Or was it a myth in the first place?
More than a year ago, I saw a statistic from Pew Research that caught my eye: As the oldest millennials were pushing 40, only 30 percent of us lived with a spouse and a child in 2019. When the oldest members of the Silent Generation were turning 40 in 1968, 70 percent of them were living with a spouse and a child. |
That's a big shift in what middle age looks like for most people in just 50 years. And as an elder millennial myself, I felt that it was not really illustrated in our movies and on TV, which still mainly shows people in their 40s living that "Leave It to Beaver" life, with two kids, a big suburban house and a stable job. |
I started poking around and found that other trappings of mid-20th-century midlife were also less true for elder millennials, or were never true in the first place. Homeownership is harder to attain, and working at the same place for your entire career was never really a thing for any generation. |
I wanted to hear from my fellow 40-somethings about what middle age meant to them. In August, we asked readers born from 1977 to 1984 to tell us how they felt about their life as they reached its chronological midpoint. We asked them whether they felt the term "middle age" even applied to them and how they felt about the notion of a midlife crisis. |
My Times Opinion colleagues and I went through all 1,300 reader responses and one major theme emerged: the idea that a "midlife crisis" did not apply to millennials, because our whole adult lives have been affected by crises. We came of age during the dot-com bust and Sept. 11, and then just as we were getting our bearings, the Great Recession rocked the economy. Then we experienced the chaos and polarization of the Trump era before sliding headlong into a pandemic. Now we're dealing with inflation and a bunch of bank failures — the chaos never ends. |
The hackneyed narrative of a midlife crisis is always about a man who is suffering from terminal ennui and feels like he must flee the stability of his marriage, job and children for adventure, usually in the form of a red sports car and a younger girlfriend. |
My long-form piece asks the questions: How can you have a midlife crisis if your generation has never known security? And was the midlife crisis, as depicted by so much of our popular culture, ever even real? |
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