At 40, we’re broke. The millennial dream was a lie

When Lena Dunham turned 40 in May, it felt like a milestone for Millennial women. “I don’t want to freak you out”, she says as Hannah in Girls, the era-defining TV show she wrote and starred in 15 years ago, “but I think I might be the voice of my generation, or at least a generation…” The line was meant to be ironic, an embodiment of the disastrous mix of mid-00s entitlement and naivety. Yet, Girls led many to give Dunham that exact accolade. So when Dunham hit this midlife birthday, it made me take stock. I’d turned 40 a few months before her. How many of us are where we thought we’d be? Dunham is married and has published a book. But what about the rest of us? I, like many of my friends, certainly don’t have the life I thought I would. For starters, I’m financially dependent on my partner – something this millennial feminist swore would never happen. I have fallen into all the gendered traps I used to tweet about angrily: I work part-time and do the lion’s share of childcare. My partner works in finance; I am a freelance writer, so perhaps the financial discrepancy isn’t so surprising. What is more surprising is I now want to work part-time and be able to drop my son off at nursery every morning. Shorts We also don’t live in London; something once inconceivable to me became increasingly appealing when we started to think about buying a house. 27-year-old Marisa – the age I was when Girls first aired – believed she would have been hosting Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and writing bestsellers after a stint living in New York City. I have done none of these things. Of course, every generation has their own moment of realising that perhaps their life will be more ordinary than they’d imagined (and then trying to resist blowing it up in spectacular fashion). And yet the gap between where I thought I would be and where I am isn’t entirely of my own making. For all of our alleged avocado, flat white, nasal-gazing, millennials are a generation pummelled by global catastrophe after catastrophe. Many of us graduated into the job market in or around 2008 – the year of the global financial crash and worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930. I fell into the bracket whose earnings took the longest to recover. I wrote about this at the time, and clearly wasn’t pleased: “I’m 28 and broke – so don’t talk to me about payday treats!” read the headline. Pretty quickly, the financial crash made plain that we were not going to get what our Boomer parents had promised. The story we’d been led to believe went something like this: work hard, go to university, get a job, buy a house, have kids, book a nice holiday. Dr Eliza Filby, historian and author of Inheritocracy, says: “Millennials were told education, hard work and a decent career would deliver basic markers of adulthood: a home, financial security and the means to start a family. They’re reaching midlife realising that they’re becoming their parents, but often cannot afford to live like them.” We faced a broken housing market which would have long-term repercussions, stagnated salaries (one study suggested 15 years of wage stagnation made the average UK earner £11,000 worse off a year), and a shrinking economy, meaning fewer jobs, and which took five years to recover to a pre-recession size. It broke the entrenched idea that children’s lives are always better than their parents. Dr Filby says this has left many millennials “with a legitimate grievance: they followed the script, but the script stopped working”. In the 1970s, both my parents graduated, moved to London, could afford to rent, and found roles working in TV. There were no years of working for free or staying on friends’ sofas. Instead, there were jobs with salaries that gave them skills that led to bigger salaries. In their 20s, they were buying a large house in Surrey. My friend’s parents bought a house in Stoke Newington, East London (admittedly it was far from its gentrified current incarnation). But a tiny house on the same street sold recently for £1.9m. How many young couples have that? Things were possible then – and not through laborious self-optimisation strategies but because opportunity was accessible. My father, who worked in current affairs documentary-making, recently said to me: “I’d be on the streets if I had to do this today.” Opportunity and prosperity began to seem lacking on a much larger scale, too. We voted ourselves out of Europe, and watched right-wing populism take off. To many millennials, the election of Donald Trump was yet more evidence of regression. When our parents were coming of age, they’d watched the civil rights movements, women’s liberation, anti-war movements, laws and culture shifting in the direction of progress. I remember my mum waking me up in 1997 to tell me Tony Blair had won the general election. Things can only get better was the soundtrack to those years. Since 2008, and after the heady election of Barack Obama, things have arguably only got worse. And then there was the greatest plot twist of all – a global pandemic that shut the world down. Throw in inept Prime Ministers messing with mortgages (under Sunak, mortgages for 20- 40-year-olds saw a rise twice as large as the rise for those over the age of 60) and a war in Ukraine, and the last few years have been marked by an interminable cost of living crisis. Is it any wonder a few of us are finding we’ve drifted quite some way from where we hoped to be. “I think a lot of us are feeling quite existential – knackered, burned out, but cognisant of needing to work until we’re 80”, says Lucie Greene, founder of Light Years, a forecaster and strategist. “We’re questioning