The Great Millennial Career Crisis
Hey, Millennial.
Quick question: How we feeling about those life choices right about now? 👀
School ⇢ Career ⇢ Promotion ⇢ Success 🎉
That was the deal, right?
And yet somehow, you're sitting there wondering why it doesn't feel the way you thought it would.
Before you turn that into a personal failure, hear me out. 🫶🏽
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Can I say something just a little bit controversial? A lot of you didn't do anything wrong in your careers, and yet you still feel like you're behind. I'm hearing this more and more often from friends, from friends' spouses, from clients: "I did everything I was supposed to do. I followed the path. I checked all of the boxes, and yet I'm sitting here feeling like, 'Wait, why didn't this feel like it worked?'"
The idea that if you go to school, get a job, climb the ladder, that everything will fall into place, well, that just hasn't held up for a lot of people.
And what I see happen next is the tricky part because a lot of people start internalizing this change and switch and market dynamics as personal failure. When in reality, a lot of this is structural. It's shifting industries, it's economic timing, it's a completely different world of work than what we were prepared for.
So instead of asking, "What did I do wrong?" Reposition that. A more helpful question might be, "What am I trying to hold myself to that just doesn't apply to me anymore?"
You might be measuring yourself against a version of success that just doesn't fit your life anymore, or this market. And if you're in that space right now, questioning, rethinking, recalibrating, it is not the crisis in the way we were taught to think about it. It might actually be clarity.
Because when you stop chasing what you thought you were supposed to want, you finally get to decide what matters to you now.
