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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Long gone are the days when "millennial" was synonymous with "annoying young person". The allegedly avocado-obsessed generation is entering their 40s marking their entrance into middle age, but according to New York Times op-ed writer Jessica Grose, middle age for millennials looks quite different from what previous generations have experienced.

Events of the last two decades that Jessica describes, and that we all know too well, as cascading crises have altered the typical life pattern, preventing millennials from achieving the comforts associated with middle age in so many cases. Without those comforts, many millennials are missing out on the typical midlife crisis that occurs in some people's 40s as well. We're going to wrap up today's show by continuing our series of generational call-ins that we will keep doing this year.

Listeners, millennials, as we welcome Jessica Grose to the show, do you consider yourself middle-aged now? How are you experiencing middle age? Is it different from what you imagined or how our society typically has depicted middle age for previous generations? 212-433 WNYC, for older millennials, 212-433-9692. What milestones have you hit? Which have you skipped? Have any society-wide crises personally hindered what you might have anticipated would be your development toward middle age, financially, socially or whatever? 212-433 WNYC.

For millennial-age listeners, particularly older millennials, those now entering their 40s or approaching them, 212-433-9692, as joining us is New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose, whose article, This Isn't What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed To Look Like, inspired this segment. Hey, Jessica. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jessica Grose: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can you start off by defining the millennial generation, even by years? Just remind us what years were they born and for some people who may either be much older and much younger and thinking, "What? Millennials are middle-aged. What?"

Jessica Grose: There's a little wiggle room around these numbers depending on who's defining it, but roughly born 1982, which I am, so I am the most ancient millennial, to the year 2000. If you are born in those years, you are technically a millennial, whether or not you identify as one or not.

Brian Lehrer: Your article is titled, like I said, This Isn't What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed To Look Like. What was it supposed to look like?

Jessica Grose: There was a very popular book published in the year 2000, the year I graduated from high school, that projected an extremely rosy future for millennials, which was a very big generation. It was the echo of the boomers. We're a much bigger generation than Gen X. It depicted that we would be more conservative than Gen X, we would marry younger, we would have children, we would be less divisive, we would be better educated and while the better educated part is true, they did not predict the staggering student loans that hobble so many.

There's this notion that we would be happy and well-adjusted, and I think some of us are, but I think some of the life crises that happened around us outside ourselves have prevented millennials from having the kind of stability that many hoped for or imagined for themselves in midlife.

Brian Lehrer: I guess if we just list the big world events or US events in the lifetime of millennials, they're just so huge compared to a lot of other times in history. If we start at the year 2001 with September 11th, and then we look at the financial crisis with its huge implications, and then the election of Donald Trump and how polarizing that was in so many ramifications, and then the pandemic. Oh, my God.

Jessica Grose: My argument isn't that millennials have it harder than every generation that came before. Every generation reaching middle age has its challenges, but I do think there are ways in which, in particular, wealth-building has been hard for millennials just because of when the particular financial crises hit. We didn't even mention the dot-com bubble bursting which happened as we entered college. Even when I graduated in 2004, I still remember being told, "The climate out there is not good for getting jobs," even though I was college-educated. Obviously four years after that, it was the Great Recession.

One piece of information that was really interesting for me that I revealed in my reporting was, while Generation X has been buffeted by many of the same economic and geopolitical forces, they have, as a generation, done better at recovering wealth lost in the Great Recession. There's just a lot of forces against us. The housing market is bananas. Many of the traditional markers of middle age are just much harder for us to get than previous generations.

Brian Lehrer: All right. People are calling in to answer the question, how are you experiencing middle age now? Is it different from what you might have imagined or expected as you hit approximately age 40? 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. Amanda in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Amanda.

Amanda: Hi. It's funny what she just said about wealth-building and achieving these-- being able to buy a house and things like that. I totally feel it. I was just telling the screener that as far as my life right now, in the immediate, goes, I feel good about things. I've got a great relationship, and I've got a wonderful child, and I'm really happy with my job, I'm doing what I love, but I'm only making enough to meet the immediate expectations and immediate hopes and dreams.

I have dreams for our future, but I have no idea how I'm going to get there, how I'm going to achieve that. We don't have the resources. We haven't built any wealth. Again, we're living day-to-day and in the moment, which is wonderful, but then also, we want to be headed somewhere, and we don't see us headed anywhere.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda, I wonder how much you blame changes in politics, and the economic politics or the political economics that your generation has been living with.

Amanda: Yes, I guess it has to do with that a lot, I think. I recall so many arguments with my parents and my grandparents about the way that they were choosing to vote, and the way that they were picking people based off, I get it, self-interest. I am more about social growth. I feel like if we grow as a whole, we're all going to grow, but I don't think that certain people in politics understand that and have that mindset. They're just so self-interested and they don't want to support policies that don't directly support them.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda, thank you. Thank you so much for your call. Ben in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ben.

Ben: Hey, Brian. How're you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. I see you just turned 40.

Ben: Yes, I just turned 40 this year and my wife just turned 38. I think we're finally at a moment where we are getting those things that we thought we would when we were younger, a house. We have a young family, we have two small children. We did it with the help of our parents on both sides. It wasn't us on our own, so acknowledging our privilege there. It came later than we thought it would as well, and it was quickened by the pandemic. I think both of us in our own careers oddly advanced in those moments, but it feels like we're here now, and I'm ready for a midlife crisis. I'd like to get a convertible.

