How do you deal with them?

Maybe some of you haven't had one yet, beyond trying to please your parents or teachers, or calculating an educational path today, hoping the future will pan out tomorrow.

Or maybe this isn't the kind of topic you're comfortable talking about, even though young people seem to have a lot of internal stress about this very sort of thing. It's not like a big secret that the more choices in life, the more angst we might internalize.

Thinking of these things as a normal, recurring pattern over very long life spans might take the load off, but I dunno. Maybe the word "crisis" is a misnomer. Whatever.

My current crisis is trying to figure out if I want to check out of society, for the most part, and retire to a few acres in Maine by the water. A loon talking to the loons, a crazy cat lady, so to speak. With so much idle time on my hands that I might write, read, draw, stay awake into the wee hours, and sleep only when tired. At this rate, I won't sleep much at all.....but what I do with my waking hours will change.

Or should I immerse myself into retiring golden years by being more and more socially interactive, being a buzzing active person, with an interventionist attitude? Then being in the hub of vibrant city life would be better, in contact with all sorts of people of different ages and backgrounds. Older people can't do much good if they're off in la la land by the pond writing poems and collecting cats, after all.

It's really only a "crisis" due to the crappy housing market and uncertainty about having a place to call home. I have two sons that may or may not be able to go it on their own, the jury is out on that, so I feel compelled to keep the status quo. After the recession of the 80's plenty of us sought safe harbor with our folks for a couple of years. Even if we had a degree.

This is probably into rambling land now, but what do you think of as an Existential Crisis? Is it where you live or with whom you live? *or what you DO* Is it about balancing freeeedom with obligations? What ARE your obligations, to your self or others, and HappiNess, and how do you work through it when there are conflicts?