Whenever I hit the leaderboard at Orangetheory, I post the triumph to Instagram stories with the same caption: “My midlife crisis is going great!” This is the most mortifying collection of words I have ever written, but it is my truth.
Midlife crises are not the universal experience that they are often made out to be; one needs a pretty high base line of financial and personal stability to have the luxury of a life-altering freakout or a new obsession. But I am now firmly in my mid-40s and have observed that my peers are greeting this decade of our existence in a few specific ways.
The varietals of the millennial midlife crisis according to social media are: spiritual (an ayahuasca journey, getting into near-death experiences or starting sentences with “As an Aquarius …”), relational (divorce or polyamory), material (throwback crisis and, inadvisable in this economy, fancy car or boat), and physical (running a marathon, getting into power lifting, bragging about your Orangetheory wins).
I can’t speak to the first three manifestations of discontent, but I can provide a couple of explanations for why many of us are choosing to spend our free time and precious expendable income battling it out at feats of athletic performance like Hyrox, a punishing fitness competition where the average athlete is a 35-year-old woman.
The biggest one is probably the pandemic hitting just as we were cresting into peak adulthood. Covid forced us to touch the hot stove of mortality. This most likely led some of us to adopt healthier habits. About 50 percent of Americans 35 to 49 met the C.D.C. guidelines for aerobic activity — think running, walking or swimming — in 2024. This is above the average for all generations, and greater than for older generations. The federal guideline is defined as at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise or some equivalent combination of the two per week.
It’s tough to make an apples-to-apples comparison with Gen X and boomers at the same age because of the broad age ranges the C.D.C. breaks groups into, and I couldn’t tell whether it used the same methodology over time, but there are other bits of data that suggest millennials are very into working out, including the popularity of different kinds of obstacle course competitions, like Tough Mudder and Spartan Race, and an increased demand for marathons. Millennials also spend a greater proportion of their money on wellness, compared with older generations.
But a quest for better health is not the whole story. The rude cliché about my generation is that we have no work ethic because we were raised with participation trophies for everything. This has always struck me as incorrect. There are just so many of us millennials, the echo of the baby boom, clawing for what feels like a diminishing set of opportunities. We have always been somewhat cutthroat.
Because we came of age just as social media debuted, we continue to be keenly aware of what our peers are doing. We don’t want trophies merely for participating; that’s insulting and we’re not stupid. We want trophies for CRUSHING the competition. We want to put in maximum, earnest effort and then also be publicly rewarded for that effort (ask Anne Hathaway).
Being extremely fit as you enter the back half of your life is both a literal and a metaphorical flex. It tells people that you have the leisure time to devote to hours a week at the gym, even if you have other pressing responsibilities. In the past few years, as the use of GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy has become widespread, the body as status symbol has gone beyond thinness. If you are rich enough or have good enough insurance, you can buy weight loss, but defined triceps require work.
And yet. Sometimes when I am sweating it out on the treadmill, closely monitoring my heart rate and speed, I am dragged back down to this mortal plane. What’s the point of all of this running — what am I running from? Why do I need an audience of thousands on Instagram to applaud my athletic performance, what emotional void is this filling? I still feel vaguely pathetic about sneaking a peek at my neighbor’s machine to see how fast she is going, just to make sure I’m slightly faster.
At some point you have to face the limits of your aging body’s abilities, and consider whether some of that time and money would be better spent doing something less self-centered. Basic fitness is important for everybody so that our bodies function well, but this is something else.
On the other hand, there’s a raffle going on at my Orangetheory studio that would grant the winners entry into the eight-day New York City Hyrox competition starting next month, which involves 50,000 other psychos and is already sold out.
Should I buy a raffle ticket?
End Notes
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I’m continuing on my foreign film and TV tear by watching Pedro Almodóvar movies. Over the past few nights I watched “All About My Mother” and “Volver.” Nobody writes female characters like Pedro! I just want to watch movies for grown-ups where people have emotionally resonant conversations with each other.
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I’m working on a story about rural hospital closures, in particular labor and delivery units. If you have been affected by these closures, please email here. Or reach out about anything else on your mind. I’m also taking suggestions for more foreign films and TV, so keep ’em coming.
The post The Millennial Midlife Crisis Manifests as Visible Abs appeared first on New York Times.
