Can you have a quarter-of-a-century life crisis?

I am now twenty-five and I’d like to say that everything is just the same as last year, or that I really don’t feel older, but I do.

This has been a very different year for me compared to the past few. With the start of teaching in the classroom, the career that will take the majority of my time for the next thirty years or so, comes a calm tranquility. For the first time life is not in tumult. Jobs are not changing, I am not going to school anymore, no more random people in random places, my life has become routine. Overall I suppose the biggest changes that starting a career has brought is routine and cash, which are both good and bad.

Routine's nice because for the first time in about five years I can plan my life without having to wait to find out what a work or school schedule is going to be. I know what time I will wake up, what time I should go to bed (but still I don't), and how much time it takes me to do things everyday. I am also not spreading myself over several different things anymore. I can put most of my energy into my classroom and into my students, instead of heading in several different directions at once. All of this is nice of course but I can’t help but feeling a little too settled.

Brooke and I had talked a lot about our plans for the future during the first six weeks of teaching and we discovered that we didn’t really have the desire to travel, or make an international type of pilgrimage that we once did. We are making a difference here in the lives of kids so maybe that’s what life really has in store for us. Alone that is not a bad thing but couple that together with the teacher salaries (which though meager, are about 2.5 times bigger than our salaries last year) and let it sit for a few years you have all the makings of a middle class malaise.

I have already learned that I have a terrible predisposition towards hunting on the internet to find new toys to spend my hard earned teacher cash on. I have contemplated a new computer, a digital slr, a disc golf set (yes, I’m a nerd), a new speaker set, a car radio, and a vacuum cleaner. In fact, all of my time on the Internet recently has been focused on consumption, whether its been of goods, ideas, or pirated movies, it doesn’t matter. The fact is: I haven’t created a damned thing myself. And that’s what I worry about.
Will settling into a career make me lose my soul? Does the fact that the career is teaching make any difference? What happened to those dreams of traveling and changing the world I once had?