The truth behind the millennial "midlife crisis" | The Gray Area

911 happened when most of us were in high school and that was a a massive moment that shifted politics, culture, the economy. And then you have the 2008 financial crisis just as many of us were finally getting our footing, getting into

secure jobs, coming out of college, uh, and then boom, you know, you're hit with mass layoffs. And so it's that domino effect of one step forward, 10 steps back that I think has led to where we are right now, which is for many of us

still not having a handle on the economics of our lives. >> Welcome to the gray area. I'm John Glenn Hill sitting in for Shaun Illing. Emil Niazi is a columnist at the cut.

She spends a lot of time writing about work and motherhood. And not too long ago, she wrote a piece examining how the midlife crisis is different for millennials. aging seems to change with each generation.

So, I invited her on to talk about the changing markers of adulthood, the eternal optimism of the millennial generation, and why at the end of the day, it might just be latestage capitalism's fault. I had a really great time having this conversation, and

I hope you enjoy listening to it. Emil Nyazi, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You're a columnist at the cut where you write about motherhood and how that intersects with work.

And a few months ago, you wrote this really interesting column called midlife crisising in the end times. And you've actually written quite a bit about this particular stage in life. Why is midlife in our current moment something you're drawn

to explore? Well, first of all, I just am 40 plus now. So, naturally, you know, I'm I'm in this phase of life and I'm thinking about it and and this is kind of what what I write about is my experience

of life. But also, I I I look at um my parents. I look at the generation um even just one above me, you know, Gen Xers. I'm an elder millennial and and it appears to be

a very different experience of midlife that that we're having. um and certainly that I think Gen Z uh is going to have. And so I just really think it's important that people understand that not only are we in a midlife crisis,

but we are in just like an economic crisis, a cultural crisis, a crisis of um fertility. There's so much going on that is altering our experience of this stage of life and it feels like a particularly precarious stage of life because of all of those

things. And so I just I'm sort of like the canary in the coal mine sounding the bell going like help help. I think that this this is very different than it

used to be. We're going to dig into the midlife crisis even more. But first I want to go back to another crisis and that's the quarter life crisis. To tell you a little bit about myself.

A decade ago I was 25. And what I remember about being 25 is crying all the time about not being where I felt like I was supposed to be in life that I wasn't making the progress that I was supposed to.

Did you go through something similar around that age? 100%. Absolutely. I felt, you know, you're coming out of school, you have this expectation of where you should be, right?

you're you're coming out of school, you're thinking, "Okay, I've got the skills now. I have the knowledge. I'm ready for my first adult job. I'm ready to take on more responsibility to have um