‘A late blooming into misery’: why Millennials are unhappy

At 31, I had been in a great new job for more than a year. I had published my novel 18 months earlier and given birth to my first baby just before that. Yet I had been experiencing a certain kind of tedium for a while.

I had thought my dissatisfaction was perhaps a symptom of my brattiness. There had been no parties in my honour lately, no announcements to make with a satisfied air of self-deprecation (“some personal news”). Intellectually, I knew I was not special, but in my heart I still loved the applause. I wondered if maybe I was experiencing depression for the first time in my life.

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Then I thought it was more likely my feet were getting a bit itchy. Entering my 30s, I was a mother, had a great job, had even published a book. What more could I want? But this gnawing feeling continued to grow. Couldn’t I be doing more? Should I have done something different instead? Like become an astronaut? I felt petulant, ungrateful.

But when I finally lifted up my head and looked around, I realised I wasn’t the only one. Surveying people of a similar age revealed I wasn’t just being a brat. Everyone seemed to be struck down with this same malaise. Whether they were my close friends or acquaintances, lived in another hemisphere or had never left the state, every 31-year-old I spoke to seemed to be in a state of ennui.

We’re not the first cohort to experience a crisis. To experience the passing of time. And by passing of time, I mean the dawning realisation that time is finite, and we might have already wasted a lot. We used to have time to burn. But it was a late blooming into misery.

While Gen Xers and Baby Boomers before us had these realisations by 25, for Millennials the prolonged adolescence that was our 20s had delayed this type of self-reflection. And the hangover seemed more severe.

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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. Of course, your job is also never going to love you back.

It is an old compulsion to try to impose a narrative on our lives, especially when looking for meaning in our existence. But life does have a natural progression, a natural flow that Millennials ought to have simply participated in, and many feel it’s not flowing as it should.

Many felt there were certain things that should have fallen into place by their 30s. Namely: partner, shelter, job, probably children. Yet there have never been more single people in their 30s globally, there’s a housing affordability crisis in pretty much every Western country, and in many industries the career progression that existed for decades has simply disappeared.

What was happening was a good old-fashioned identity crisis, but an identity crisis in a unique set of social and economic circumstances. Precarious work, delayed baby-making, rising singledom, a heating planet, loss of religion and increased unstable housing mean this generation is facing old problems – who am I? – in a different world. If that weren’t enough, we now have to contend with a pandemic placing radical restrictions on modern life.

Just like the lobster surprised to find itself boiling to death, in hindsight, the signs of our impending misery had been there all along.

Edited extract from Trivial Grievances, by Bridie Jabour (HarperCollins, $35), out on Wednesday.

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