The millennials at 31: welcome to the age of misery

Do I hate my job? Do I want a child? Am I not, actually, all that special after all? The end of our extended adolescence is bringing many painful questions

I usually avoid assigning characteristics to entire groups of people.

I think it is odd to say all millennials and boomers are a certain way, that people of a particular nationality are rude, that a gender is clueless, when really you are usually just talking about a small number of middle class people, or more embarrassingly, nobody at all.

There are so many factors, so much nuance lost, when glazing over someone’s race, class, sexuality, childhood experience, family dynamic.

But, every 31-year-old I know is miserable.

I recently went to a girls’ night with a group of women I loosely know through university, and halfway through noticed how unhappy everyone at the table was. There was a divorcee, a newlywed, someone who was casually dating and another parent. But none of that seemed to matter to their generally miserable dispositions.

Thinking more about it, I realised that whether they are my close friends, acquaintances, live in this hemisphere or have never left my state, every 31-year-old seems to be in a state of ennui.

Something about the age has woken these people up to the world. I think for the first time they are thinking, ahem, we are thinking: “Am I running out of time?”

They are beginning to look around at the shape of their lives and realise, well, this is the shape of their lives. It isn’t just women either. Most of the men I know have entered the malaise as well.

Everyone seemed to sail through 30, but 31 has been the mental block. Maybe we won’t be rich. Maybe we won’t be famous. Maybe this job is the “career” we thought was waiting for us around the corner. Is a big love coming? Are our parents really going to die? We already know a few that have.

Does it finally matter that you spent the entire weekend sinking prosecco and tins of beer? Is it just me or does the skin on my chest feel ever so slightly … looser? Is it all catching up with me? Have all the small and big decisions I have made over the past 31 years meant that this is where I have landed?

Well, yes.

Then of course there is the big decision – the one where if you do nothing, it really matters, and if you do something, it really matters.

Seemingly, the day after turning 31 is all about waking up sweating and asking “should I have a baby”? The next question is sometimes “and who with?”, but I have many married friends deciding whether they will be child-free or not. It’s not just a freak out for the single person.

Sometimes the decision is agonising, and sometimes, much worse, the decision is not actually theirs.

The baby question is just one part of the early-30s milieu. There is a distinct loss of ambition. People who have spent years striving and hustling are suddenly questioning it all. If they are not happy being defined by their job, then what do they want to be defined by?

Friends? Family? Apartment? Character? A job seems the easiest when you really start grappling with it. You don’t have to like the person you are if you are defined by your job.

When talking to a friend about this she responded grimly: “I plan to have my freak out when I am Carrie Bradshaw’s age.”

I write this almost as if I am a passive observer, but of course I am part of it. I am 31. I am suddenly consumed by whether I am living in the suburb where I could be happiest, whether I should have another baby (the eternal question), what I am supposed to be doing with my career, whether I really care about all of the listed above or not.

I think there is more of a nihilistic edge to millennials than any previous generation – not to sound twee but it’s hard to daydream about the future when I have been choking on bushfire smoke for weeks and rainforests are disappearing at a rate of 30 football fields a minute.

I don’t think millennials are a particularly spoiled generation, but because of a lot of economic and social factors they have had a lot longer to think about themselves than anyone else before them. Previous generations probably had their “I’m not actually that special” realisation in their early 20s when working full-time, buying property and having kids.

Millennials have had a well-documented prolonged adolescence throughout their 20s, a lot longer to be self-centred. The hangover caused by the realisation life may not be going as it was supposed to is much more severe. They’re also stuck in unstable work and not buying property.

It’s not that it’s an inherently bad thing to think about what you want, what you think of yourself and what makes you happy, but there is having an interior life and there is rumination – and rumination is mostly only going to drive you to despair. It’s not nice to think about yourself too much, the conclusions reached, the anxiety, the relentless measuring up and down. It’s not going to end with you being happy.

I heard the writer Sisonke Msimang reference in passing the “disappointment and freedom” of being in her 40s. Maybe my cohort are just entering the disappointment phase and there is no solution but to wait for the freedom.

The only other solution seems so lame it is difficult to write: find a way to stop ruminating, to think outside ourselves. One of the unanticipated reliefs of having a child is all of the time spent not thinking about myself. I hadn’t realised how sick I had become of me.

The solution is not to have a child – a baby is never the solution! There are other ways to move on from the rumination: meaningful work, not-very-meaningful-but-fun hobbies, pets, volunteering, reading, exploration. (I refuse to say travel because it’s a dumb trope that travel makes you a more fulfilled or better person!)

It doesn’t have to make you a better person; my kid definitely did not make me a better person. That’s not the aim, it’s just about trying to be happier and not too pathetic in our collective quarter-ish life crises.

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