Traditionally, if perhaps erroneously, our idea of a midlife crisis has long involved an older man leaving behind his home and family life for a red sports car, a too-young girlfriend, and perhaps some kind of hair dye, if not a hairpiece. This midlife crisis means trading away the parts of one’s life for something newer and younger. The only thing this archetypal man can’t trade in, of course, are the years he’s already lived.
In reality, that kind of implosion fantasy doesn’t resonate with many people. No one wants to be the guy who can’t see his own desperation, flailing against his own mortality. If a guy is indeed that guy, he wouldn’t allow himself to realize it. And it especially doesn’t ring true to millennials, now entering their 40s, the time when issues of having lived half your life traditionally start to arise. This is a generation that often can’t afford the home or family life to throw away, never mind the new sports car; one that grew up hyperconscious about mental health and the benefits of therapy, encouraged self-expression and open discussion about relationships, and found value in experiences.
Millennial lives don’t look like boomer or even Gen X lives, and neither do their midlife crises.
While in years past the midlife crisis might have been fueled by a dawning reaction to one’s own mortality, for new 40-somethings, it’s more like a progress report. For one thing, the stability that previous generations found stifling can be hard to find. Many are looking for an opportunity — a fitness journey, a new career, a personal awakening that might involve tattoos — instead of something necessitating an intervention.
What remains, however, is that creeping reality that we only have one life to live. It can’t help but feel a little like dying.
Fully understanding the midlife crisis means deconstructing the ideas about what it looks like. Which is to say: the rug-wearing, skirt-chasing, Lamborghini jerk we all know and fear was always largely a myth.
“The thing about those stereotypes is that they’re not actually very common. People don’t actually abandon their spouses and buy red sports cars because of a midlife crisis,” says Hollen Reischer, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies how people find meaning in their life experiences.
Though Reischer assures me that there are no historic statistics that show a spike in red sports car purchases with a direct relationship to divorce rates, she explains that the urban legend is important for a different reason. Midlife crisis stereotypes like that guy or, as Reischer points out, the fear-mongering myth of the menopausal woman condemned to a life waving off hot flashes in front of her fridge allow us to project and obliquely explore our fears of getting older. Those include fears about how we’re perceived and what we might lose along with our youth: beauty, value, potential, health.
We know how we don’t want to age, but aren’t totally sure how we do.
To some degree, that’s the problem Sam, 42, is facing. In the last four years, Sam — who Vox is referring to by a pseudonym so she can speak frankly about her experience — has come out as bisexual, changed careers, and gotten a bunch of tattoos.
But the changes in her life weren’t always welcome. During the pandemic lockdowns, her marriage ended, and she was laid off from her job, prompting these larger shifts.
Sam describes changes in her life — a new relationship with a woman, a more secure job that doesn’t make her feel “like garbage” the way her previous career did, an apartment where she lives alone, five tattoos in the last six months — as positive, but she has some uneasiness. “It’s just really hard to find a feeling of being settled,” she explains. She’s coming to terms with not just her age, but the political climate she’s living in, her parents getting older, the lingering fear that she didn’t hit the milestones she had envisioned for herself, and an uncertain future.
“Maybe that’s where the crisis comes in. … Sometimes it makes me feel kind of— bummed isn’t the right word, but just wistful.”
“I think I’m happier because I’m not hiding parts of myself anymore and I’m acknowledging who I am fully,” Sam tells me. “But I also can’t say that the stability of marriage, kids, and all of that stuff, isn’t appealing still, and maybe that’s where the crisis comes in. … Sometimes it makes me feel kind of— bummed isn’t the right word, but just wistful, I guess.”
Even if millennials like Sam see opportunity in midlife, that doesn’t mean it comes without doubts or longing for security. Being able to admit that is part of Sam’s process, as is being optimistic about the future.
“In 10 years, I think I’ll probably feel more satisfied with where I am than where I was like when I turned 40,” she tells me, explaining that the support from her circle of friends — some of whom are queer, some of whom don’t have kids, and some who are on a similar life path — has made navigating part of her life easier.
“It’s an ongoing journey, and even though I feel like I look back at the past a lot, I also am trying to keep an open mind about what’s coming,” Sam adds.
As Sam indicates, there are some outside factors impacting the millennial midlife crisis, including the economy. Most of the cohort entered the workforce in, around, or following the financial collapse of 2008, only to be hit again by the Covid 2020 recession, and now join the ranks of the middle-aged in whatever kind of economy we’re facing in 2025. That might be why, according to a 2024 study from the Thriving Center of Psychology, 81 percent of millennials polled said they couldn’t “afford” to have a midlife crisis. It may also explain why so many millennials don’t feel like they hit adulthood milestones, which often involve large purchases if not total financial stability.
Financially secure or not, though, at a certain time in our lives, knees and lower backs do begin to ache. Parents get older. So do children, for those who have them. Responsibilities and expectations pile up, and aspirations get more urgent or complicated. Perhaps the idea of making millions of dollars at a dream job seems more like an impossibility than it did 10 years ago. All of these factors make the transition to midlife real, frighteningly so. And shifts in everything from the economy to our lifestyle to our life expectancy mean that the experience has changed.
Chip Conley, an entrepreneur, author, and the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which focuses on reimagining midlife as a positive transition, explained to me that the notion of the midlife crisis was born mainly out of fears of mortality. But as time has passed and people live longer, the “crisis” doesn’t feel so terrifying or set in stone. Millennials, he says, have benefited from that outlook.
“Millennials have taken a ‘path less traveled’ mentality to their lives,” Conley tells me.
