I Coined a Term for the Millennial Midlife Crisis, Meet Millennial Malaise

We deserve a term for the feeling

My generation is experiencing a unique phenomenon. We are the only group to have grown up with and without the internet in our formative years. I had an analog childhood, playing in my yard without the temptation of screens. My cognitive development wasn’t tethered to technology. I was about 10 or 11 when a computer showed up in our house, and even then, we had to wait, patiently, every single time, for dial-up to connect us. The internet was brand new, which meant there wasn't much of it yet. It was being built in real time, and we were witnessing new advancements and ideas every day. We didn't have all the information at our fingertips. We were laying it down brick by brick, like a shared LEGO sculpture nobody had the full instructions for. I burned CDs ripping songs off Limewire, I printed driving directions off Mapquest, I stared into the abyss trying to solve MYST (iykyk). The clunkiness and friction mattered more than we knew.

Millennials are, by the numbers, the most intelligent generation to exist. The Flynn Effect, coined by James Flynn in 1984, found that average IQ scores had climbed with every successive generation. After a century of upward IQ, Gen Z is the first generation to show a decline. They are also the first generation to be digital native. They grew up with computers, a robust internet, iPads and smart phones. School’s adapted by folding technology into their curriculum which changed how students absorbed information. Unfortunately for them, screens tend to lean towards cognitive outsourcing. They didn’t need to scour textbooks, magazines, archives to find the answer, they can google with ease. That lack of effort codes differently in our brains. We are less likely to retain the information and it has induced shorter attention spans. They aren’t reading books, and they rely very heavily on AI for every small request. Reading surprisingly matters a lot. Juliette Han, a PhD in Neuroscience, lays out why. People who read twice a week or more have a reduced risk of cognitive decline, it strengthens the white matter between the two hemispheres, allowing them to communicate better. Reading makes you better at connecting ideas, it builds your ability to empathize and brings your imagination to life. When you read an AI summary or skim a headline, none of the things mentioned above, turn on. You eliminate your ability to think deeper. The brain is after all akin to a muscle, use it or lose it.

We've engineered the friction out of learning and it's the friction that codes the information into our brains permanently. We know handwriting encodes more deeply than typing does. I still remember standing in the library, assembling an old-school bibliography by hand, it was tiresome and took a lot of time! The effort was the point. It's what made the learning stick.

Millennials were raised by Boomer parents who came of age during the greatest window of upward mobility this country has ever produced. 90% of children born in the 1940s and 1950s went on to out-earn their own parents. That generation didn't just hear about the American Dream , they lived it, in real time, in front of their kids. We watched our parents' circumstances visibly improve across our own childhoods. So we absorbed the gospel as fact: work hard, get the degree, follow the steps, and the payoff arrives.

We did everything right. And somewhere around midlife, it has become clear that something is missing. There's a hollowness to this moment that we didn’t anticipate.

I call it Millennial Malaise. Millennial Malaise is the collective exhaustion and disillusionment of a generation that followed the rules, worked hard, got the degrees, chased the milestones ... only to find the promised payoff had evaporated. leaving burnout, financial precarity, and a quiet grief for a future that was sold to them but never delivered.

Because despite hitting every milestone, upward mobility isn’t what it used to be. 49% of Millennials have jobs that are lower in socio-economic status than their parents. So what we’re working towards feels empty because it is... It’s like we were hiking a mountain, climbing summit after summit, we arrived at the top only to realize…there’s not a ridiculous, jaw-dropping view but rather, a cliff. There’s nowhere left to go, no salary increase, no ability to buy a home, costs are rising, and it makes you want to jump right off.

The wealth gap has widened so intensely that most people are just surviving. To Gen Z’s credit, they never believed in the promised payoff. They grew up running active-shooter drills in their classrooms and watching climate disasters demolish cities over night. They resigned to a different story. We came of age with Obama, when hope felt tangible, when the promise of the constitution was maybe coming true. And so this stark reality is hitting us harder.

We believed our arc would mirror our parents. Expectation is always the thief of joy which is why we need to relinquish those expectations and ideals. Our grief is real, we need to mourn what we thought our lives were going to look like first. But I also believe we can build something so much better and more true in the wake of this. A system that works for more people. Once we relinquish what life was supposed to look like, we can start to examine what we really want. What are our real values? Who did we want to be as a kid, before anyone told us what to want? (These are the exact questions I walk through in my workbook, which you can grab here.) How can we build a life and a career that is actually in alignment with who we are, not just a job we thought was going to build us a financial future? The reality is, there is no finite amount of money in the world. We should be living in a post-abundance era. The issue is that the people hoarding the wealth are deeply out of alignment with themselves. The asymmetry we’re living inside of is the opportunity. If corporate stability is a relic of the past, cost of living is increasing, how do build a purposeful and meaningful life instead?

These are the questions we need to be asking. The answers we find in ourselves will usher in something different. We need to mourn what was but I tend to believe it’ll be better than the future we thought we wanted. What do you think?

P.S. I’m a wee bit concerned about the literary crisis so I just hosted a book swap courtesy of The Breakout Foundation and I highly suggest it!! The quality of conversation was deep, it was soul nourishing and everyone left with new books to read! 10/10 recommend!