Are Elder Millennial Women in America Ok? A Historical Accounting

To be human is to go through multiple cycles of belief and cynicism throughout your lifetime. To quote the canonic meme guy sitting at a table, debate me.

But I think that people my age have grown up against a historical backdrop that accelerates that cycle. The lives of elder millennials in America have been defined by an even stronger, more frequent swing between belief and cynicism.

There’s something about being promised a lot, then let down, then held to impossible standards, ad infinitum, that can make a person both deeply mistrustful of authority while also easily influenced by groups, belief systems, or even workout classes that promise to fix everything. This phenomenon is something that multiple extremely qualified writers have explored in recent books, including Amanda Montell in The Age of Magical Overthinking and Cultish; Rina Raphael in The Gospel of Wellness; and more recently Liz Bucar in Beyond Wellness.

The things I believed in were school, books, art, and being “good.”

The older I get and the deeper we sink into our uniquely American polycrisis, the more I think about what drives people to cling unquestioningly to beliefs that clearly aren’t true or good for anyone. A lot of it is likely rooted in a combination of desperation, entitlement, insecurity, and a deep craving for stability in historic moments of chaos, you know, like maybe a Great Recession. Hell, I wrote a whole novel about it.

It also helps that the current cultural zeitgeist is low-key obsessed with the late 2000s and early 2010s. This time also happens to be when I became a “real” adult. Instead of digging out my layered camisoles and re-visiting my side bangs, I’ve devoted my energy to thinking about the belief-cynicism cycles in my own life.

Here they are.

Childhood: The late 1980s-2000

To be a kid is to believe in something. Children are literally wired to do that in order to survive. You have to believe that your parents, guardians, or other adult figures will protect you, or that there is some kind of rule you have to follow for things to turn out OK.

The things I believed in were school, books, art, and being “good.”

I deeply believed that getting all A’s was inextricably tied up with being a good, worthy person, and would give me a grown-up life that was happy and fulfilled. This was somewhat tied to the mix of cafeteria Catholicism and semi-hardcore evangelical Christianity that I grew up with, which espoused a very narrow idea of what “good” could be. As a chubby girl in southern California who sometimes blew through social cues, I learned quickly that being “smart” was my only chance at being “good.”

Thankfully, whether my parents intended to or not, they countered a lot of this conditioning by giving me unfettered access to anything I wanted to read and signing me up for all the art activities geared toward weird kids like me. If anyone asks what radicalized me, I say it was the time my mom famously marched into my conservative Christian school after I came home from 6th grade with a Jesus coloring sheet from “art” class, angrily volunteering to start an actual art program there. (To everyone’s surprise, they took her up on it.)

But whether or not you grew up chubby around people who thought Jesus coloring sheets were art, this was the era of American Girl dolls and “girl power.” Even if we were getting Gatorade poured on us during P.E. class by girls who fit into Limited Too clothes, a lot of us believed that if we got A’s and worked hard on those science projects, we’d be good, and grow up to be happy adults.

Adolescence: 2001-2006

Somewhere between walking into 8th grade homeroom and seeing my teacher staring in open-mouthed shock at the live 9/11 coverage from CNN and hearing my first anti-Muslim slurs in real time, I started wondering if the idea of “good” I had grown up around wasn’t quite right.

This began my first phase of multiple cynicism-belief cycles. Throughout my adolescence in the early 2000s, I vacillated between believing that America stood for freedom, and vocally expressing my anger at being made to watch the news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe during English class. Some months I prayed for Jesus to guide me, others I went to the abstinence club on campus with my friends only for the free cookies they gave out. A bleach blonde pop-punk aesthetic gave way to American Eagle polos, and swerved right back to “weird thrift store girl wearing winged eyeliner.”

I also became more deeply cynical of humanity in general.