Compared to generations before them, millennials have had more options to shape how their lives will unfold. Whether it’s taking a gap year, going to grad school, waiting to get married, taking more time to have children, or not having children at all, millennials have been less locked in than previous generations when it comes to what their adult lives should look like.
“Boomers and maybe even Gen X-ers, there was this sense that you’re supposed to live your life based upon this set of rules — your parents’ set of rules.” Conley says. “I don’t think that there’s this feeling where millennials are waking up one day and saying, Whose life is this?”
That isn’t to say that millennials haven’t been dealt some unfortunate hands, particularly when it comes to wealth (millennials’ retirement prospects compared to older generations look not so great), or that millennials are immune to expectations or material envy. But if they do wake up with that realization, millennials might be more equipped to handle it in a healthy way than previous generations.
For some, it’s literally fitness.
James McMillian has seen his fair share of millennial midlife crises turn into fitness journeys. McMillian is the chief innovation officer at Tone House, where he and his fellow coaches offer training for HyRox, an extreme fitness race that’s seemingly inspired by gulags.
McMillian says that though HyRox — which features eight ultra-challenging lifting events coupled with eight kilometers of running — is open to a wide age range (he’s seen participants in their 70s), one of the most popular age ranges is 35 to 39.
“We can’t control our careers. We can’t control our relationships. But when you’re training or when you’re doing fitness, that is something — one of the rare things — you can control,” McMillian says. So much of millennial life has been dictated by circumstance, and wellness is one thing that’s in their own hands.
“This is their chance to become an athlete,” McMillian adds.
Kate Laney, a six-time HyRox participant in her 30s, is one of those athletes, and she confirms that she gets a sense of growth and control from the workout. “I mean, it’s definitely or at least a little bit of death — I die every time I do it,” Laney tells me. “I see my body change. I see myself getting healthier and these competitions — my growth year over year, making new friends year over year, my daily workouts — that’s my journey.”
For many millennials, a midlife crisis involves reevaluating their careers. Being tethered to your job is perhaps one of the more old-fashioned things about the supposedly open-minded generation. But as Elise Hu, the co-host of the self-care Forever35 podcast tells me, it makes sense because millennials have been told, over and over, to work hard.
“Culturally, there was this real sense that you were supposed to just work harder — just work your way out of it,” Hu says, referring to graduating into the Great Recession of 2008. At the time, just having a paying job meant you should consider yourself lucky, and just a few years later, many millennial women were told to “lean in” and climb the ladder. Whatever hardship life contained, putting your head down and working was going to be the best way to conquer it.
It’s only natural that, after all these years of working hard and not having much to show for it, the question would arise: Where did all the years of labor go? Was it worth it? Did any of it make us happy?
“Covid was a real reckoning, right?” Hu asks. “Because it was like, ‘Oh, wait, I don’t have to be doing things and hustling all the time.’”
Julie Bogen, 33, a former audience editor (and, full disclosure, a former Vox employee) and now a freelance writer, thought so. She tells me that the compounding factors of the pandemic, having a child, and working from home full-time all culminated in her experiencing burnout around the 2024 election. “I was fucking drowning,” Bogen says.
Her job, in particular, had become a complication. “There’s a lot in my life that’s really, really important to me, and it got really hard for me to make myself prioritize things like analyzing the Instagram algorithm,” Bogen says, noting that The 19th, the news organization she worked for, gave her the grace and support she needed while making the decision to step away.
She explains that while she felt equipped and empowered to quit her job, she is still working to organize her life around the things in life that make her happy, including her children, learning how to cook, barre, and getting bylines at more publications.
“It doesn’t feel like I blew up my life — it feels like I took a really big risk,” Bogen says, acknowledging that her family is “really lucky.” “I think the hard part is like, getting from A to B for me, where it was like, I made this choice, I feel good about this choice, and now I have to make some decisions about what’s next.”
Looking at midlife and older adulthood as an opportunity rather than a “crisis” is something that can benefit anyone, Reischer, the professor at Buffalo, says. In her work, she studies how humans understand their own life experiences and how that shapes their connection to their own identity. Seeing life as an open-ended tale and ongoing narrative can help make us satisfied, more realized, more mentally healthy people, especially later in adulthood — even if something feels unsure or uncertain in the moment. It’s all part of our bigger life story.
“If you’re not acknowledging where you are, it’s very hard to get to the next place.”
“It allows you to say, this is where I am now and I know this is where I want to go,” Reischer says. “If you’re not acknowledging where you are, it’s very hard to get to the next place.”
That “next place” is where Patrick Drislane, a 39-year-old teacher, already has in his sights. Drislane talked to me about how the millennial midlife crisis has felt uniquely disorienting. From financial setbacks, to social media, to being governed by boomers, it all feels like we’re in a “generational waiting room,” Drislane says.
Even though Drislane followed the formula his and so many other parents taught their kids — school, then college, then a job, and then saving money — it never felt as though those things led him to the same milestones his parents achieved. That might be the defining trait of the millennial midlife crisis: learning to accept that our lives don’t look like the ones our parents had.
During his crisis, Drislane has been planning and mapping out his future. In 10 years, he thinks he’ll have saved enough to retire from teaching and pursue a different career on his own terms. He doesn’t know what that’ll be — but it’s the prospect of it being his decision that excites him. Ideally, he’d like to own a home, preferably a small place in the Catskills.
“I know what it feels like to live 40 years, and that’s what I have left,” Drislane tells me. “How can I figure out who I am without giving up my integrity, without giving up my values. How can I make the most of that? That’s the sports car I want.”
