Millennial Midlife Crisis: Why Adulthood Feels Less Stable in Your 30s and 40s
Millennial Midlife Crisis: Why Adulthood Feels Less Stable in Your 30s and 40s Quick Answer Many millennials entered adulthood during or soon after the Great Recession, delaying wealth-building during important early career years. Housing, career, marriage, and family milestones have become less reliable measures of whether someone is successfully “grown up.” Millennial finances have improved substantially since the 2010s, but housing costs and other fixed expenses continue to make stability uneven. People entering their 40s increasingly face simultaneous responsibilities for children, aging parents, careers, and their own retirement. The modern midlife crisis is often less about escaping adulthood than deciding which parts of adulthood are actually worth maintaining. For earlier generations, adulthood was often presented as a fairly predictable sequence: finish school, get a stable job, move out, buy a home, start a family, build retirem...