxative tea).

Robinson identifies two strands of the twenty-something crisis: one, occurring in the early- to mid-twenties, in which we flail around wondering what on earth to do; the other, later on, when we panic that what we’ve done is all wrong. Manifestations can range from the prosaic — my late-twenties career shift, for example — to the dramatic, a full-scale life overhaul leading to anxiety, even depression or nervous breakdown.

What’s causing this collective sense of distress? Clearly, today’s twenty-somethings face very real economic and social challenges. Graduate unemployment in the UK sits at 7.3 per cent; the average student leaves university with debts exceeding £44,000. Starting salaries for university leavers in professional posts dropped 11 per cent in real terms between 2007 and 2012, to £21,702. And this is all as house prices remain out of reach; first-time buyers in the capital need a £50,000 deposit for a lender to consider giving a mortgage, while the average rent for a property in London is now £1,412 a month.

‘My parents were married by 21 and had a house by the time they were 30,’ says David, who, having graduated with a degree in anthropology, spent much of his twenties working in dead-end temp jobs in London. ‘It was a difficult time. Coming out of university was such an anti-climax. Our parents’ generation would come out and go straight into a career. I was working in call centres.’ Eventually, aged 27, he packed it in — moving to São Paulo where, having just turned 30, he now works for a conservation company. ‘I’m not earning much, and I may have sacrificed any chance of savings, but at least my life has improved.’

It’s often said that today’s twenty-somethings are impatient for overnight success. If we are, who can blame us? We live in a society that fetishises youth. ‘There’s a mythology that success is much easier today than it used to be — this idea that “I wrote my idea on the back of a beer mat and sold it to Google for 100 kajillion dollars,” ’ says Dr Papadopoulos. Popular culture, she points out, is filled with examples of youngsters achieving great things. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, reportedly became a billionaire aged 23. Last year, Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Luminaries, aged 28. Dunham may be the poster-child of the quarter-life crisis generation, but she’s also the Golden Globe-winning creator of an internationally successful TV series. She’s 28.

‘It’s terrifying,’ says Claire, 23, who’s just moved to London after doing a Masters in media studies. She’d planned to find a job in television production, but has given up hope and is now applying for bar work. ‘Everyone else has already achieved so much. They’ve known what they’ve wanted to do since 15 and have done placements and internships ever since. I feel like I’ve missed my chance.’

The combination of this impatience to succeed with difficult economic circumstances can be overwhelming. ‘There’s so much expectation riding on you to make something out of your life,’ says Iain, 29. After leaving university, he worked in PR in London but struggled to find a full-time job, instead working on short-term contracts. ‘I’d go on Facebook and LinkedIn and feel like it was only me that wasn’t succeeding.’ After six months of unemployment, during which time he moved back in with his parents, he became increasingly despondent and anxious, and started suffering severe panic attacks. ‘At times I felt suicidal.’ He was later diagnosed with depression, prescribed antidepressants, and began therapy. ‘When I started getting help, it was just a huge weight off my shoulders.’ He’s now back working in PR and recently came off his medication.