Author: Lyz Mancini
Art: Kristin Kastein
I vividly remember the day my dad got an earring. I was about ten years old and we were on a camping trip up in the Adirondacks – my sisters, my mom, and I went up ahead for a few days and he was to meet us there. When he finally arrived, he had a goofy smile on his face and something shiny studded in one earlobe.
“Someone’s having a midlife crisis,” a family friend joked. My dad’s face reddened. He took a fair amount of jibing for that earring, but he kept it in. At some point it disappeared. Now that he’s passed away, I wonder about the interiority of the man I never got to know, to the extent I wanted to. Was he depressed? Feeling the weight of his existence? Or did he just…want to express himself? Something pushed him to pierce his ear, and for some reason in the year 1996, it held more weight than it does today when a millennial decides to switch up their appearance. That idea of the “mid-life crisis” was imbued in boomer culture back then, in a way that, I would argue, is dead now.
A new hobby, career change, year in Paris, etc. is no longer cause for alarm because we are the generation that curates and builds our own lives.
Affairs, divorce, short skirts, motorcycles, for some reason – these are the tropes that were labeled as a “mid-life crisis” for the boomer parents of millennials. They were raised by parents from The Great Depression, their structured life that prioritized stability made sense – they stayed at jobs and with partners for decades, had kids, annual vacations, and largely hunkered down to flourish outward. They were able to purchase homes (still are!) and save for retirement, but unconventional lifestyles were not as prevalent – they took more courage and often those rights were not yet legalized.
I graduated college in 2008 and was dumped into a society mid-recession, where there were no jobs, copious student loan bills looming, and no security. Many of my peers lived at home for years, jumping from job to job until the economy improved. By the time things settled and we were able to either work our way up from unpaid or find our footing within a career, we were in our mid-to-late twenties. A lack of savings paired with an unclear future resulted in, for many, an unstable environment to purchase a home, have children, and instead we were left to figure out our lives later than our parents. (Hence the now-cringey millennial term “adulting.”) We literally could not begin those rites of passages until one day…we were expected to. The generation that raised us now rolled their eyes at our selfishness, claimed we cared about our phones too much, the Peter Pan Syndrome we clung to, and blamed avocado toast for our lack of a mortgage.
Millenials to create our own means of survival, of finding joy in the world not promised to us.What eventually resulted were unconventional, more open-ended life choices and structures.
Ethical non monogamy, choosing to be child-free, nomadic living, exploring a spectrum of gender and sexual identity and…not viewing getting tattooed in your thirties as some kind of cry for help. Millennials became not only voraciously hard-workers to the point of burn-out (hello, the rise and fall of girl boss culture), but political, empathetic, mental health advocates, and statistically the most progressive generation in existence. We are the generation that gentle parents, re-parents ourselves, breaks taboos around medication, and after years of binge drinking, now entering our sober era. However, we also indulge in the flow of self-expression and joy – a new hobby, career change, year in Paris, etc. is no longer cause for alarm because we are the generation that curates and builds our own lives, even when it looks like the ones our parents lived.
Having lived through one recession and thus electing Obama, firmly-established careers through the pandemic, and now on the precipice of a fascist regime plus another recession, one could argue that this generation doesn’t fall victim to the trope of a “mid-life crisis” because we have persisted through many a crisis from the moment we came of age. Gen Z culture has made fun of millennials, likely a cyclical tradition that allows the world to turn. However, now they ask; what did you guys do during the last recession? How did you fight for your rights? How did you get by? How did you know who you were meant to be?
I think about my dad’s earring sometimes. What it did for him, what it satisfied. If he felt like he couldn’t continue to explore, or tap into, his younger self in an ongoing way.
Boomers dealt with their generational trauma by creating safety within societal structures, while millennials rebelled against it. This is everyone’s first time on this Earth (at least that most of us remember), and we all are working to feel comfortable within our own skin as we age, as our bodies change, as the world does. Had we graduated college into a world that looked more like our parents, would we also be balking at any unconventional choice? If we lived in a country that better supported mothers, that paid us enough to purchase homes, would we all be tittering at a random alternative aesthetic choice? We’ll never know.
I think about my dad’s earring sometimes. What it did for him, what it satisfied. If he felt like he couldn’t continue to explore, or tap into, his younger self in an ongoing way. How it felt, to hear it relegated to a “crisis” connected to his age when we all feel like kids inside anyway. So how do you live the life you want, in the body you have, and save yourself from crisis? Did millennials figure it out? Are we stunted? Are we free? I am now technically a mid-life millennial and the answer is…we’re still very much still figuring that out.
About the Author:
Lyz Mancini is a writer living in Catskill, NY. She is a beauty copywriter for brands like MAC Cosmetics and Clinique, and her writing has appeared in Slate, Catapult, Vautrin, Shortwave Magazine, Witches Magazine, and more. She is a Tin House and Pitch Wars alum and was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize.