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Hello, my name is Jane Nevins, and I turn 40 years old this April.
And I have big feelings about this.
As the first wave of “elder millennials” enters their fifth decade, we find a cultural script for this stage of life that is, well, frankly, a bummer. Most stories about people turning 40 are sad sack tales of missed opportunities, mourning their youth, and thoughts like, “Is this all there is? I thought it would be better! I thought there would be more!”
Join me on this podcast and explore what being a newly minted 40-year-old means.
#40AFTrailer
[00:00:00] I'm turning 40 this year, and I have big feelings about it. Very big feelings. Obviously, turning 40 is better than the alternative, and by that death, but still, no one is excited about this milestone. No one I know, and least of all me. Turning 40 is actually on the horizons for millions of millennials like me, the generation born between 1981 and 1996.
In fact, many of us are already. According to the Pew Research Center, there are 72 million millennials in the United States. So while the oldest have crossed that Rubicon, the rest of us are looking at it on the horizon. Millennials, I think we have a fraught relationship to aging. We're having children later, and owning homes later, if ever.
As a generation, we're generally worse off than our parents. And so what does it mean to [00:01:00] age when so many of the milestones we culturally associate with adult life remain out of reach for so many people? The high cost of housing, student loan debt, the Great Recession, we're all familiar with the litany of social forces that have shaped our generation and not necessarily for the better.
In terms of turning 40, for me personally, I would say the anxiety falls into three main buckets. The first bucket is aging itself. The inevitable decline in strength, stamina, and flexibility that everyone experiences at some point before reaching death. My body is really changing, it's harder for me to lose weight, and I see crow's feet under my eyes.
My hair is a little thinner and I still feel pretty good, but I also have more aches and pains and also have acid reflux a lot. The second bucket of my anxiety is about our cultural attitudes towards aging, specifically in women. If the [00:02:00] patriarchy values women for their beauty and sex appeal, then what does it mean to lose that?
This transition was famously parodied on the Amy Schumer show Skit, The Last Fuckable Day, where women in Hollywood are penalized for aging by being passed over for choice roles and a handful of entertainers gather for a send off. If you haven't seen it, look it up. I've been chronicling the films, TV, and stories in pop culture that explore turning and honestly, it's not pretty, but more on that later.
Plus, personally, I'm already defying a lot of cultural expectations by not having kids and by being a lesbian. So there are trade offs here, certainly. What does it mean to grow older as a woman without children? So there's the aging body, the negative cultural messages, and then finally, There is the existential dread.
This is the third bucket. I think that turning 40 is a time when we [00:03:00] acknowledge that our lives are finite, and a good chunk of living is actually over. But it's fraught because there's still time to make big changes or to try new things. At 40, you're not really young anymore, but you're not quite old.
I would say at this age, you're still young enough to really make substantial changes to the course of our lives. And while I think it's always worthwhile to make a change no matter your age, whether you're 20, 50, 60, or 90, I think there's something about turning 40 as a milestone of being essentially half through our lives that brings our mortality into clear focus.
The recognition that we really are aging. I think that is this truth that is the crux of the midlife crisis. The definition of crisis is a situation that is extremely difficult or [00:04:00] dangerous. And crisis actually comes from the Greek word krisos, which means to decide. So it's a time to decide if we want to make a change or stay the course and keep living as we've done.
The questions are, how can I live a meaningful life? What have I always wanted to do that I haven't done yet? What have I learned about myself? And what needs to change based on the answers to this question? So let's pivot and talk a little bit about the midlife crisis cliches. I think there's two main cliches here.
And the first one is a stereotypical Midlife crisis. When we think of this story, I think of a man, someone who works in a corporate job, someone who has an affair with his secretary, and then buys a sports car. It's an anachronism that isn't really relevant to the lives of most millennials. First, it centers around a straight, cisgendered man who leaves his [00:05:00] wife and kids for the secretary, who is a younger woman.
And the wife, the woman, is a nameless, faceless wife. There's no space for her to have a crisis. All that main character energy is sucked up by the man. We don't care about her needs. She's just stuck at home with the children. The sexism and heteronormativity baked into that vignette. Next, he buys a sports car, which assumes you have the money to buy a sports car.
This presupposes one is not paying off student debt or saving for a down payment on a mortgage. The issue with the classic midlife crisis, there's a lot of issues, but at the core, the reason we make fun of the man who gets a divorce and buys a sports car is because those choices reflect useful values.
It defies the expectations that a mature person should have grown beyond valuing beauty and material objects. [00:06:00] This man is deeply selfish and seems lost. And what does it mean to turn 40 as someone else, as a woman, or a non binary person, or a queer person, or a person of color, or someone living on the margins, or just living a life that defies the narrative of job, marriage, kids, crisis?
Okay, cliche number two, age is just a number. No, it's not just a number. Sure, if you're a vampire, it's just a number, but for the rest of us mere mortals, time is a big deal. There are real physical, cultural, and intellectual changes happening as we age. And yes, 40 is an arbitrary number in western culture, and being 40 is really not that different from being, say, 39 or 41.
But age, like gender, is a cultural construct, and so is money. And being a cultural construct doesn't mean its impact isn't real, it just means it's something we can understand and unpick, and have agency to choose [00:07:00] how we react to or express ourselves. And listener, Thanks for bearing with me. I think that turning 40 calls us to reflection and calls us to action.
And the context for this personal reflection comes at a time of profound social upheaval and environmental collapse. I just lived through the pandemic and I'm starting to come out the other end and everything still feels very different. The economy is different. National politics feel like a trash fire.
And so I think a lot of us are experiencing this change while the ground is shifting under our feet. So my fellow millennials and friends. Come with me on this journey. I think it's time for some new stories and some new ideas about turning 40. I invite you to join me for new conversations about what it means to sort out the next chapter that is authentic and doesn't hide entire cliches and also acknowledges both the losses and challenges [00:08:00] of aging and explores its benefits and opportunities.
It's time to tell new stories. Join me for conversation with folks who are flourishing in their forties.