Millennials are turning 40.

What does that mean and how do we feel about it?

This November I’ll turn 36 and I’ve asked myself: what do I want to be celebrating at my birthday party when I turn 40?

My generation, the Millennials, started entering our forties in the last four years. The milestones we are meeting at that age are as varied as humans themselves, and the patterns they show us reflect the wider conversations and movements we’ve experienced since we came of age close to 20 years ago.

In considering my 40th birthday, I’ve reflected on my parents beginning their adulthood in the 80s. Born on the edge of the Boomer/Gen-X generations, they showed me a relatively linear progression of their life milestones up to a certain point. They joined the Air Force, got married, and had both of their children by their early twenties, owned nearly every home they lived in after that, paid college tuition in full for both my sister and I, and later on, our weddings too. By their 40th birthdays they were celebrating nearly 20 years of marriage, looking forward to retirement, and getting ready to send two kids to college. Their adulthoods before they turned 40 were marked by the Clinton administration and two separate Bush administrations on either side. Based on the relative economic stability I experienced as a kid and the political neutrality of our armed forces, it never occurred to me that the political party in power made any difference in our everyday lives.

I would imagine most people who read the above paragraph feel as though they just read about two incredibly successful people, and they would be right. Their financial and familial “shit being relatively together” was the blueprint for success that I inherited from watching their life, whether intentionally or not. Many of us who grew up in an economic system which allowed for that same linear progression did as well. So we look forward to our own 40th birthdays expecting to meet similar milestones. But what happens when we approach our 40th birthdays and are nowhere near that?

In their early forties, my parents sent their second kid to college and separated. As a rising Junior in college, I struggled to make sense of a worldview where my parents were not together. I’d lived in blissful ignorance my entire childhood of what hardships their marriage must have faced with two active duty careers and near-constant deployments to war in the decade since September 11th. In the 2008 financial crisis, they were facing a massive equity loss on the home they’d purchased only two years before, and their divorce a couple of years later. Looking back, I’m proud of the brave decisions my parents made to rebuild separate lives for themselves. At the time, I couldn’t get past the pain of my own disillusionment.

So without missing a beat I set out to recreate what they had, minus the divorce. I never even stopped to consider that the unraveling I’d just witnessed in their lives might have been an indication that while they had been successful in many ways, they did not truly feel happy in others. I thought that if I could set out to meet all those same financial and familial milestones, and I did it as a stay-at-home wife instead of my husband and I having two seemingly conflicting careers, I would somehow end up differently. Looking back, I see 22-year-old Jules choosing to get married so young because she thought she could repair something that did not ultimately need fixing. I needed to let my parents’ life trajectory fully belong to them. I needed to write a story that was true to who I was. But at 22, I did not yet know that woman.

In the decade of my twenties, I catapulted myself into evangelical conservatism in an attempt to heal the emotional and physical abandonment I’d felt as a kid. Through no fault of their own, my parents’ military careers were hard on me as a sensitive firstborn daughter who put a lot of pressure on herself. I’d grown up a gregarious, achieving, and emotionally confused. In church I met a young man my age who became my husband less than two years later. By 30, I’d left the church and was a divorced mother with an infant and a toddler, no money, and a resume that appeared haphazard at best. Despite the heavy grief and stress of that time, I also remember how much lighter I felt having left behind a chapter I’d worked unreasonably hard to hold together, even though it ended earlier than my own parents’.

Five years and a pandemic have passed since then and I can say that I have a shit-ton of personal development and not a lot of economic progress to show for it, a theme I’m noticing is a hallmark of those in my age group: we are reflecting on our lives and our emotional motivations earlier, and valuing our personal happiness more than those milestone achievements we thought we would mirror from previous generations. And in some way, the same could be said of our parents as compared to theirs.

And yet, the individualism that is a hallmark of the stories of American success, and baked into what we tell ourselves about our own desires for self-sufficiency, are competing with our need for real and lasting joy, family, and even security. Millennials are having our first wave of midlife crisis as a result of that pressure, and the weight is not letting up. Parents are shouldering more stress and responsibility than ever, as warned by the Surgeon General just this week. Housing, childcare, and higher education have become prohibitively expensive for many of us, and especially if you live in a single-income household. For single people, the internet has changed their dating environment and with it their familial timeline. With access to social media, we are viewing wealth and lifestyle porn which we project personal fulfillment and financial success onto, causing us to feel more behind than we are; or at the very least, brings the nagging ache that we are missing something.

And while this is all just the tip of the iceberg, I don’t believe Millennials need to be primed for discontent or cynicism as we approach our forties. We are the generation re-defining what family means, and on our terms. We have more social flexibility for creating blended families, chosen families, same-gender marriages and many more unique containers for belonging and mutual care. In 2024, we stand to elect more Millennials to political office than ever before, and along with it the power to shape the world we are inheriting. We are just becoming old enough to have the perspective it will take to heal the political divide and make lasting, systemic change. Millennials exist at a pivotal point in the climate emergency and activists have laid the ground work for us take up the mantle of forward progress before our kids (Generation Alpha) take up their own.

We are the last generation who remembers what it was like to be children without internet and social media. Because of that, we can still shift our kids’ relationships to their developing self-image and change the tide of teen depression, anxiety, and bullying.

There is much to say about the challenges we face. And if Kamala Harris’s rise to the top of the Democratic ticket has shown us anything, it’s that we still have the collective capacity for hope, energy, and change. On my 40th birthday I want to celebrate being MORE hopeful, not less. I want to celebrate the dialogue I’m starting with you right now, and the meaningful shifts we made together because of it. I would imagine my boyfriend and I will make decisions about our family before then, and I look forward to approaching that with creativity. I also look forward to having greater financial security for my children and I than I do now.

Some days, it’s too much to consider this milestone while we continue each day without the much-needed change we need. Yesterday a Georgia high school lost students and teachers to a shooting perpetrated by a 14-year-old boy who should never have had access to a gun. There are massive problems with simple solutions we still have not addressed.

So I’m not asking us to fully change what our forties mean to us in this moment. Maybe you feel cynical about it, and I happen to want to make room for that. What I’ll ask is to let ourselves flirt with possibility-flirt with hope-even if we can’t yet commit to an alternate story. Because even if we don’t know when we will meet that romantic partner, or have the kids, or have enough money, or get the job, or turn around abortion rights, or whatever it is…

We can decide to do our forties together. I want to do this with you. Whatever your political party, gender, or any other identity marker of yours, thank you for being here. Thank you for the dialogue.

This is Flirting with 40.

Tell me in the comments how you grew up, what you look forward to about turning 40, or if you already are 40, how you felt then vs. now. I’ll respond to each one thoughtfully.