What is a Millennial Mid-Life Crisis?

When aging coincides with societal changes

How long will I live in the absence of some unlikely mishap or tragedy? What can I expect my end of life to look like?

These are questions I’ve been asking myself this year after my January birthday inspired a need to isolate.

According to Northwestern Mutual, a woman born in 1984, like myself, will likely live to around 86. This goes down to 78 if I change my lifestyle habits for the worse. This makes me just under or exactly halfway through my hypothetical lifespan.

I believe there’s something in my body that recognized this cellularly because 2 years ago I started feeling a shift in my everyday existence. So am I having a mid-life crisis? If so, it’s time to embrace it, but it’s not as simple as I imagined it would be.

I’ve never conformed to modern society’s obsession with youth.

I’ve always looked young for my age, so I enjoyed getting older. Many of my closest friends are at least 10 years older than me, a few others have been old enough to be my grandparents. I adore wisdom, a life well-lived, varied experiences, and a full story. I like history and rubbing shoulders with it. And now I’m aware that I am history.

In some ways, we’re always creating history, but it’s different when adults look to you as a resource for things they weren’t alive for.

I used to think it was funny when my children didn’t understand life before cell phones that their father and I regularly reminisce about. But now that they are nearing adulthood themselves, and they ask me about my teens and early adulthood to rub shoulders with my nostalgia, it’s a bit jarring.

And so it began.

I started sizing up my children and my past in a completely different way once my oldest became a teenager. I’m still sizing up my youth, my relationship to youth, and my departure from this body. I’m remembering deceased family members and seeing life from their perspective.

I’ve also found myself on the other side of the age gap debate. There was a time when I was attracted to men who were “too old” for me. Now it’s the opposite. This is hard to reckon with.

My eyes tell me they’re my age, but my mind is telling me, “That guy is a literal baby.” That is, of course, my sarcasm speaking, but a man in his mid-20s seems like a baby when I really think about it. I used to be a nanny for kids who are in that age range. The internal conflict is real.

Part of it may be because I never really connected with my body aging. I didn’t really see a lot of evidence of it. I don’t sit around thinking about my age and I’m one of those people who can’t remember my age when I have a birthday.

I’ve been estimating a different age since I turned 22. I would say I’m almost 25, or I’m almost 30. And once I turned 31, I just stayed 30 for 7 years. When I turned 38, I became 40. But now that I am almost 40, for real…I’m struggling.

My body is changing.

I’m still menstruating. However, perhaps in relation to my two teenage daughters, my cycles have changed. I went nearly 2 months without a period and I wasn’t sexually active at the time. However, I can feel my period “coming” almost a month before it comes.

I grew my first grey hair at age 18 and a good friend of mine viciously plucked it from my head. I was saddened, and for the past 20 years, I’ve hoped I would have a head full of grey hair asap, like my favorite high school teacher when she was around my age. But it’s just a few greys highlighting the crown of my head. At least this indicates to strangers that I am old enough to not get carded.

My body is not as skinny as it was in my pre-30-year-old life. I don’t struggle to find adult clothes to fit me. That’s fun. I’m more interested now in having a toned belly (thank you belly dancing) and the rest of my body just is. It’s great to not worry so much about how I look, I feel comfortable in my own skin. But sometimes I look in the mirror and think “Is that really me?”

The Millennial Mind

I’m more conservative, more and less cautious at the same time. I have a lot more awareness of the different lifestyles people have and more understanding of differences, even though I’ve always been a live and let-live kinda girl. I’m very aware of what matters to me and understanding is a balm for my mind more than acceptance ever was.

I’m less interested (and probably less capable) in learning things outside my comfort zone. I’m technologically advanced and challenged at the same time. I’ve built many, many websites in the past 15 or so years, but I have a hard time keeping up with a cellphone or toying with apps. I hate updating technology! This is a consistent sign of my age that is pointed out to me nearly every day.

I feel like I’m too young and too old for some of the challenges I’m having. I still have to worry about getting pregnant. I had my last child at the age of 36. I would be happy to not have to worry about birth control anymore. My favorite way to do that is to not have sex at all! Of course, that’s something I actually need to work on in a healthier way.

I recoil from the stress more than I could have imagined. My nerves are, as my mother would tell me as a child, shot.

So what is a nearly 40-year-old to do?

How do I/we navigate the changes in our bodies, minds, and in our communities? How do we find our place? Likely the same way we did in our early adulthood when our elders didn’t understand us and we couldn’t really go to them for as much help as we really needed. We did and will — by deeply embracing the time we are alive in and adapting our lens so we can have the life we want.

How’ve we done that in the past?

We created blogs, we embraced the influencer and gig economies before they had those names. We embraced streaming music, we embraced our curly hair, we embraced our bodies and others’ bodies, we embraced tiny homes, we embraced eco-tourism and solo travel, and we embraced alternative diets and adopting pets over breeding.

We embraced backyard chickens and home gardens. We even tried to embrace online dating. No, we really embraced that, despite being very vocal with our complaints.

But we also championed normalizing therapy, alternative healing, meditation, tarot, affirmations, and manifestation. We enabled Netflix, social media, Spotify, and more to expand as they have. We were there at the nexus of Burning Man and mainstream media, and when Coachella was actually affordable and not hijacked by celebrities. We turned smaller towns into meccas for creativity, innovation, and embracing the weird.

We had the help of the generation before us (our big brothers & sisters) to set up the infrastructure for some of these changes. But we embraced them and expanded upon them like a grown-up playground, and that’s what the internet was for us. Maybe this is why we don’t feel as much like adults as the adults before us. This may also be why we’ve written so much about the struggles of “adulting”.

We self-publish, support, and create podcasts, eBooks, YouTube channels, and more. Yet, we see the transient and dulling nature of some of these conveniences. We, more than other generations feel the urge to keep things in check, between innovation and the innate needs for healthy humanity.

I still have high hopes.

I’ve wrestled with the double-edged sword of social media. Two decades of social media means like it or not, your life isn’t as private as you thought it’d be. Most of my peers never planned to or could have understood what having “followers” would mean.

Nevertheless, as a generation, we’ve embraced being minor public figures. Anytime you post anything online you’re being judged for not just that, but anything else anyone can google about you.

It’s become expected that you will have at the least, a social media account, so people can get in touch with you, learn about you and socially collaborate with you. The thing is you can’t control who has access to you, even if you have private profiles. This creates an internal crisis on its own.

Adding the complexity of reaching middle age with an entire adulthood of navigating, normalizing, and numbing to unprecedented social standards can create depersonalization. While my generation has flourished in many ways, internal and interpersonal struggles have also enabled drastic social and health challenges, including addiction, and unprecedented loneliness.

The internet has become a lifeline for most of us. We’ve had to learn how to navigate constant temperature-taking on where we fit into society, without totally unplugging.

This has been a struggle of mine for over 2 decades. Even when I deleted all my social media for over a year, it continued seeping into my daily life. Have you ever had a family member or close friend get mad because you didn’t see or respond to something they posted on social media?

As a mom, I’m now tasked with preventing dopamine addiction in my children, along with everything else the internet enables. I can’t give them a childhood full of neighborly love, where everyone knows each other, all the kids are outside playing and everyone looks out for each other. But I try to bring the benefits I gained from that upbringing into each day.

We early millennials grew up in functional, robust communities — and yet exposed to and tasked with handling things the generations before us didn’t. We fully experienced and appreciated life before the internet age and after. We sought to understand them both…together.

We also have considerable healing to do and we should keep evolving.

Everything was changing in our late teens and early 20s and everything is changing again. Mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, environmentally, politically.

As millennial women, we’ve seen so many changes regarding womanhood in our lifetime. And we will live longer than our male counterparts.

We will be the wise women the Gen-Z and whatever next-ers will look to as they create, support, enable, and champion new ways to experience humanity. We’ll continue to make the connections between how things were, how they are, and what they can be. Including ourselves.

I’m Mera. Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in more from a millennial mom of many follow me here.