Rachel Brodsky is a freelance journalist who writes about music and pop culture.
For a generation that has hopped from one unexpected catastrophe to another, from 9/11 to the 2008 financial crash to a global pandemic to a shocking challenge to US democracy, it’s ironic that today’s elder millennials didn’t see the most predictable of crises coming. But for those of us in the late-30s-to-mid-40s set, it’s here: midlife ennui.
However inevitable, though, our midlife crisis carries its own special kind of dread. Worse, maybe, than earlier generations’ midlife crises. And for the first time, this year a string of pop culture artifacts — in film, TV, and books — started to articulate it.
Midlife panic in pop culture isn’t anything new. Boomer-focused films like “American Beauty” and “The Big Chill” explored the decay of youthful idealism. And some of what they depicted has echoes today — particularly middle-aged women’s disappointment with the shortcomings of supposedly enlightened men.
But other struggles highlighted by these films seem quaint. “American Beauty,” released in 1999, focuses on a man in midlife (Kevin Spacey) wondering if everything he has — which is a lot — is enough to fill his soul. (Spoiler: It isn’t.) In “The Big Chill,” from 1983, a group of college friends well into their 30s are all gainfully employed but feel they’re missing just one thing, whether it’s a baby, a happier marriage, or, in the case of a People Magazine scribe played by Jeffrey Goldblum, something more substantial to write about.
From where I’m sitting, I’m thinking, Boo-hoo? It must be nice not to tack on “I hope I get to keep my job for another month” or “I hope I can afford to fix my house/body/car if it breaks” to that wish list.
Maybe people my age didn’t see our precarity coming because the culture had us convinced that if we could just survive the girlboss hustle culture that defined our 20s and early 30s, then we could bargain our way out of the economic mess we inherited. In the 2010s, millennial-focused media, exemplified by shows like HBO’s “Girls” and “Insecure,” Comedy Central’s “Broad City,” and FX’s “You’re the Worst,” depicted our generation struggling to mature into adulthood, with many of its protagonists weighing personal authenticity against career ambition amid unstable job markets and toxic romantic relationships. The core assumption of these shows, particularly “Girls,” was that once these characters became who they were (as its protagonist Hannah Horvath, played by Lena Dunham, proclaimed she needed to do in the 2012 pilot), the rest of their lives would naturally fall into place.
A decade later, however, a new wave of millennial-made media suggests that after quarter-life self-actualization, it’s hard to find the financial means to make a go of the life you’ve imagined.
Let’s start with a personal favorite: Apple TV’s underrated buddy-comedy gem “Platonic.” Tonally indebted to “Girls,” “Platonic” follows two Los Angeles-based former best friends (Sylvia, played by Rose Byrne, and Will, played by Seth Rogen) as they reconnect at around age 40. Byrne’s character has seemingly done everything “right” — she’s married to a kind, steady lawyer with whom she parents three kids. Rogen’s Will, on the other hand, is getting divorced, has no children, and helps run a trendy brewery in LA’s Arts District. Sylvia and Will don’t appear at the outset to have much in common post-college (the heyday of their friendship), but they overlap in their midlife anxieties about the nature of marriage, work, family, friendship, and — here’s the most millennial part — the forever-out-of-reach notion of stability. In one of the first season’s best gags, Byrne’s Sylvia nearly buys a decrepit, closed-down nursing home simply because it has enough square footage to accommodate her family of five, who are still sharing one bathroom in their single-family home. Though Sylvia appears solidly middle-class, she and her husband can’t afford better housing in Los Angeles.
Over on Peacock, the much-discussed limited series “All Her Fault” begins as a crime drama when a young boy goes missing from an after-school playdate. Yet as the series plays out, it becomes agonizingly clear that the real villains are not so much the child’s kidnapper but two well-to-do husbands (Jake Lacey and Thomas Cocquerel), whose incompetence places undue burdens on their wives, Marissa and Jenny, played by Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning. The moms never stop working — at their actual jobs and at domestic labor. Unlike many millennials still struggling to find their way, both families have the means to hire help — but not even that does much to lessen the weight Snook’s and Fanning’s characters carry when their husbands fail to engage in any housework.
I imagine that Marissa and Jenny — both somewhere in their 30s or 40s — grew up thinking that if they just worked hard enough, they would “have it all,” as Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 book, and later, popular culture at large, promised. They could have a robust career and partners who pitched in without having to be asked or micromanaged. This was a boomer dream first. But women of that generation weren’t all that surprised when their husbands, reared in an age of traditional gender roles, ultimately fell short. Millennial and Gen Z women expected better.
More examples abound: In film, Mary Bronstein’s visceral A24 entry “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” tells a similar tale of maternal burnout as a mother (also played by Rose Byrne) suffers a nervous breakdown while parenting her sick child during a two-month work trip her often-absent husband is taking. Lynne Ramsay’s “Die, My Love” portrays Jennifer Lawrence as a thirtysomething writer idealizing a move from New York City to woodsy Montana to start a family with her boyfriend (Robert Pattinson), who hints at a past life in a band but now has a vague, possibly sales-related job that frequently takes him on the road. Lawrence’s character falls into psychosis due to a combination of postpartum depression and rural isolation. Perhaps she never should have left the city, but millennials with growing families and shrinking real estate options are unlikely to turn down a free house (a deceased uncle leaves his to Pattinson’s character), even if it happens to be in rural Montana.
Economic unease, when it isn’t the main character, always plays a supporting role. Erin Somers’s novel “The Ten Year Affair” is about Brooklyn transplants to an unnamed Hudson Valley town deciding whether to plunge into infidelity. But the lead protagonist Cora’s financial insecurities keep surfacing. She can barely afford to fix her new-old home, or its “janky stove” and “a dryer that ran incessantly unless you unplugged it,” among other amenities badly in need of repair. The house is a constant reminder of her midlife struggle. A wild mushroom keeps pushing through a crack in her bathroom tile. “When you pulled [the mushroom] out, it only grew back,” Somers writes.
Midlife worry doesn’t go away – what changes are the circumstances unique to each generation. In boomer films and literature, we saw a generation that first rebelled against conformity and ultimately embraced it (car, house, kids, financial security) but was left unsatisfied. The good life wasn’t enough. This year’s millennial cultural offerings were all about how the good life we’d been promised — equitable and healthy partnerships, decently paid jobs with room for growth, relative affordability if we saved 30 percent of each paycheck — remains stubbornly out of reach, eluding not just the young but people who are supposed to be coming into their own in their 30s and 40s.
Unlike the boomers’ midlife crisis, ours did not jump out and surprise us after years of relative contentment. Ours is more like an unceasing drizzle following a hurricane, and it’s leaking into all areas of pop culture, where it will no doubt continue sprouting mushrooms in the bathroom tile.