![]() ![]() They said that income and class disparities would narrow. While they acknowledged that a crisis might hit this generation and cause its “familiar millennial sunniness” to “turn sour,” they predicted that as they reached midlife, millennials would be more traditional - reversing “the trend towards later marriage and childbirth.” They also predicted that millennials would be more socially and politically cohesive, rejecting the “cultural wedge issues of the late 20th century,” unlike their Gen X and boomer predecessors. When William Strauss and Neil Howe published a best seller in 2000 called “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation,” they remarked that millennials were “kids who’ve never known a year in which America doesn’t get richer.” They described an “upbeat,” “optimistic” and diverse set of Americans coming of age. Our childhoods were marked by an unusually high level of prosperity in the United States and the expectation that such stability would continue. This isn’t what middle-class millennials thought midlife would be like. Amid all this, who’s got time to worry about whether they’re feeling fulfilled? We can’t rely on anything but ourselves and can only hold out hope that we won’t eat cat food once our bodies break down and we are forced into impoverished retirement.” She said she knows that sounds dramatic, but it’s how she really feels. I am a professional married to a professional, but our jobs can go up in smoke at the drop of a hat. lose a quarter to half of its value a couple of times, child care expenses, fraying social fabric, wage pressures and, above all, insecurity. “Career crises, education debt, watching my I.R.A. “My whole adult life has been one long crisis,” she said. Things have been difficult for her family, she said, but one thing she isn’t worried about: a midlife crisis just over the horizon. Her husband got a job with health insurance, so the family could remain in the United States, and she is looking to restart her career. (They had relied on her job for health insurance.) They returned to Delaware in 2022, six weeks before they had their third child, in June. Her husband is a Japanese citizen, and the family ended up moving to Japan for a spell so that they could be on the national health plan there. “Here was another financial crisis for us because, you know, I’m not the sole breadwinner, but I was the main breadwinner.” Then her lingering symptoms prevented her from working as much as she needed to, and she lost her job in 2021. She barely saw her children, then 6 and 3, until she caught Covid in October 2020. She and her colleagues volunteered to cover shifts in the emergency room, and she was working more days than ever. When the Covid pandemic descended, she went all in on her job because she felt it was the right thing to do in a public health emergency. Part of the desire for a move was lifestyle she felt the demands of her job in Minnesota didn’t give her enough time for her family, so she wanted to move into private practice.Įxtra time with her family didn’t happen, either. After some time in Minnesota and another house that was a bear to sell, her family, which now included two children, finally settled in Delaware in 2019. Dunham began her career as an OB-GYN with over $250,000 of educational debt, even though she went to a public university for medical school. ![]() ![]() He also lost his job during that economic slump.ĭr. “What was supposed to be a decent asset for us was suddenly a millstone,” she shared. Her husband, a software engineer, bought a house in the Tampa Bay area in 2006, which lost half its value in the 2008 recession. Instead, the cascading crises of the next decades thwarted her at every turn. Dunham, a wry Maryland native whom I spoke with over video chat in early January, told me that this unexpected financial crisis inspired her to get it together - to seek out a stable career (medicine), to get married early (in her 20s) and to make the sort of choices she thought would disaster-proof her life. The family was suddenly faced with anxiety about paying for school, retirement and their mortgage. Dunham was leaving for college in 2001, her mother lost her job of 20 years in that year’s recession. Caitlin Dunham will be 40 this year, and she’s been grasping for security her entire adult life.
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