Having an Existential Crisis

The last few days, I have been hit by an existential crisis (crisis feels too strong of a word, but by the definition, I am having an existential crisis).  I have wondered what the point of life was, tried to understand the concept of there being "nothing" when you die (which I may add is not something I am certain of, but the very possibility itself was enough to send me down a rabbit hole), and tried to wrap my head around the universe itself.  I was sending my mind in places that sent shivers down my spine and my thoughts were equivalent to running a race that never ends.  Up late at night with nothing but my thoughts, I have needed to have noise to drown them out.  I haven't slept well.

I'm 23-years-old.  I know that I should not think these things because I will not be faced with these problems for hopefully a considerable amount of time.  And yet I want to answer them or at least soothe my fears, because I definitely don't want to be thinking these things with death on my rearview mirror.  I want to face these problems now.

My first act was to share some of these thoughts on Twitter.  That was productive but did ultimately not help me stop facing these questions when lying in bed.  I will say the knowledge that other people go through this too is comforting.  You can "know" that other people are going through it, but when people share it with you personally - or as personal as Twitter can get - you actually realize this is a normal process of life.

So I decide to just google "How to Get Over An Existential Crisis."  Got a problem in 2016?  Google it.  So I scoured a few sites and read a few things.  Some of them were written from a clinical perspective, some from personal experience, and some just went through a whole list of theories.  Ultimately, one thing in particular did stand out as why I'm having these issues NOW.

One guy, somewhat condescendingly to be honest, asked the person who proposed a similar question to mine, to analyze the rest of his life first.  He asked a whole bunch of questions that essentially came down to "Are you satisfied with your life right now?"  Which drove me straight to what my real problem is: I'm afraid that at the end of my life, I'm going to look back and think I didn't do anything with it.  That I wasted this opportunity.

That's a symptom of how I've felt since basically the day I decided to change my major from journalism to "I just fucking need to graduate."  I don't know what to do and the possibilities are endless.  Ah, but therein lies the problem.  The possibilities are endless.  I could do (mostly) anything.  How the hell am I supposed to make a decision?  I haven't been able to yet and it's been over a year since I graduated.  Am I just going to go through life constantly in fear that I will make the wrong decision therefore making me not want to make a decision at all?

My other issue is that I still live with my parents and work on the weekends, two things that have contributed to a less than ideal social life.  I mostly like my current job - not as a career, but for now - but it's extremely inconvenient if you want to do anything on the weekend.  During winters, I work nights and during summer, I work all day in the sun and by the time I come home, I don't want to do anything for the rest of the day.  So while I don't consider myself unhappy, all of these things have contributed to an overall sense of stagnancy.

This is my first solution: to write about it.  After all, that's something I love doing and would like to continue.  I'm going to try to write more about different things.  I have a few short stories that I wrote for a class that I may post on this website.  I love/hate when I post something and anxiously await any reply to what I've written.  No matter what I do, I will probably always write.  I would like to make it a career, but it's not exactly that easy since there's not a whole lot of money in it unless you make it big with a book (the other big avenue is journalism, which I didn't like).  That's why I'm so grateful the Internet exists, because I don't necessarily need to write for money in order to write.

So how do you deal with an existential crisis?  I guess the answer is to do whatever you need to do to feel fulfilled in life.  What do I need to do to get fulfilled in my life?  I don't know the exact answers, but I do know that when I'm 69-years-old and I look back on my life, I really want to be able to have this sense that I have not wasted this life.  I have taken advantage of life.  I've done something.  I can look back and be satisfied.  I don't think I will fear death because I did everything I could and there's nothing I can do about whatever happens when you die.  Because that's where my real fear is: not necessarily death itself, but that when I die, I'll feel like a piece of shit for not doing anything with it.