The Geriatric Millennial at 40

A generation raised on nostalgia passes into its peak looking back years.

Gonna do that classic online trope of prefacing new content with an apology for the lack of recent updates. Part of that is due to my home Internet service getting cut off for two weeks. All because I didn’t pay the bill for three months. What gives!

Suffice it to say, money has been tight of late, so I’m back to working multiple jobs, though getting strung along with the promise of full-time hours by my main gig, only to never get them, made balancing the ol’ budget a bit tricky since January. If there was a bill I could get away with not paying every month, well, you best believe I wasn’t gonna pay it every month. Eventually one lapsed month turns into three, and there goes my Internet. I still had connection on my phone, but I’m sorry - tapping out a lengthy Substack post on my phone doesn’t strike me as the most practical use of my time.

Thanks to my tax refund, I’m no longer behind on bills for the time being, so I can focus on other things, LIKE MY INEXORABLE MARCH TO THE GRAVE.

That’s right, folks: in a few short months yours truly will be turning 40. I guess this isn’t a flattering fact to broadcast, as being an online brand is generally a young person’s game. Youth is fetishized in most arenas of American mainstream culture and doubly so online, where grown folks even older than me desperately try to affect the language of 20-year-old Zoomers, deadass.

However: when one turns 35, there’s little point in entertaining the fantasy that one is young. More dignified simply to own it. By all means, stay young at heart, just don’t post on TikTok. What’s more, I don’t have a lucrative brand or any amount of coolness left to protect at this point, so might as well let it all hang out.

In the summer of 1982, I was born in Allentown, the year “Allentown” was a hit song, and my mom was working for Bethlehem Steel at the time. In terms of symbolism for the dawn of gutted American manufacturing, the decoupling of wages rising alongside productivity, and the triumph of neoliberalism, I’d be hard-pressed to stumble onto a better origin story.

I feel fortunate to have gotten through my most formative years without the Internet and cell phones, and of course that my family fared better than many in Allentown from that era. My household didn’t get a modem until 1996, so at least I reached my teens before I could be terminally online. And there were fewer ways for the computer to destroy your life in those days, so long as you weren’t trying to meet up with randos from chat rooms. A bit of a late adopter for cell phones, I didn’t get my first flip phone until 2002, when I was in college. Rising rates of depression and poor socialization has been a well-documented and sure to be further studied phenomenon connected with such technology. I’ve struggled as it is with those things and I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I were hooked into the Internet and perpetually exposed to media as a little kid.

Other things that expose me as part of the older cohort of Millennials: I worked at a video store! I worked at a Tower Records! I worked at a KB Toys! I worked at a small, local newspaper! I played team sports as a kid! When I first entered the working world, most people were unconcerned with building a personal brand! I also cling to a mortgage that I secured not long before the 2008 housing crash, only to watch my one-bedroom condo lose a third of its value then never quite again reach its initial selling price over the course of 15 years.

The popular Gen-X stance against selling out might have been mostly a bullshit posture, but the extent to which Millennials outright rejected it with “get that paper by any means necessary” mentality has always disturbed me, and eventually I caught the consequences of it from some of the more ruthless among us. As with many things, it’s a complex dynamic. By no means do I suggest there’s an inherent nobility in never achieving anything or being broke all the time. Nevertheless, repeatedly hearing from people I ostensibly respect that being a convictionless careerist is what one must to do in this world is a hard pill to swallow. I would like that not to be true, but if everybody believes it, guess what - it is, or at least more so than it was.

My astonishment at how youth culture, within the span of 10-15 years went from reveling in transgression, and celebrating strength to largely admiring tattling, loving corporate brands, and prizing victimhood may never wane. I keep hearing warnings of inevitable backlash to these dynamics, but I’m not sure if the forces responsible for them can be counteracted in the near term.

The back half of my 30s was decidedly unpleasant, grueling enough that I felt those five years as much as the 35 that came before. Not in a race with anyone to reach any particular life milestone, but I worry whether I can set myself up for what’s left of my time here. My parents frequently drive down to North Carolina to visit my father’s first daughter (my half-sister) because she provided them with grandkids that my sister and I did not. Stability is still a possibility, happiness an elusive ideal, and I’m keeping my head up as best I can. Maybe I’ve been downwardly mobile but I’d like to cushion the fall sooner or later. I’ve navigated uncertain professional terrain to relative success; perhaps I can again. Here’s hoping.

Also fun to think about how The Simpsons is still going in my 40th year despite being bad for half my life. Recently I saw the show is producing a straight-to-streaming episode that couldn’t more transparently be a marketing gimmick for Billie Eilish. That’s our Beatles for ya.