I’m approaching 40 this year. Around 20, I missed an important uni deadline, and meant the degree I had planned would cost me an extra year I couldn’t afford (like literally couldn’t afford the tuition). Managed to finish, but with a degree no one would recommend. Was absolutely panicked.

Ultimately, ended up very successful in a job in a country on the other side of the world. Met the woman who is now my wife of 13 years, had some amazing adventures, moved to a few more different countries, changed industries again about 10 years ago, and worked my way up to upper management again before leaving that field too.

TL;DR No, stress has brought me nothing but misery, I have no regrets except that I didn’t enjoy the ride as much as I could have.

Learn new stuff as you work, or as hobbies (my entire second career started as a hobby). Don’t be afraid to “fake it till you make it” and keep an eye out for jobs you didn’t even consider as a possibility. I personally avoid corporate gigs, smaller independent companies are more likely to notice you and use you for the skills you bring. Life can fly by, enjoy the ride.

Coming from a person having a quarter-life crisis being just a baw hair from their 30s.

1. You are still extremely young but don’t fixate on this. Telling yourself “I’m still young and have plenty of time to do X or fix the Y” means eventually you will be too old for those things. Unless you will fall ill or there will be some age restricted obstacles, it’s not true. You can learn new skills in your 20s as well as your 40s if you are determined enough. Shifting your career? No bother, I know heaps of people that did just that in their uni days as well as ones that are long into their existing career.

2. Don’t worry about this. If you fell behind the pack with your studies, means it wasn’t for you. Whether it was the nature of your course, or maybe a uni in general. Going to university is not for everybody, just like doing manual labour is not for everybody. Use this opportunity to ask yourself a question, WHY did you drop out. Is it because you were too lazy? If you had true passion for it, you would find motivation to do it.

3. No shame in that. I know people that are in their 30s and live with their parents to save money for their first home. Use this opportunity to enjoy your life without certain worries. The time to pay taxes, rent and for your food will come and you will look back fondly on this period of your life :) It would still be a good idea to chip in for utilities and food to your parents if you have means to do so. Will probably make you feel better about living there.

4. Good. Do mistakes. You learn more from your mistakes than from the things you did right. But the important thing is to analyze WHY you made those mistakes.

5. Maybe check if there is a career advisor near you/on your campus? They offer free advise based on what interests you. Ask yourself what are things in your life that you are passionate about or what kind of stuff do you enjoy doing. Remember, if you are passionate about something, there is a way to make it into your career. There is a reason why some people that are truly passionate about video games, they go into streaming career, and they are very successful. Me for example, I love playing video games, but I don’t see myself doing for a full on career, because I want to keep it as my private hobby, and I lack certain traits to become a successful streamer (English is not my first language, I’m self conscious and I lack certain charisma).

6. Do it. Only by trying you will learn anything about yourself. Hypothesising will only get you this far.

That’s my advice :)

I didn’t stress. I avoided stress. When my classes got too stressful I stopped going. When paying for school got too stressful I dropped out. When working my shitty computer tech job got too stressful I went down to part-time and started falling behind on rent. When I lost the apartment, telling my family was too stressful so I just became homeless for a while.

That was the crisis. That was the lowest point.

Maybe tolerating just a little more stress would have been good for me.

It gets better bro.

I’m 33 and I was in a worse situation:

• Started getting depressed in 2011 at the age of 20
• Graduated in CS in 2016, super late, but with top grades
• Started working as a software developer, hated it
• For a few years I switched between working in a local computer shop and uni to get a master’s degree
• Again, I graduated super late in 2021 but with top grades
• Still hated working as a developer and now hated working as a technician too
• At the end of 2021, I got a call from my old high school, they needed someone to teach programming
• Decide to give it a try, absolutely love it
• Suddenly, depression is gone and I have a reason to get up in the morning
• A 10 year old nightmare is over, still single though

I dropped out of my university in my first year. I was a music major, and my orchestra director set up a gofundme so that family and friends and teachers from my old high school could all get together to purchase an instrument for me I can use in school because my family was broke and couldn’t afford it. But I stayed at home instead of living on campus, and since my family life was so chaotic, the stress of everything happening at home on top of taking on a huge course load made me lose my academic scholarship, and the thought of taking out student loans to be a gigging musician seemed like a guaranteed way to never escape poverty. I didn’t know what to do. So I did nothing. The deadline passed, and I fell into a deep depression that took years to get out of.

I had to start working in various blue collar environments until I had enough money to move out with my partner, who turned out to be really shitty once we started living together so then I had to find a place by myself, then I went back to a technical college to get some IT certs, and eventually stumbled into my first “big boy” job doing IT for a large warehouse. Since then, I’ve doubled my salary by hopping between a few different tech jobs, and I even get to play in a local symphony with the same instrument that was given to me for school.

It took about 5 years of wafting around after dropping out of college, and my mental health was in the shitter for most of that, but going through that stress made me the person I am today, and for the first time in my life, I kind of like who I am. With that said, I didn’t have the time to enjoy life with how much I was working and am trying to make up for lost time now. But it’s so much easier to do that now that I have disposable income and a comfortable place to sleep every night.

TL;DR Your early 20s suck and there’s going to be a lot of stress – thats unavoidable unless you’re a nepo baby. Just roll with it and don’t forget to have fun every now and then. You’ll figure it out.

So yes and no. Some of this depends on what sort of “loop” you’re stuck in, which I can’t answer unless I have more details. The rest doesn’t depend as much on that.

On one hand, 21 is extremely young—which means you have an absurd amount of wiggle room and time to course correct, even if you’ve done some really dumb stuff.

