The millennial Midlife Crisis is in crisis

Business Insider

22-06-2025

José has a stable life and career. He wishes he could blow it all up.
The 42-year-old has worked in cybersecurity for two decades and earns a six-figure salary. He lives with his girlfriend outside Dallas and earns enough to cover their basic expenses and put some money away for retirement.
But he's no longer energized by his work. When he thinks about how he'd like to spend the second half of his life, assuming he lives into his 80s, " sitting in front of a laptop definitely isn't it," says José, who requested that his last name not be used so he could speak frankly about his job. He thinks about getting a degree in exercise science, since he's more passionate about combat sports than he's ever been about computers. He's even thought about moving for a while to Southeast Asia, where he spent time when he was younger.
In short, José is having a midlife crisis. Or, rather, he wishes he could have a midlife crisis. As desperately as he wants to make a dramatic change in his life, it feels like an especially bad moment to give up a well-paying job. "I wouldn't take that risk now," José says. He's left wondering: If not now, when?
In the clichéd fantasy of the midlife crisis — the one a lot of millennials and Gen Xers grew up with — you buy a red sports car and shed as many trappings of middle age as you can. Research suggests that at least 10% to 20% of the population experiences some form of midlife angst, which typically hits in a person's 40s or 50s.
But a crisis can also be clarifying: an impetus to restart your life while there's still time, only now with the financial freedom and hard-won wisdom that was lacking in your early 20s. As two researchers argued in an influential 2008 paper published in the Harvard Business Review, confronting one's mortality can spark a transition from "deficiency motivations" — making up for a lack of something — to "growth motivations," when people can embrace the "freedom that only self-knowledge can impart."
People are "looking for a revitalization," but have a hard time envisioning what would work — or daring to dream."
It's a nice idea — if only the generation already in the throes of middle age felt like they could afford it.
In today's erratic economy, blowing up your life to chart a more fulfilling and productive path can feel positively reckless. Many industries — from tech to manufacturing — are contracting, and companies are hiring at their slowest rates in a decade. Knowledge workers and creative professionals are being pushed aside by AI and other new technologies. A Glassdoor poll conducted in October found that two-thirds of professionals reported feeling stuck in their current roles, including more than 7 in 10 respondents who worked in tech. People are choosing to stay put in jobs they may want to leave. Going back to school is about 40% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. The increasing cost of living has made it more challenging to weather a pay cut that may come with shifting to a new career. In one April 2024 survey of millennials, eight in 10 respondents said a midlife crisis was a luxury they could not afford.
Between the 10 midlifers I talked to for this story, there was no shortage of ideas for what they'd do if they were to blow up their lives. But they all agreed that this felt like the wrong time to put personal fulfillment ahead of being practical.
The real crisis might be an economy that has so many people feeling trapped.
Francesca Maximé, a therapist and life coach, has a front-row seat to this dilemma, though she prefers the term "midlife pivot" to midlife crisis.
That's how she describes the shift she made in her own life a decade ago. After nearly 20 years as a TV reporter, Maximé, who's now 54, became disenchanted with how the media had covered the 2016 election. Some personal issues led her to therapy, which in turn inspired her to launch a new career that would allow her to offer that kind of help for others. "Now I work for myself," she says. "I have two businesses. They're thriving."
She says many of her clients who come with midlife anxiety are hoping to make a similar pivot. But whereas she could see a bright future for herself when she hit her mid-40s, her clients who are reaching that milestone now say there are just too many unknowns in the job market and the economy. "They're looking for a revitalization in their lives," Maximé says. "But they have a hard time envisioning what would work — or daring to dream."
Middle age may be a time when people feel they really know themselves. But it's also the time when a big shift can feel especially risky since they're most likely to have people counting on them, whether children, partners, aging parents, or colleagues.
"There's nothing wrong with reassessing things, taking stock of where you've been and where you want to go, and making changes," says Margie Lachman, a psychologist who directs Brandeis University's Lifespan Development Lab. After all, you may become dissatisfied in your 40s simply because you're more clear-eyed about what you actually want out of life. "It's not too late to make changes, and you don't necessarily have to have everything figured out," she says.
But older millennials, in particular, tend to feel like they've been casualties of periods of uncertainty that have coincided with key points in their lives. The dot-com bust and the Great Recession hit at the onset of their adulthoods and working lives; the COVID pandemic arrived as they were starting to reach their 40s; and now they're dealing with inflation and new technology like AI just at the moment when they were supposed to be nearing the heights of their professional lives and earning power. "Everyone experiences these same events, but depending on where you are in the life course, they can have differential effects," Lachman says.
The sense that now is an especially inopportune moment for midlifers to take a leap of faith is echoed by Gen Xers.
