Poor, busy millennials are doing the midlife crisis differently

“They feel trapped, and they’re not happy with that, but they don’t really have a huge number of options,” says Steven Mintz, an historian at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood. “They can’t just write a check and walk away.”

The “midlife crisis” is already over the hump itself—it turns 58 this year. This phenomenon, the much-mocked mashup of paunch and panic, was first introduced to the American public in 1965 by psychologist Elliott Jaques, in a paper depressingly titled “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis.” Research by Jaques, then 48, showed that creatives such as composers and artists demonstrated precipitous declines or changes around the age of 35. At that point, per Jaques, humans swapped optimistic timekeeping for a pessimistic approach—rather than “time since birth,” it was “time until death.”

The paper he presented had an instant impact, launching books, television coverage and even a government task force to investigate suicides by men at midlife. The tropes of the phenomenon were established at the outset: It was a distinctly White, male and middle-class concern. Around the same time, widespread social upheaval made divorcing your wife to marry a younger woman less frowned-upon (from 1960 to 1969, the divorce rate climbed from 2.2% to 3.2%; it would peak at 22.6% in 1980), and unfettered commercialism was at a generational high. Buying a fast car was equal parts patriotism and posturing. Fittingly, Chevrolet’s Camaro was introduced in 1966.

The first cohort to experience the midlife crisis as Jaques defined it was the Silent Generation, or those born in the 10 years or so before World War II; their offspring, the boomers, embraced many of the same moves when they hit 40 in the 1980s. Gen X claimed the title in the 2000s. This Nirvana-shaped gang spritzed a dose of their signature rebellion into the mix—had Ben Affleck turned 40 in the 1960s, it’s doubtful he’d have opted for a full back tattoo.

Which brings us to today and the midlife millennials. “The road map of life has disintegrated,” Mintz says. “The guidebook that told you what to do at 25, or at 35 or at 50? It has completely faded.”

So how are these newly minted fortysomethings reconsidering life? By spending less, of course. Instead of buying a new car, they’ll buy a bike and get out on the road—improving their health and increasing their longevity along the way. Instead of getting plastic surgery, they’ll adopt an adventurous hobby.

“There’s an idea that you needn’t be old in middle age,” that you can stay young by exercising and traveling, says Mark Jackson, author of Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis. Those pastimes come at a price, “but they’re much less costly than buying a Porsche or a Ducati or having a mistress.”

Thanks to pandemic-spurred flexible work protocols, the old trope of leaving your family behind has turned into uprooting the whole clan and moving everyone somewhere with a higher quality of life per dollar. “If you want to move to Alaska, that’s not a fantasy anymore,” Mintz says. “With a degree of remote work, you can do it now.”

Instead of getting a divorce, many couples are rethinking monogamy and the way they share space. London-based interior designer Francis Sultana says a so-called snoring room, or second sleeping space, is now a regular feature of homes he designs for clients in long-term relationships. He and his own partner have had their own bedrooms for at least a decade. “It’s a happy way to manage, especially if the cycles of your working or waking lives are different,” he says. “And in the old days, separate bedrooms were quite the norm.”

For many, the name of the game isn’t aggressive change at all. Lucia Knight, who runs what she calls a “midlife career design consultancy” called Midlife Unstuck, explains it this way: “There are too many plates spinning now for you to just drop them” when you want to adopt a new path. “So you negotiate with each of the 10 plates of life to make it happen.”

She works with clients to progressively tweak their lives rather than implode them. One managing director at a bank, for example, turned crocheting, a hobby she’d developed to lower her anxiety, into a profitable side hustle. Another, a nurse, started working part time so she could take an upholstery course and mull a switch to furniture making. Knight says 40% of her clients are women. The phenomenon, she says, is “no longer very male.”

“I don’t think anyone bothered to look at a woman’s midlife crisis back in the 1960s,” says Annabel Rivkin, co-founder of the Midult, a site for women in midlife. “She just got left, so it was a reactive, not an active, one.”

Rivkin prefers the term “midlife crossroads,” hoping to help shift the dialogue around this life stage away from sex, separation or spending power.

Hitting midlife for a millennial needn’t be a source of panic at all. Lacking money to blow up your life can actually be freeing, say some advisers. If a crisis is ultimately about reasserting control over your circumstances and destiny, there’s one currency everybody has control over: their time.

Sarah Knight, the New York Times bestselling author of a series of manuals such as The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, suggests we think of our time, energy and money as emotional cash and create a “f--- budget” around them. “Spend your ‘f--- bucks’ on things and people that make you happy—or at least on those that serve you in some way. And decline to spend them on stuff that doesn’t,” she says.

Replace “Yeah, sure!” with “I’ll think about it and get back to you!” Stop thinking you need to justify declining an invitation, date or job offer. You don’t owe anyone an explanation beyond “No thank you.” Don’t worry so much about being perceived as nice: “If you’re honest and polite, you’ve done nothing wrong,” Knight says.

Midult’s Rivkin calls midlife your “get s--- done” era, when women turn their backs on deference. “My pockets are not deep, and my life is very hungry,” she says. “I think there’s a new ability to say f--- it.”

When the midlife crisis as a concept was first put forward, “it was very much seen as a time of depression,” says Broken Dreams’s Jackson. But our expectations have changed dramatically. “We’re used to changing jobs. We get married later and have fewer children, and at a later age. And we’re living longer, so midlife has become extended.”

Those longer timetables will also reshape the rhythm of the midlife crisis moving forward. Rather than a single table-flipping moment of life reinvention, Jackson suggests the new normal is a constant, quiet reassessment and iteration, allowing millennials and those who come later to recalibrate without upending their lives entirely.

The first Gen Zers will turn 40 in 2037. We might not even notice it then, says Rivkin. “Gen Z has an identity crisis every 30 seconds,” she says. “So there aren’t a lot of rules anymore about when we might look at resetting our lives.”