1 week Ago By Aimee Meade
What’s in a midlife crisis? It used to be that this period of age-related angst was the sole preserve of men in their forties and fifties, who would suddenly develop a fascination with open-top convertibles, women half their age and leather jackets with an impractical number of zips. Then women caught up and Hollywood started paying attention. Mind-the-age-gap romances like Amazon’s smash hit The Idea of You , the upcoming Nicole Kidman film Babygirl and, yes, even the new Bridget Jones film all follow successful, sorted women who start sordid affairs with much younger men.
The message: women can uproot their lives in middle age just as much as the boys can. Alas, the middle-aged meltdown may soon be a thing of the past – and millennials like me are apparently to blame , just as we killed cow’s milk, department stores, casual dining or any of the other industries and leisure activities we are routinely accused of exterminating. The reason? We just don’t have the cash.
According to a recent US survey of 1,000 millennials by mental health platform Thriving Centre of Psychology, 81 per cent said they simply can’t afford to have a midlife crisis at all, with 63 per cent adding that they didn’t feel financially stable at this point in time. Initially, this checks out. After all, this generation is more likely to live with their parents or work in low-paid service jobs as they enter their prime buy-a-Jag, move-to-Rio stretch of middle age.
But I don’t think this means an end to the soul-searching or emotional turbulence that usually accompanies life’s halfway mark. After all, there’s no age limit on lying in bed awake at 3am, wondering where your life went wrong and if you’ll ever amount to anything. (Trust me, I know.
) At 36, I already sense the seeds of age-related freak-outs in my wider social circle – it’s just that the millennial midlife crisis is one that has to be, er, a little more budget-conscious. Who can afford to have an explosive affair with a colleague and blow up their marriage? That would mean having to move out and pay rent and bills on your own. Instead, you can sneak around looking for hook-ups on Feeld or Pure, a new sex-positive dating app that a friend described as “Amazon Prime for men: they’re in an Uber to yours in 30 minutes”.
Alternatively, you could introduce your spouse to the idea of ethical non-monogamy – sex parties are relatively cheap too. Don’t worry if the last time you wore leather was at a university production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show – you can get a leather harness off Temu or Vinted relatively easily. That brings me to the time-honoured trope of upgrading your wardrobe, your car or both.
Boomers and Gen Xers once splashed out on Lambos, luxury handbags and designer outfits to assuage their existential woes. Millennials are the generation compulsively shopping online for pointless gladrags that will inevitably fall apart by Christmas, and I know more than a few men who have gone for road bikes instead of buying sports cars and motorbikes. (In their defence, padded cycling shorts are a cheaper investment than taking out insurance on a Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
) Read Next The five signs you're having a millennial midlife crisis As for going on a round-the-world cruise, exploring the Arctic or any of the glamorous travel I associate with having a meltdown in your forties and fifties – millennials will find a way to do that on a budget, too. I once met a man in his late thirties who had quit his job to sail from Panama to Colombia on a rickety fishing boat with a bunch of gap year teenagers and backpackers. Rather unkindly, people on board called him “Granddad”.
Privately, I hoped that I’d be luxuriating on a five-star yacht by the time I was his age, not hanging out with a bunch of puking, seasick Manchester University graduates. Now I wish I’d grasped this wise elder millennial by the hand and wished him all the best with his millennial midlife crisis. I’m only being slightly facetious.
Maybe we just need to ever so slightly expand the age demographic that constitutes this phenomenon. Remarkably, one in 10 millennials in the survey said they’d already gone through a once-in-a-lifetime upheaval – it just happened to them around the age of 34. The vast majority of people surveyed were also already exhibiting classic midlife crisis emotions, with 72 per cent saying they felt “trapped by their life circumstances” and 70 per cent feeling like they were “not where they thought they’d be at this point in life”.
The term “midlife crisis” itself seems to imply a period of smooth sailing and stability right up to that critical breaking point. For millennials, that crisis point has been here for years. So if you see one of us wearing a funky, directional leather jacket or getting in to a new hobby (I hear bouldering is very big right now), please be kind to us.
We’re having a middle-aged wobble, a few years ahead of schedule. Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author and podcaster.