We should just be buying sports cars and accruing boy toys. But I guess we're doing something else.
Jane, a marketing professional in Canada, has already had one midlife crisis. She got so much out of it that she'd like to have another.
A decade ago, when she was in her mid-40s, Jane walked away from a career in PR and marketing and spent a few years working on a doctorate in history and traveling with her partner. It was, they thought, their "last chance to have the big adventure." (Jane also asked that her last name not be used for fear of professional consequences.) But when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, and the academic path turned out not to be economically viable, Jane returned to the more stable world she'd hoped to leave behind. She took a job in content marketing for a tech company in Canada. "I've got, by any standards, a really awesome job with a really awesome company," says Jane, who's now 55. "I have no objective reason to feel dissatisfied with this. I should be grateful."
And yet, the past few years have felt like being on "a treadmill that just keeps going faster and faster and faster, and you're just burning more energy to just stay in one place," she says.
She's desperate to get off that treadmill. She still feels a strong pull to do community work or to train to become a mental health counselor. But she no longer feels confident that a job in her old field will be waiting for her if she finds she can't earn enough to keep up with the household expenses. She's already the oldest person in her company, and she expects AI will eventually take over the kind of writing she does anyway. She fears her 30 years of experience could rapidly become worthless.
"I didn't realize that I would get slammed with being obsolete this early," she says.
It can be hard to come to terms with wanting to shake things up — to the point of knowing how you'd do it — while realizing that doing so would be irresponsible. But the implications of being caught in a rut are bigger than a slice of the population feeling unable to follow their bliss. "People feeling stuck means that workers are less engaged with their work," says Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor's lead economist. "And employee engagement is important to productivity."
Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story said they felt unsure that the path they were on was sustainable, since new technologies are devaluing skills they've spent decades mastering — let alone that it would offer them a lot of personal satisfaction in the long term.
"You pass 40-something, and you start to become really aware how much time is left," gripes one millennial dad. "I feel like I am trading away fast-dwindling years doing insignificant things."
Kara Haas, a 43-year-old living in Brooklyn, feels caught between a shrinking profession and more uncertainty than she can comfortably manage. Years ago, she dreamed of becoming a film director. When that didn't work out, she thought she'd found a still-great option working as a set designer for TV shows and movies. But smaller budgets and a steep decline in the number of projects getting greenlit have meant there's a lot less work than there used to be.
Haas feels like this could be her last, best moment to switch to something different. She's thought about opening an Airbnb. But with less work, she has a smaller cushion to sustain her through a major transition. She worries about falling behind on her expenses or losing the health insurance she gets through her union.
Haas sees only bad options, which is a far cry from how she imagined things turning out. She'd always assumed that her midlife crisis would at least be an opportunity to have some fun. "We should just be buying sports cars and accruing boy toys," she says. "But I guess we're doing something else."
Whatever the state of the job market and the broader economy, millennials are certainly not immune to having a midlife crisis in the classic sense: feeling bogged down by adult responsibilities, like parenting, and regret over not getting to enjoy the fruits of their labor. For millennials especially, this can be exacerbated by other cultural shifts: parents, including dads, are spending far more time with their kids than previous generations; they take less vacation; and just keeping up with your contemporaries is more expensive than ever. By one estimate, the cost of raising a child has gone up 20% since 2016.
"You pass 40-something, and you start to become really aware how much time is left," says Jason, a small-business owner in New York, who also asked to use only his first name in order to express his true feelings. As a married father of a 6- and a 10-year-old, Jason, who's 44, says having his life shaped by his kids' routines has both brought on his midlife crisis and kept him from doing much about it.
"I've worked incredibly hard for decades and now have infinite opportunities to travel, participate in exciting things," he says. "And I'm having to say no over and over again so I can just sit at home and be there for bedtime. And that really kills me. I feel like I am trading away fast-dwindling years doing insignificant things."
Maximé, the life coach, says the advice she gives clients who feel stuck at midlife is that blowing up their lives isn't the only way to make a change. She encourages them to think in terms of baby steps. "Start by imagining the perfect way of life you'd want to live," she says. "Then, figure out the practical steps you can take to get closer to that ideal."
For a lot of the people I talked to, the most immediate way to ward off feelings of existential angst has been through forging deeper ties with those around them. Jane, the marketing professional in Canada, recently joined a dragon boat racing team and started volunteering at a local dance festival.
She's embracing the idea of small-scale adventures — at least until a better option presents itself.