A former coworker recently noticed that the young people in his office didn’t seem to be doing happy hours anymore. He figured it was just a case of teetotaling Gen Zers, which is probably healthy, but still, it felt a little sad to imagine that kids these days weren’t having as much after-work fun as he used to. But in the middle of his lamenting, a terrible thought crossed my mind: They probably are doing happy hours; they’re just not inviting him. He’s married, in his 30s, and has been a middle manager for a while now. His 20-something underlings might not want to make a habit of knocking one back with the boss — if anything, they’re probably out complaining about him.
One of the underappreciated rites of passage of aging is the moment you realize that you’re an adult. It’s one of those things that sneaks up on you. Yes, 18 is the age when you legally are considered an adult by the government, and there are important milestones at 21 (drinking) or 25 (renting a car), but the lived experience of adulthood is looser than that. You hit a travel snafu, or there’s a conflict in a meeting, and you wonder just who’s supposed to be in charge here. Suddenly, it hits you that the answer is you. Millennials: On the map of aging, you are here.
In the cultural imagination, one of the main narratives about millennials has been that they’re young. They were defined by a sense of arrested development, a generation suffering from a perpetual failure to launch. But the march of time comes for everyone, and millennials are no exception. They’re buying homes, having kids, making investments, and getting promoted at work. Millennials are the adults in the room now — they’re the ones responsible. It’s neat, but it’s also stressful and scary.
“It’s startling to many when you get there, especially if you didn’t go through life thinking you knew everything to begin with,” said Jennifer Deal, a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall Business School at the University and the author of “What Millennials Want From Work.”
“For a lot of the people who don’t necessarily think that they have all of this stuff completely dialed in, finding out that they’re now the ones who are supposed to keep the boat steady and on course is startling and overwhelming,” she added.
In their family lives, millennials are increasingly finding themselves in the "sandwich generation," a life stage in which they're taking care of both their kids and their parents (or grandparents). On the one end, even if their parents don't need caregiving, they've slowed down, and they're not as on top of things as they used to be. Their moms are no longer in charge of holiday planning, or maybe their dads need help figuring out how to set up their new phones. On the other end, they're figuring out what's for dinner every night or starting to doubt the effectiveness of their gentle parenting approach given what's going on with their misbehaving kids.
For probably 10 years, millennials were the new thing. Millennials were the shock to the system. Millennials were changing everything
Many millennials are also in a sandwich situation professionally. They've been working long enough to get into management or at least move up the corporate ladder a few rungs. They're not yet at the ranks of the more senior Gen Xers and baby boomers, so they're also expected to translate the younger generation to their bosses. They can relate to the youngs, but they're not entirely in sync with them, which in and of itself is uncomfortable to admit. Like, what do you mean there are jokes about millennial managers on TikTok? Why is everyone talking about how to relate to Gen Z? How am I no longer the youngest person in the room?
"For probably 10 years, millennials were the new thing. Millennials were the shock to the system. Millennials were changing everything," said Lindsey Pollak, a speaker and consultant on multigenerational workplaces. "To go from that and to have a new kid in town with the Gen Z cohort is probably even more noticeable because millennials got so much media around being new and different."
Our educational formation is marked by graduation — from elementary school, high school, college, etc. At work, there's some of that, in changing titles and promotions, but advancement is much subtler, so you might not notice it.
"Sometimes, the transition starts to happen when you start to manage somebody for the first time, but as organizations are becoming more and more flat, it's less of a moment," Pollak said.
In a Zapier survey conducted by Harris, over 60% of millennial respondents said they had direct reports. They're often a reluctant managerial class because many don't love the idea of having to be the bad guy and set the rules. So they're trying to handle things differently as managers, hoping to bring more empathy, transparency, and a healthier work-life balance to the table than they were afforded at the start of their careers. Sometimes, being the boss means having to put a foot down, which they're learning how to do effectively. But even if they're not managing anyone, they're expected to know the lay of the land. It can lead to some imposter syndrome, on top of the overall anxieties that come with aging.
"You forget how much you've learned, and that has value — communication, the nuance of managing people and projects," Pollak said. "More junior people don't know what they don't know, and you do."
I've run into this recently: Two young journalists have reached out to me over the past couple of months for mentorship. My gut reaction is that I hate it. I feel like I'm not old or seasoned enough to have reached mentor status, and I worry I don't have much to tell them that's of any use. Upon some reflection, I've come to realize being on the merry-go-round for a while means I can be helpful, even if mentoring really is not my jam.
"Adulting" is fun when it's a one-off celebration that you did your taxes alone for the first time. It's not so fun when it becomes your full-time gig. When you're in charge at home and at work, it means there's not a lot of time to recharge yourself. It's your job to call the teacher about a problem at school and explain to your Gen Z report that they can't call in sick once a week. If you own your home, which a growing number of millennials do, there's no landlord to figure things out for you — you've got to call the plumber when a pipe breaks.
"It's exhausting and slightly scary because now you're in charge of keeping all the balls in the air, and you're not really sure who's playing the net," Deal said. "Sometimes, you don't necessarily trust yourself to do it, but you trust yourself more than the other people who might be doing it."
Maybe you would really rather not do the driving on your girls trip, but your bestie is terrifying behind the wheel, so you suck it up and say you'll rent the car. It's annoying, but given how many miles you've put on your proverbial and literal tires, you know how to handle things a bit better and prefer to take the wheel.
You have these life-course milestones that are bigger and heavier that you have to lift.
Being the adult in the room means dealing with reaching middle age, which is becoming a reality for the many millennials who are crossing the threshold of 40. The slightly delusional hopefulness of youth has faded. New aches and pains are creeping in. People may be disappointed in how their life has turned out and not super jazzed about the future. Those in the sandwich phase of caregiving have more financial and emotional troubles than their peers. Middle age means you're at the bottom of the U-shaped curve of satisfaction. We're happy when we're young, then we have a bad time in our 40s or so, and then we get happy again when we're old.
"When you're younger, you don't have as many responsibilities, or they're not as taxing," said Lindsey Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who studies aging. "Then, you're in this middle age trying to figure life out, where you have children, maybe aging parents, a career. You have these life-course milestones that are bigger and heavier that you have to lift."
On top of the challenges and stresses that come with adulthood, millennials are also losing the automatic cool factor bestowed by youth. Their socks are too short and their hair is parted wrong and they have absolutely no idea what is happening with pants anymore. Brands are speaking to them differently, with buzzwords like "sensible," "practical," and "safe." The good news is maybe they're so wrapped up in the trappings of being a grown-up they don't have time to care about whatever latest trend they are behind on. "Jeans that are clean" is the only goal when you have a screaming toddler in the background.
"For me, being part of this generation that is now parenting and managing and the adults in every sense of the term and managers in every sense of the term, maybe I'm too exhausted to go to happy hour the way that I used to," Chris Lovell, a career coach from Los Angeles, said.
There's this meme that flies around online. It goes: "13-year-old me: Don't tell me what to do. Me now: Could someone tell me exactly, in chronological order and with great detail, what I have to do?" It crystallizes the current millennial life stage. Like it or not, the avocado-toast-loving, brunch-obsessed generation is now running the show. And many millennials do not like it.
There are, of course, upsides here. Once you step into the role of being the grown-up, you come to understand that you can trust yourself to take on the responsibilities that perhaps once felt daunting. There's something freeing in being the decider and developing that level of autonomy. It's also nice to have yourself together a little more. The tasks you're taking on are ones you're prepared for, even if you don't realize it. It's sort of like you're lifting weights in the gym for years, and over time, you get to the point where you can pick really heavy things up.
Millennials are trying to do things differently and better than generations past, to varying degrees of success. As much as they may want to be a "cool" dad, sometimes, they just have to be a dad. We compare ourselves with the models we had as children and young adults, meaning our parents, our grandparents, our early managers, and our older coworkers. We take cues on what to do and how to act from them, or at least from how we thought they were doing things. And, oftentimes, we realize they had a point.
"You have a new appreciation for the work that your parents or your manager or whoever the model was for you," Anderson said.
The experience of realizing you're the grown-up — and the excitement and fear that come with it — isn't unique to millennials. Baby boomers did it, Gen X did it, and Gen Z, you'll get there, too. Millennials are doing it in the age of social media, meaning they get to watch their peers, commiserate, and wonder whether they're falling short. The internet is a space for endless suggestions on how to do things "right." Part of being the adult in the room is sifting through all that to figure out the answer — and eventually just going with "good enough."
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.