2000s diet culture had a vise-like grip on a lot of us, so I believed in Atkins, Weight Watchers, and Slimfast as fervently as some of my classmates believed in the Bible’s literal interpretation. But when I got tired and hungry, I leaned further into my burgeoning “funny fat girl” identity. Through it all, though, I continued to believe that being good at school was my way to college, and college equaled good job and happiness.

Early adulthood: 2007-2016

The Obama years may have made some of us generally more optimistic, but it also gave us the version of the Internet that rewired our brains. I believed so hard in books that I majored in English, thinking I could become a professor. My goals were to read, write books, and make a living by having smart people listen to me. It sounded like a dream. But the hard economic reality of the Great Recession years hit everyone in one way or another.

I had no remaining belief in Jesus, beyond him probably being a nice Middle Eastern guy who was gravely misinterpreted by powerful people. Once I soured on academia during a disappointing aborted PhD program I attempted to pursue in order to forestall the labor market’s grim realities, I had to put my faith somewhere. I threw that same belief into being a DC wonk, after starting out as a copy-editor for an accounting firm (yes, really).

Living in DC during the Obama years sped up the belief/cynicism cycles even further. I took a series of jobs in communications. I liked the proximity to people I viewed as smart decisionmakers. I met the man I married. I went to a lot of trivia nights. I got back into improv comedy, which is probably the most benign cult anyone will ever encounter.

I also became more deeply cynical of humanity in general. Networking-as-a-lifestyle and near constant exposure to every self-styled expert’s hot takes on every horrific world event will do that to a person. So will wearing a lot of very uncomfortable pencil skirts. I got caught up in the “grind” mentality and made my job my personality a few too many times, because I felt that doing otherwise would make me unemployable. I worked out religiously, downloaded and deleted MyFitnessPal repeatedly, got seriously into yoga, and ran half-marathons, because those equaled physical discipline, which equaled goodness.

And then a certain person came down a gold escalator and became president. People I had previously thought were smart and “good” started saying openly hateful things and voicing support for the guy. I vomited in the bathroom of the Mellow Mushroom in Adams Morgan as the election returns rolled in.

The “shit’s getting real” years: 2017-2024

After the inauguration, I started going to protests. After a work meeting in which we discussed how to formulate policy talking points into “Trump-ese” (all bullet points, smaller words, one page maximum), I knew I had to get out of DC. My husband and I moved to California, a place I now believed to be saner, easier, better for actual living, and adopted a dog.

I’m almost 38 but I feel 1,000 years old some days.

It was, but “sane” and “easy” living became relative during the pandemic. Here it was again, another “once-in-a-generation” event. I told anyone who would listen that if I heard the word “unprecedented” one more time, I would throw my laptop out the window. I began writing my debut novel and my cynicism over humanity’s inherent goodness began to border on misanthropy. I blocked former friends on social media after they went down anti-vaccine rabbit holes. I started meditating and doing a lot more yoga at home, while being unable to tear myself away from the Internet. I got more flexible and more angry.

The Biden years brought a pandemic-postponed wedding, revenge travel, a house purchase, and signing with a literary agent. I made new friends, went on antidepressants, and started a comedy pun contest. Then the Biden years      ended. I cried on election night while curled up on the floor against our aging dog, husband curled up behind me.

The “whatever we’re in now”: 2025-present

I’m almost 38 but I feel 1,000 years old some days. Inundation with news of atrocities and a creeping sense of powerlessness will do that to a person.

My belief in the American government’s inherent stability and goodness has mostly gone the way of Jesus. Wherever he is, he’s probably pissed.

I’ve stopped working out as religiously, and have gained an amount of weight I thought would be life-ending 20 years ago.

This leads to the major belief I have left: realistic hope. I took a hard swing into doomerism for a while, but I’m pulling myself out. I think a lot of us in my age group are trying to do that right now, especially the ones raising or trying for kids. We’re still planning for the future, because what other choice do we have? Giving up? I watched too much PBS Kids programming for that.

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Be Well by Sarah Flocken is available from Heliotrope.