First published by The Sunday Times on 18 April 2021
I can’t possibly be getting old — I’m a millennial. I’m a sensitive, unique snowflake. My generation dates online; we start quirky businesses. We go vegan, talk confidently about our vulvas and suffer from anxiety. There’s nothing old about us.
Or so I thought, anyway. Yet the first millennials were, according to the most commonly used metric, born in 1981 (with the youngest arriving in 1996), and having had the maths brought to my attention, I now realise that the oldest of my generation turn 40 this year. Oh God: millennials are getting middle-aged.
At 37, I have a few years to brace myself, but nevertheless 2021 marks a generational milestone. The fact that it has arrived in the middle of a global pandemic feels about right, points out Anne Helen Petersen, the 39-year-old author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. “I do think it’s appropriate that this defining moment in our adult life is coinciding with really uncertain financial times,” she says drily. “We were in our mid and late twenties, job searching, during the great recession of the late 2000s. We have that feeling that, at all points in your life, there’s always going to be precariousness. As soon as you find stability, it will be replaced by the unknown.”
So what will midlife look like for my generation? On a superficial level, there’s no cause for concern: we’re going to be hot middle-agers. Among those starting their fifth decade this year are Beyoncé, Sienna Miller, Serena Williams and the Duchess of Sussex; millennials Holly Willoughby and Paris Hilton both celebrated their fortieths in February. Even for us normals, thanks to the rise of high-tech skincare and tweakments, and the drop-off in smoking and sunbathing, we’re likely to be the youngest-looking fortysomethings yet.
On the other hand we may have deeper problems than wrinkles. Thanks to starting adulthood around the time of an economic crisis (and then hitting another one 12 years later — thanks Covid), many of us have been affected by failing industries, salaries that lag behind inflation and unaffordable house prices. For the most part, our parents’ generation went straight into “adulting” — work, marriage, homeowning and children — after school or university. Millennials have tended to tick off these later, or in some cases not at all. It’s possible that we had more fun in our twenties, but we probably have less to show for it.
But where baby boomers could begin to relax in middle age, having paid off a chunk of the mortgage and raised kids almost to adulthood, our midlife may be more of a slog. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation in 2018 found our generation were half as likely as boomers to own a home at the age of 30; even as we enter our forties many will be renting.
Our work life is less stable too. There has been a significant rise in freelancing: 4.8 million Brits were self-employed in 2017, compared with 3.3 million in 2001, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). My boomer parents were horrified when I was made redundant from my first journalism role at the age of 25. Little did we know that, 12 years later, I still wouldn’t have held a staff position. I no longer bat an eyelid at the thought of hustling for work; even some of my friends in steady professions such as medicine and law have hopped between jobs, developed side businesses or changed careers.
Freelancing is a liberating way to work, but it’s also an anxious one. Lalli, 38, who runs a marketing company, puts it best: “I eat what I kill, and it’s feast or famine. I became a small business owner not because I aspired to be, but because there were few opportunities — I love the work I do, but I don’t get maternity leave or a pension.” A 2018 survey by Samuel & Co Trading found that 43 per cent of millennials have no savings; I only started my own pension at 36. While many boomers are enjoying comfortable retirements, we can’t bet on that for ourselves.
Before this article triggers your midlife crisis, let me clarify that it’s not all doom and gloom: millennials have had a positive influence on the working world. A few months before the pandemic, a piece in The New York Times entitled Young People Are Going to Save Us All from Office Life explained that my generation is more likely to work for (and run) companies that offer flexibility and a good work-life balance. Since then, Covid has upped the ante, with most employers embracing remote working. As we go into middle age, then, it’s likely that we’ll be able to spend more time at home than our parents did, and more time with our children, too.
That’s if we have kids, which I don’t yet. Another study by the ONS found that 49 per cent of women born in 1989 remained childless by their 30th birthday, compared with 38 per cent of their mothers’ generation and 21 per cent of their grandmothers’. “At my age my parents were in the thick of parenting. I was a teenager when they turned 40,” says Muireann, 37. “My husband and I hope to become parents in the next year, but it’s strange, because if we’re so much older, then we should be more stable financially, but we’re not. I do think, though, that we’re probably more emotionally mature and more prepared.”
In fact millennials are said to be the most anxious and stressed generation — but we’re good at talking about it. “The rates of diagnosis of anxiety and other issues are much higher than generations before, but then we weren’t always looking for some of these things,” Petersen says. “Often, earlier generations didn’t seek a diagnosis — they just dealt with it alone. So it makes me hopeful that we now use words like ‘burnout’. You can’t address any of these things until you embrace talking about them.”
Our sensitivity may have earned us the nickname “snowflakes”, but it has also helped to break down stigma and encourage a culture of seeking help. I suspect millennials have also benefited from those coming up behind us: the world-weary cynicism we inherited from Gen X has been corrected by the world-changing energy of Gen Z. At the start of the #MeToo movement in 2017, for example, it felt revelatory that, no, we didn’t have to accept being groped and harassed; after all, we had been told this was an unavoidable fact of life.
“I think that is a very older-millennial attitude,” says Petersen. “A lot of ideas were passed down to us. But things began to change as we grew into adulthood, from acceptance of LGBTQ rights to the current iteration of feminism. When I was in college, no one called themselves a feminist. That has been a real shift.”
It’s easy to forget that, in the two decades since older millennials hit adulthood, the world has changed in positive ways. Just rewatch 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, a film in which Bridget tolerates having her bottom patted and breasts stared at by colleagues and uncles alike; it’s unthinkable that the film would be written this way today. Similarly, the push to protect the planet has transformed what we consider possible — would we have believed, if you had told us in 2000, that plastic bags would no longer be free, smoking indoors would be reviled and we would be taking our own cups to the coffee shop?
Millennials have had a rocky youth, peppered with global crises and political clashes, but maybe we’re wiser and more resourceful for it, and better equipped for whatever comes next. As Petersen and I stare together down the barrel of 40, she sounds a final note of optimism. “We’re coming into middle age with a new understanding of what is possible in the world, so what other things can we change?” she says. “That’s what’s really exciting.”