A Few Good Men

There's this phenomenon happening that needs to be highlighted and addressed. Young men everywhere are freaking out about their lives. For single (or at least unmarried) guys in their late twenties and early thirties it's an intense case of "What the hell am I doing with my life?" It's not a quarter life crisis and it's not a mid-life crisis. It's something in-between and something new. I've been trying to come up with a better term for it but nothing has replaced my original idea: Man-ic Panic.

First, the evidence, all accumulated in the last few months. One good friend recently had lunch with us all psyched about his business ideas and how he would soon move to Italy to pursue his racing dreams. A few weeks later he meets a girl, runs off to the Philippines to pursue her, but instead finds God and decides to move there to do missionary work. Another guy has intense debilitating panic attacks and is currently seeing a therapist because life is constricting him. Someone else picked up and moved to Europe with nothing more than a few pieces of luggage and three hats, leaving behind friends and a relationship. A handful of my personal friends are also looking desperately around for any reason to pick up and move, to find something different, and to escape the drudgery that is their current lives and forseeable futures.

What's causing this state of affairs? Well, the easiest answer is that the years of being a man-child are over. Once you push into the thirties you have to get your shit together, or if you have your shit together already, you suddenly come face to face with how shitty your shit is. You know? We've all seen our fathers slave away at jobs they hated. We take a step back and realize that our lives are possibly headed in this exact direction. Career, wife, kids, BBQs, pets and then it's a skip and a hop to health problems and heart attacks. And it's not just about the job. It's about trying to figure out if this life is right for you, if this girl is right for you, if this is what the twenty year old you wanted.

Actually, a lot of movies address this Man-ic Panic. Zach Braff's recent works, Garden State and The Last Kiss. One of my all time sleepers, Beautiful Girls, essentially deals with this theme. Anything where the guy is about to marry the boring normal chick but meets the exciting crazy one and has to reconsider. I think Julia Stiles and Sandra Bullock were in a movie or two about this. But the answer is not Hollywood, it's not about the beautiful brunette who comes in to save the day. I'd bet it's a pretty rare thing to find some wonderful girl who'll come along and grab you off the scrap heap -- it's pure lunacy and delusion to hope that they'll actually find you. So forget it, girls aren't the answer.

For women of a comparable age, it's the biological clock that ticks. But for guys there's something similar scaring the crap out of them: life is seeping away. The window for "doing something" looks like it's quickly shutting and the only reaction that makes sense is out with the old and in with the new. Damn the torpedoes and who cares what gets wrecked along the way. It's this sudden rush of selfishness and this desire to set out and find yourself. Otherwise the fear is that you'll slip away, never to be found.

In a way, maybe it's an early onset of mid-life crisis. If that's the case maybe we're all lucky. We won't have to suffer from a mid-life crisis when we're trapped by another decade of age, a possible family, and multiple responsibilities and mortgages. I mean, if all this is a moment to reflect, to heed the call of the wild, then better to freak out now then later right?

The big fear though is that there are no answers at the end of this thing. Then what?