On the other hand, time only starts to move faster and if you don’t commit to course correct at some point you’ll end up a lot older in a way tougher spot.

I think the answer here is some sort of average of extremes (like it is for most things in life). You shouldn’t worry about the future too much because you’re so young, but you should start taking action to course correct now so that the next 5-10 years are easier.

I also dropped out very early. Struggled with that disappointment for a long time. Moved in with my SO’s parents and lived with them for years!

We moved out and got a rental when I was 25. I’m 29 now and working on my career in banking. Started exercising the last couple years and have been keeping up with it consistently. I feel like it was only in the last few years that I felt I was making progress but really needed some optimism to keep going. You just never know what’s going to change your life around. Try to improve yourself in any way you can and sometimes that can help you change your trajectory

Thought I was having a quarter life crisis then at 40 realised - “Oh no, that’s just life”.

It’s just bullshit and downhil all the way form birth til death.

Get used to it.

I’m a bit older than you, and I know for my age group things are real hit and miss in terms of success and ability to do things. Your age group is just getting fucked. I’m sorry :(

We don’t have the same level of opportunity the boomers had, or the money, and now all that wealth and power is theirs and they’ve tightened the grip. It’ll take a lot of dying out or a revolution to fix anything, I feel.

Fwiw, I dropped out and reentered the following year and completed it. From there I just kept building my career and I’m doing pretty well for myself at this point.

Don’t give up.

I wouldn’t bother with a degree unless it is required for your chosen career path.

You’ll save time and money by entering the workforce in a lower position now and working towards a promotion.

There are a lot of people out there with degrees entirely unrelated to their work and or earning wages similar to people who didn’t bother with uni and they have a student loan to pay back on top of that.

If you have your heart set on higher education, look at the open university, courses are designed so that you can do them in your free time and are substantially cheaper than “proper” uni with degrees that are worth just as much.

Oh you’re always “right” to stress about life. Life is fucking hard, and full of problems, and if you aren’t neck deep in problems in your life it’s because you’re unconscious.

But for that very same reason, you’re always “right” to skip the stress and just get on with the next task. If you have a hard time doing that, I suggest drawing a map of the meaning in your life.

If you don’t know how to do that, look for a class called “Maps of Meaning” and watch it. It’s a free course, published on youtube. No homework or anything; just all the lectures videotaped and published on youtube.

That one course has done more to make my life functional than anything else I’ve encountered.

You’ll be fine. You are incredibly young. I just started over with a new career at 45. I have friends my age who are back in school. Maybe try not to have kids since that will make this all harder. But then again, have em if you want em.

I went to uni right out of highschool. Became a paramedic. Has a good career but it just wasn’t what I wanted. By 25 I quit and was travelling doing odd jobs or whatever I could. Meeting people, seeing places. It wasn’t easy but I wouldn’t change it for the world. I’ve been many places, done many things, met so many interesting people and completely changed my world view from when I was 20 because of it all.

I say don’t let society tell you what is right or normal. Find your own path. Do things you find interesting and don’t make your life about your work. Now I am old and have medical issues. I’ll be 50 this year. I’m glad I lived while I had the opportunity. It’s your life make it what you want it to be not someone else’s idea of life.

Yep absolutely!

For me, it felt like my life was quickly progressing away from a youth I was not ready to leave for inexplicable reasons. In the end I ended up taking a nuclear option once I realized how uncomfortable I was with my future, and while it’s not been easy it’s been absolutely worth it.

Even though you may be stuck in the same habits and mistakes, they can be rewritten and you’ll be surprised how quickly life changes once you find what makes you authentically happy. A lot can happen in 3 years and I guarantee you’ll still be young at 24. You can still be young at twice that. There’s a lot of life ahead of you, especially once you take calculated risks to improve your future and make the most of the youth you still have. You may not know what exactly will make you happy, but trust in yourself and your judgement to find it as you go.

I was in a similar position to you in my twenties, I spent a lot of that time working in bars and restaurants simply because it was what I knew and because I was totally uncertain about the future and felt adrift.

By my mid twenties I was just really tired and soul sick, so I saved up a bit of cash and then hitch-hiked around the US for two years, living out of a pack, mostly outside. It’s an extreme course that I don’t necessarily recommend for everyone, but I think I needed to get outside it all so I could really assess what was important, what I was willing or not willing to deal with etc.

When I finally came back, I went back to restaurants, but with a new sense of scale and possibility about life. A friend I worked with moved to an IT job, and suggested I should apply. Before my period of wandering, I would’ve probably passed the opportunity up feeling like it was too unfamiliar, but my mindset about risk had changed completely by that point and taking the job was a no brainer.

That job led to a different career trajectory, it’s not my dream career but it made it possible to afford a modest home with my sister and to create a lot of security. Goals that seemed out of reach became more realistic, and as I seize on those goals the opportunities tend to compound and it gets easier to plan the future.

The thing to understand about your twenties is you’re afforded the ability to make mistakes and experiment, to take risks. Some people know what they want right out of high school (or it’s decided for them) and sometimes those people do have a very clear course laid out and the means to achieve it. That’s not the case for everyone, and it’s ok to tackle life at a pace that makes sense to you in your context.

The only suggestions I would give is to use your twenties to just take sensible risks and do stuff, even if something seems too big to tackle take a run at it anyway. Pursue opportunities actively and eventually one will stick. You’ll meet a lot of failure or dead ends but that’s perfectly ok and normal because you’ll be learning something each time and honing your life saaviness. Failure can be painful, but it’s good, particularly in your twenties when you’ve got so much time ahead of you. Just be careful of accruing debt, that’s sort of the main thing that can screw you a bit.