When I was 10, I thought my father had lost it and that he and my mother were gonna break up. He came home to our tiny apartment in the wilds of Toronto’s suburbs one random Sunday morning with a head of newly permed, newly blond hair. To make matters worse, he was wearing a buttery, green leather jacket that obviously cost an insane amount of money that we absolutely did not have. Before I even saw him, I heard my mom — calling out in a panicked voice, repeating the phrase, “Is this real?” over and over again. When he finally came into my room, I felt genuine fear. Have you ever seen a brown man with blond, curly hair? As my mom put it later that evening when she’d stopped shrieking, “It’s not right; it shouldn’t be real.”
Today, with my own newly aged eyes, I get that my father was going through an early midlife crisis. Lately, stuck as I am in my own midlife crisis that a dye job and leather jacket won’t fix, I’ve been thinking about my dad’s short-lived grasp at, I don’t even know what, extending his mortality? Prolonging his youth? He was 35, he had three kids, and he needed to drastically alter his appearance and spend an absurd amount of money on something stupid to prove to the world and his family and his bosses that this mortal coil will not take him unadorned, unchanged from the young man he used to be. (The blond hair didn’t last long, and the jacket sat in the closet, enclosed in its garment bag, until my parents finally did get a divorce years later.)
In the movies and TV I grew up watching, a midlife crisis was born out of a complacent sense of security; life was maybe going too well, and people just wanted a chance to flex their youth one more time. They bought a sports car, pierced something, got a weird tattoo. In the extreme, maybe they ditched their entire old lives and started fresh, did something that their kids are still in therapy about now.
For most millennials, the old material markers of midlife, like owning a home or spending 20-plus years at one job, are a nostalgic fantasy. Something we miss but never had. Even as we negotiate gray hairs, crow’s-feet, and a changing body, for many of us, little has changed in our career, home, and money prospects. Growing up, even though our family didn’t have a lot of money — my parents were refugees who moved from Pakistan to Canada without college degrees and drove taxis, waited tables, sold cars, and did whatever else they could to give us what little they could — things felt relatively fine. My parents always managed to clothe and feed us, we went out for dinner a few times a month, we always had a pretty decent roof over our heads; hell, they even managed to buy a house at one point. They had jobs, they left jobs, they got new jobs. They lived paycheck to paycheck, but they also weren’t worried about where that next check came from. I can’t imagine buying a house in downtown Toronto today on one income with less than $10,000 saved for a down payment. I actually want to cry just thinking about the prospect. Same with their ability to get a job when they needed one. I have 20 years of experience in my field at this point, and the majority of the time when I apply for a job, I never hear back.
Today, the real crisis isn’t about mortality; it’s that our lives and stations are unchanged from when we were 30 — or, hell, even 20. It’s about a distinct lack of comfort, of resources. My dad was trying to escape the doldrums of midlife with blond hair; meanwhile, I have friends who can’t even escape a bad marriage because they can’t afford the rent in a new place by themselves, especially if they want to keep their kids in the same school.
For as long as there have been “trend stories” about millennials loving pricey avocado toast, there have been actual millennials sounding the alarm bell about how crippling student-loan debt, a punishing job market, and rapidly rising housing costs have diminished our ability to get a secure footing in our lives and actually start to plan for our futures. And now, we’re not exactly staring out the window of our country house fondly remembering our salad days. We’re still grinding it out, perennially worried about losing it all.
Any single change in our jobs, homes, or health could upend our entire lives in ways that are just financially impossible.
Two years ago, I wrote about losing my ambition, about reshaping my priorities and putting the focus back on what I really want to do. I don’t need new highlights or a sports car; I just want the ability to plan for a secure future, to have optimism about my career prospects ten or even five years from now, to be able to afford to care for my family without the constant threat of layoffs, hunger, or eviction. I want time with my kids while I’m still healthy and aware, and I want to do work that is fulfilling and meaningful. And despite divorcing myself from a specific model of success in the process of leaving ambition behind, I do work hard. I work harder than ever, because I’m terrified of what happens if I don’t. I’ve spent the last year looking into what getting a real-estate license would entail, looking up how to become a plumber’s apprentice, and Googling “best graduate degrees if you want to get a steady job that pays good and will let you retire one day with dignity.” It’s a midlife crisis, no doubt, but it’s not born out of restlessness or a rosy remembrance of things past; it’s panic that this is as good as it’s going to get and what lies ahead could be worse.
I’m not just worried about myself — I have young kids, and my parents are getting old. Can I care for everyone and myself? I have a parent who will likely require some financial assistance as they age, and I don’t know if I have those funds. (A third of Americans happen to feel the same way, and just over half plan to assist their parents financially in their retirement years. For me and many of my friends, our current retirement plan is to drop dead at work.)
Almost all of my friends are in the middle of a job crisis, either looking for work or trying to figure out how to pivot to something else. I have a friend in her late 30s who has not been unemployed a day in her adult life. She’s the most organized, impressively career-focused person I know — she just got laid off from her job at a big tech company. Her most generous assessment of the landscape is that she probably won’t find another job for a year and may have to reconsider her career path entirely and start from scratch. She and her partner were seemingly financially secure and debating whether it makes sense to have a baby, but this has thrown everything off. Another friend in his mid-40s is worried it’s too late for him to have a baby and is also reconsidering what it is he should do with his life, but has no idea where to start. He’s been a steadily working creative who was one of the lucky ones to have bought a house 15 years ago, but he just sold it to give himself some wiggle room as he starts looking for steadier employment.
I keep waiting for the dam to break for something to happen that fixes the housing bubble, our debt crisis, or the job market, but that alarm’s been ringing and no one who can do anything about it seems to be interested in answering.
So while I do often ask myself, “What the fuck have I done with my life, and can I still survive out here doing what I do?,” the rub of midlife is that you do have so much more to lose. I don’t want to blow up my life and start from scratch. I just want to feel like the ground beneath my feet isn’t constantly shifting. So, like most of my generation who are used to this kind of precarity, I’ll just keep moving forward, making the best out of what I can. And let’s just hope I won’t be writing this same essay in another 20 years.
