Sing it with me now my millennial brethren, “Woah, we’re halfway there. Woah-oh, livin’ on a prayer”. That song won’t be quite so happy when the older millennials reading this realize — we are, literally, halfway there. We’re mid-life now, given that the average American lifespan is 76.3 years old. It’s 82.6 here in Canada though.
I was born in 1983 and am currently 41 years old. For those doing the millennial math that makes me halfway dead in Canada. That makes me an elder millennial, entering (well, being dragged) into my crisis era. As an elder, and one of the first millennials to enter my crisis arc — let me guide my younger comrades.
Midlife here we come, like it or not.
If you think, that’s not possible — we’re too young to have a midlife crisis. I assure you that all this adulting we’ve been faking our way through has been catching up to us chronologically. As I’ve learned over the past few years, time has a way of being grudgingly and trudgingly linear.
It’s weird when you wake up and you realize you’re too old to be young but you’re too young to be old.
Where’s my ferkin time machine.
Welcome to millennial midlife, and buckle up buttercup because we’re crisis-ing different. Gone are the days when a midlife crisis meant a panic setting in about the monotony of a life that’s halfway over. Dont’ get me twisted here, we still have one foot in the grave, just without the 20-years-at-the-same-job boredom. Instead, we’ve been moving from one job to another, one financial catastrofuck to the next — in an ever-changing world that’s actively trying to replace us.
The worst part is — we can’t even afford to have a midlife crisis. Midlife crises are surprisingly expensive affairs, with the sports cars and whatnot. Physically, I’m middle-aged. Economically I’m still in my 20s.
I can’t afford to buy a sports car, I just finally paid off my 13-year-old Toyota. I can’t ‘upgrade’ to a younger spouse, I never even had a first one. And I can’t buy a second home either, because, well — ditto. So far from what I can tell, the millennial midlife crisis mainly involves tattoos, hair dye, and reverting back to wearing a cocoon of emo clothing.
Instead of the lavish crisis of generations before us, millennials are being forced into more blue-collar-bougie crisis options — like living in a van, or homesteading (that’s a fancy bourgeois name for gardening). We can’t rebel against the numbness-inducing bourgeois lifestyles that we never had. Previous generations crisis’d-out over the monotony of the passage of time, but we’ve been in crisis mode our whole lives.
When I was 18, I attended a New Year’s Eve party where we waited for the ball to drop and then waited for the world to descend into anarchy for Y2K. Less than a year later the Twin Towers fell and a different type of anarchy descended. Fast forward a few years and we had one of the biggest recessions in history. The world of course didn’t crash on Y2K, which was only the training ground for the official end of the world, which the Mayans predicted to be in 2012. Somehow, we survived that too.
We collect crises like Pokemon, then turn them into Russian nesting dolls of layered issues.
Oh, and I forgot about the pandemic-practice rounds of ebola and bird flu to lead us up to the real dandy world-breaking pandy. Oh, and Al Gore was scaring the shiznit out of us the entire time with global warming.
I’m not having a midlife crisis — I’m having a whole life crisis. I started my quarter-life crisis and just kept the party going, baby.
We millennials never had time to settle into the boredom-inducing monotony of our forefathers. It’s been one shitstorm or clusterfuck after another. We’re not bored, we’re tired.
We’re tired. We’re tired of competing with each other to see who can be the best of the stressed in a competition we all lose. But we continually, caffeinatedly charge forward ‘once more into the breach’ style because it’s all we’ve ever known. All the while trying to operate with less stress even though deep down we have permanently engrained but wildly misinformed thoughts in us that it’s the fuel we need to survive and thrive.
We do that until we physically crash into our Ikea furniture, only to remind ourselves how unproductive it is and how we should be working on our third side hustle.
To top it off personally, just as I reached my ‘quiet era’ my chronic illness clicked into overdrive. I guess my body thought life had gotten too easy.
But back to our crisis.
Here’s a problem that hit me like a bag of rotten apples — we millennials are, by and large, too poor to midlife crisis right. We can’t buy corvettes, we can barely afford a Bluetooth-enabled bread maker (and we aren’t even sure what the Bluetooth does).
I guess we have to save our midlife crisis purchases for the purported windfall our parents are leaving us. Last I heard it’s up to $90 trillion, although for me personally, I’ll be surprised if I get left with a ring and a ham sandwich.
Maybe those trillions will help us finally pay off our student loans since our existentialist side hustles don’t seem to be working.
I don’t know about you all, but now that I’m officially mid-life — I’d like to quit, please. Roll me up like a piggy in a blanket because I’d like to spend the rest of my days as a financially-oblivious human burrito. If that doesn't work, perhaps a van down by the river, raising chickens and rutabagas is a solid second choice. The latter is probably the only thing affordable on my shitty-millenial-economics bingo card.
Anyhoo, I’m out like sauerkraut (which I can make with my new rutabagas).
~Robin Wilding, reporting this while chasing her tail — trying to find where the ferk they hid my millennial reset button.
The Existentialist & Exhausted Millennial Midlife Crisis