everything. Because the reality is the contract between employment and even the state with us has fundamentally shifted, the veil has been lifted. Now I see a lot of people exploring radically different routes and redesigning their lives to make it work – realising that the structures we’ve inherited from wealthy Boomers fundamentally don’t work.” My partner and I didn’t try for babies during the pandemic because I didn’t want to give birth at that time. Now we may have left it too late to have the family we’d like. Other friends can’t afford children, or don’t want to bring them up in the insecurity of renting. The falling fertility rates attest to the inhospitable economic landscape to raise a family. More friends are renting than they’d imagine. Single friends in their 40s still find themselves flatsharing in London, long past an age where they ever dreamed they would be. Others have moved home to live with their parents. In 2018, the Resolution Foundation released a report that predicted one in three millennials would never own a home, with half still renting in their 40s. Lena Dunham as Hannah Horvath in her TV show ‘Girls’ Some friends haven’t holidayed abroad in years – something my mum was always able to afford in the 90s, even as a single parent. Friends causally “joke” about having no pension, but there is an edge to their tone because we know there’s nothing to joke about. A recent study confirmed this: six in 10 millennials struggle to save for a pension. Meanwhile, the friends who have earned well are starting to question what it’s all for. To earn well now demands such a huge toll on time and life, and the rewards are less obvious. Houses are expensive, hotels are expensive, eating out is expensive. A lawyer friend who has made partner at a successful London firm recently texted: “Dangerously close to burnout.” “Many who have reached professional maturity are hit with massive disillusionment due to fiscal drag and tax brackets. I see many having strived for years, working long hours, climbing the ladder, building, now trying to earn less and starting to simplify their lives to have more meaning and free time,” says Greene. Some millennials are also now entering their “sandwich” generation era; looking after small kids and ageing parents – on top of everything else. Today the only people living a Boomer lifestyle – the lifestyle we thought we would be at by the age of 40 – are the extremely wealthy. The rest of us have been priced out, and thanks to social media, anything less than that can feel like a failure. I think many of us are experiencing a paralysis, a crisis of confidence in what to do next. People can’t figure out the best next move because there are no good options – we’re living at home longer, moving away from friends and closer to parents to help with childcare, staying in jobs we don’t like to pay the mortgage. Many of us believed we’d be settled and sorted by 40. Most of us feel lacking, off course or hugely compromised. Greene says many are having an inverse midlife crisis: “[I think of] Steve Martin in Father of the Bride II, where [upon learning he will be a grandfather] rushes out to get an earring, a haircut and sell the family home. The Gen X/Boomer midlife crisis was to rebel from the norm. Have an affair, buy a sportscar. For millennials it’s the opposite. What Martin was running away from is actually their ideal. Stability is the new luxury.” However, Dr Filby points out, it’s important to put things in context: “This doesn’t mean this generation is simply having a worse midlife.” She points to choices we have now that previous generations didn’t. “More choice over when we marry, have children and how often we change careers. For women especially, the expansion of economic and professional choice has been significant. You can have children and return to work, become the breadwinner, start a business or reinvent your career in a way that would have been so much harder [before].” She’s right; we do have these choices. If only we could afford to make them. There is a silver lining: inheritance. Almost two-thirds are set to inherit from Boomers who own houses and have savings. However, if our parents need help in later life, that will come out of the inheritance, and as many live for longer, that money can’t be relied on. At 40, we can’t claim to be the worst off anymore either. Gen Z has it pretty bad, a new report confirmed last week. And mid-life women in their 50s are finding getting employment just as tough, if not tougher, highlighted by the work of former editor Stacey Duguid. I remember my mum at 40. Even as a 10-year-old I thought she was impressive. She had a big job in the civil service, and was a single mother of two. She was adventurous and bold and able to afford to take us on train trips across the Alps for her birthday. By contrast, I feel out of control, re-examining life, career and money decisions. The map we were given was wrong, and now I’m not sure where I am. While I reroute, I’m trying to save money, be grateful and believe people when they say good things are coming my way. Greene is hopeful: “We have no choice but to continue. I think the shift that’s happening now is that feeling has moved to questioning, creativity, and agency. No-one is going to help us. Where next, and what can we do to finally build the lives we want?” Dunham has considered writing a “where are they now” update of Girls. I have some insights for her; they’re renting, relying too much on their Boomer parents, spending too much time on their phones, surrounded by small kids or IVF needles, trying to think about how they’ll pay their bills, let alone save for their retirement, and wondering how the hell they got here.