The Millennial Midlife Crisis Won't Look Like You Think

**Chip Conley** (0:00)
So, the good news there is, as millennials go into midlife, it's less about, I have to run away from this life that I've created, and it's more about, I have created a life that I can constantly iterate.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
This is The Midlife Chrysalis. Welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays with Chip Conley and Derek Gehl, your weekly conversation about thriving in midlife. Together, we explore the questions, insights and practices that help you live the next chapter with more purpose, vitality and joy.

**Derek Gehl** (0:32)
Welcome to another Wisdom Wednesday episode here at The Midlife Chrysalis Podcast. My name is Derek Gehl. I'm the CEO here at MEA and I'm with our founder, Mr. Chip Conley. Hey, Chip.

**Chip Conley** (0:42)
Howdy.

**Derek Gehl** (0:43)
Let's talk about millennials.

**Chip Conley** (0:44)
Yeah. You know, here's an interesting irony.
We didn't, when we started MEA in 2018, we were not targeting millennials, but in our very first workshop, we had a New York Times reporter who wanted to embed herself, and she's a millennial, in the workshop. She had a story already in mind of what MEA was going to be and this New York Times story came out a few weeks later and was really not accurate to MEA, but it was okay, but it was not accurate. Basically, what she said is, Silicon Valley is so ageist that all these millennials are going to a workshop at a place called the Modern Elder Academy, MEA. And the reality was she was one of three millennials in the room out of, I think, maybe 16 people.
So it was like, okay, not exactly right. But today, you know, a quarter of all the people in an MEA workshop are millennials. And that's partly because millennials are growing into midlife. You know, the first millennials are 45 years old now. And, you know, Brian Chesky and Airbnb folks that I was with, they're all now starting to move into midlife. In fact, we had an Airbnb employee retreat, not employee retreat, an alumni retreat here at our Baja campus last month. That was just so much fun to be with all of these people who we started and built this company together. We didn't start, not all of us, some of the group started the company, and I came along along the way early on. But the reality is most of those people now are in their mid-40s at Airbnb, and millennials, you know, mid-40s are the core of midlife. Midlife may last from 35 to 75, in my opinion, but it's really the core of midlife is 45 to 65 And so millennials are moving into midlife, and yet I think millennials are going to have a different experience of midlife than, say, Gen Xers or Boomers.

**Derek Gehl** (2:42)
Okay, well, let's dig into that. I mean, they were definitely dealt a different cultural and economic hand. And so what does this look like for them? What is the millennial midlife crisis going to look like?

**Chip Conley** (2:57)
Well, so, millennials were named for that because they were born and sort of ended, the millennial birth era ended around the millennial. But for the older millennials, they're like dealing with Y2K and like the world's going to end. And then they dealt with 9-11 in 2001 and the.com bust. And then they dealt with the Great Recession and the, you know, and, you know, all of the credit crunch. And then they dealt with housing prices spiking and it becoming too expensive to buy a home. And I mean, millennials have had to deal with a lot and climate crisis and, you know, you name it. And so, you know, millennials have really waited to have children and are having children, many fewer children than, say, boomers, almost half as many. And so what we've got is an interesting situation here where I actually think that millennials may not have the depth of the U curve of happiness that, say, boomers had. So let's explain the U curve of happiness. The U curve of happiness is social science research that has shown for the past 25 years across the globe that, on average, the low point of life satisfaction is around 45 to 50 And that was true for boomers and for Gen Xers. But what's happening with Gen Z and to some degree millennials, they are actually, this is very true for Gen Z, less true for millennials. They're unhappy in their early adulthood.
The unhappiest time of adulthood for a Gen Zer is actually, so far, is from 18 to 25 or 18 to 28
Interesting. Now, we're going to see what happens with that longitudinal study of Gen Zers. But for millennials, what we know is that the data is probably conclusive that a lot of millennials didn't do what boomers did, which is to say, there's a conventional path I need to go on, and therefore, I'm going to get married, and I'm going to go out and get the conventional job. I'm going to have kids, two kids by the time I'm 28 or 30 Maybe I'll have three or four kids. I'm going to get a second home by the time I'm 40 And then they wake up at 45 or 50 and have that American beauty, Kevin Spacey experience, which is, you know, and when we talk about midlife crisis, it's often men, but women have their own version of it. For men, it's this sense of like, I have, I feel I need liberation from, and I don't know who I am. And Don Draper in Mad Men ends up at the Esalen Institute and Big Sur in the last episode, because he's trying to find himself in the early 60s, having gone through the 50s in the Mad Men era. So there's an element for, I think, Gen Xers and Boomers, where you wake up around, you know, midlife, early midlife, and you realize that you're living someone else's life.