Brian Lehrer: Ben, thank you very much. Well, Jessica, I'm curious of what your reaction is to both of those calls, including Ben at the end there with what his image of a midlife crisis is.

Jessica Grose: What was so funny, we put out a call for readers to respond to how they felt about midlife, readers born from 1977 to 1984. When we asked them what they thought of when they heard the term "midlife crisis", they all said the red convertible. It is such an indelible image.

When I did my real reporting, I found out that that notion of the midlife crisis, usually the man ditching his family getting a younger girlfriend, getting the hair plugs, that was only true for very small portion of people. It was never really a universal phenomenon, even though pop-culturally, it was a universal phenomenon. Though a convertible sounds great. Who doesn't want one right now? Drive into the sunset.

Something else the second caller mentioned, a lot of people talked about having kids later in life, so in their later 30s. There was a quote I had in the piece from a dad of two young kids who was in his late 30s, and he said, "How can I have a midlife crisis? I'm too worried about paying for daycare." There was this feeling that they were just entering a new life stage. What's there to have a crisis about? I'm just getting used to this new thing.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you usually write about gender for the Times. Has there ever been a stereotypical female midlife crisis compared to the stereotypical male one that you just described?

Jessica Grose: I don't think so. I think in the '70s there was a real-time of upheaval and there was a lot of divorce, and a lot of women who had had children in their 20s going into the workforce. I guess that could be described as a midlife crisis, but there was so much else going on culturally, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, that it's hard to necessarily cite it as such. I think there's certainly less of that.

I don't think we can name an archetype in quite the same way as we could with that image. Even the color of the convertible was mentioned several times. It was always red. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Brian in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brian.

Brian: Hey. Hi, Brian, and hey, Jessica. I just want to say I'm a big fan of both of you. I read the Parenting Newsletter, listen to you all the time, and just wanted to call in and say that I relate. I read that column and all my friends did and we related to it. I certainly related to it a lot. The previous caller, Ben, I'm in a similar stage. I just turned 38. My wife is turning 37 tomorrow. Don't let her know I'm hesitated on her birthday.

I just wanted to say, when you were talking about milestones and the different stages that everybody hits, there's a milestone that I think a lot of millennials are coming to and finding, and one that I think we should talk more often about, which is finding your own therapist and sticking with them. I think a big problem a lot of millennials face is failure to relate to their boomer parents and the generational divide that comes from that.

Myself being in therapy for a very long time and learning how to cope, learning how to reframe, learning how to build self-awareness, can help close some of the gaps that we've seen in our society. In addition to getting the house, finding a partner, having kids, finding a career, I think also finding a therapist, finding someone to help with mental health, mental wellness can go a long way.

Brian Lehrer: What do you find, Brian, are the main points of tension or disagreement with your or your friends' boomer parents?

Brian: [laughs] It's a five-letter word that we're all very familiar with. That's part of it.

Brian Lehrer: Does it start with T and end with P?

Brian: You know it. That's part of it. I think there's a larger piece that's like, "We got ours, so everyone else should just work as hard as we did, and everything will be fine. Immigrants they're here just taking from the system, getting things for free," a lack of reflection and relating to all that.

Brian Lehrer: It's politics. For people who didn't get that reference, the five-letter word he was referring to is Trump. Well, very interesting. Brian, thank you very much. On the more personal side of what he just laid out, there's this quote from your article, Jessica, "Who has midlife crisis? People with money. That's a boomer problem, not a millennial problem. We just increase our Lexapro," [laughs] the anti-depressant. What were you thinking listening to Brian?

Jessica Grose: I absolutely think there are ways in which millennials are managing their expectations and understanding that the economic playing field is just not the same as it was for our parents. I think that our parents need to understand that as well. There was one reader comment that my friends and I really chuckled over because the first sentence was something like, "I feel bad for millennials. They will never see their homes topple in value like mine did." That's the first sentence. Then it went on to say, "They're so lazy and they have unrealistic demands. They're English majors and there shouldn't be--"

It was like, "Do you hear yourself like? Remember the first sentence you wrote." Just think about the fact that the economic circumstances for the generations are different and real wages have gone down. There's a number of factors that are at play here. Attaining those things that marked middle age for previous generations, that might not be what we should even be striving for. I think that when I talked to so many people for this piece, there was that feeling of, "Okay, it's not the same. I might not be able to have these things in this way. Do I even want these things in this way at this time?"

Brian Lehrer: In our last 30 seconds, another stereotype about entering middle age is that you go from being more progressive in your politics to being more conservative, you have more resources to protect, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think, with how you and everybody are describing how today's middle-aged millennials are feeling screwed by the politics of the last generation, that they're going to become more progressive politically, the opposite of the stereotype? We've got 20 seconds.

Jessica Grose: I think it's possible, but having read that book, Millennials Rising, written in 2000 and reading about how wrong their predictions 20 to 30 years on were, I don't like to be in the game of prediction making.

Brian Lehrer: Always a good conservative choice. Don't make predictions. New York Times opinion writer, Jessica Grose, her article that's being so widely discussed among so many people I know, This Isn't What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed To Look Like. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Jessica Grose: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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