This year, I turn 40, the oldest I have ever been. I don’t mean this merely as some clever turn of phrase. I can feel almost-40 in my bones and my joints, but mostly in my knees.
True story: I once climbed these old, wooden stairs that wound up to an art gallery on the third floor. I heard them creak like some fabled ship, and it was only when it hurt that I realised the sound was coming from my knees and not the stairs. That year, a close friend, a doctor, told me that if your knees creak when you squat, it’s a bad sign. Naturally, we followed up this discussion with a squat-off in the spirit of empiricism. I think his knees groaned audibly louder than mine. I ended up in physiotherapy soon after.
Like every other millennial, I am discovering middle age. Next year, Elder Millennials will turn 45, steadily crawling into midlife on their wonky knees. It’s like a second coming-of-age, except this time you have perimenopause, you don’t have a parent stopping you from playing a video game at 7 am, and most of your crushes are street dogs.
Miranda July writes in All Fours, her novel about a 45-year-old woman who makes, to put it mildly, last-minute changes to her birthday plans, “If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent, we were middle-aged, and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising.”
We are at the peak, looking down at all the choices we have made that led us to this spot. Caught in the humdrum rhythm of life, we are like Evelyn Wang from Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), an absurdist sci-fi midlife crisis film, who has to realise that “Every rejection, every disappointment has led you to this moment. Don’t let anything distract you from it.” If divorce or a tax audit were imminent, wouldn’t we like that, to be Verse-jumping heroes, in true millennial style?
Millennial midlife is looking a little different from previous generations. Many feel like they are yet to “grow up”, and “adulting” often feels performative. Many urban millennials delay getting married, having a kid, buying a house, and planning for retirement. The usual milestones that canonically prove you are a grown-up are either delayed or skipped altogether.
Some of my millennial friends who had a child well into their thirties feel like they did the right thing. They were clueless in their twenties, which was usually the age at which their parents had them. These millennial parents were more financially stable and worked hard at their careers before the child came along, and this is especially important for women. There was more life experience to draw from. At nearly 40, I am as old as my mother was when I was a teenager. Was my mother like me at this age? My father, too?
If every midlife comes with its crisis, then I wonder what our equivalent of a sports car is. Truth be told, it won’t be a red Porsche because only boomers could afford to splurge on a toy like that. We are the generation that’s making the financial decision of whether to buy a house or raise a child, or whether to buy a PlayStation for the child or for oneself. Midlife won’t even be our first crisis. We have witnessed, if not suffered, recessions, 9/11 and the wars that followed, genocides, global warming, and a pandemic. It has felt like midlife forever.
Perhaps that’s why the millennial equivalent of a sports car is just a social media post, inexpensive and self-deprecatory. I have dozens of saved posts on how millennials wake up with neck pain because they slept funny or how they suddenly took up bird-watching as a hobby. There are odes to the discontinued Nokia 3310 phone, also known as the Nokia Brick. There are accounts dedicated to advertisements and Indian indie pop songs from the 1990s. The midlife millennial is a meme.
Even our social media timelines are chaotically split between obituaries and maternity shoots, wedding photos (a millennial’s) and a child’s high school graduation (a millennial’s eldest child). One half is grieving the passing of a parent, the suddenness of it all or the parent’s prolonged illness. The other half is celebrating a baby’s birth — elegant, considerate announcements from people nearly 40, as if they were forced to realise that they couldn’t postpone biological parenthood anymore. What could be more midlife than to be a sandwich generation, millennials caught between life and death?
One viral post states that 2025 is closer to 2050 than it is to, say, 1985. It’s brutal, like being thrown into boiling water when your alarm goes off. 2050 is that kind of number that ideally belongs to the realm of speculative fiction — autocratic governments, casual space travel, genocide to drive up real estate value, gated communities, forced pregnancies, or something else straight out of Octavia E. Butler. If you think all that’s happened already, just wait till 2050, Marty McFly.
Weren’t we just kids a few years ago, jumping off compound walls and scraping knees? When did I have to start doing crab walks for health reasons? Friends chastise me with well-intentioned ageism, saying, “Don’t talk like an old person.” They don’t get it. Unlike some who live like 40 is the new 30 (that glassy skin, that curly hair, the pain-free knees, the calisthenics class, the partying till 3 am), I am living proof that 40 is the new 50. Allow me to feel old for one hot flash second. I mourn my thinning hair, the un-Rapunzeling of my youth. People think there is still enough to hide my scalp. I tell them, you should have seen me in 2017, just two years ago. Oh, was that eight years ago? Sorry, lol.
I am reminded of a line from a Ghibli film, Only Yesterday (1991), in which a family splits open a strange, exotic fruit known as a pineapple. It’s tart and fibrous, unlike the canned version, and most of the family dislikes it. The elderly grandmother, however, eats a wedge and says, “Live long enough and you will see lots of different things.” If you’re lucky enough to be 40 now, you have lived long enough to watch your favourite books turned into films and turned again into a web series. You have lived long enough to watch your favourite movie superheroes recast with a new actor. You have lived long enough to see your favourite singer on MTV and to see a biopic on their life. You have lived long enough to see Gen-Z “discover” Gotye and low-rise jeans.
Yet midlife is when millennials get to decide, if they have the option, how they want to slide down the curve. You finally begin to understand what it is to be an adult, something you thought you had already figured out at 20, and by doing so, you allow yourself the chance to understand everyone else who was once 40, 30, 20 or 10. From this peak, it’s the best view you can get as you prepare for the downhill ride.
Fernando is a Mumbai-based independent writer
Yet midlife is when millennials get to decide, if they have the option, how they want to slide down the curve 
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