As a woman about to turn 40, I’m at the top end of the millennial age bracket. People my age have lived through so much: low-rise jeans, the film Batman & Robin, boyfriends who broke up with us over MSN Messenger and the threatened return of low-rise jeans.
(Opening with a gag is a millennial’s way of showing you how well she’s coping.)
When I donned my Zoe Daniel T-shirt and voted against Tim Wilson on Saturday, I felt a familiar strain of misplaced optimism. I’ve been voting in Goldstein long enough to know it couldn’t possibly make a difference; it was impossible not to reflect on 2019, when our best efforts fell so far short. Standing in line at the polling booths, I once again drew on my depleted internal hope stores to find just a little more.
Like other millennials, I’m compelled to keep trying against rhyme or reason.
This is not a debate about which generation has it the hardest (it’s Gen X, the generation no one ever thinks about), but millennials are more depressed, more anxious and more burnt out than pretty much anyone else. More of us die “deaths of despair”. We’re lonelier, spend more time in therapy, and every few days the internet tells us we’re just being lazy.
We can’t afford to buy homes unless our parents die. We’re proportionately underpaid and overworked, while pop culture tells us we’re lazy. We’re about to get reamed by inflation. We’re dealing with mounting debt, choosing between parenthood and sparing children from All This, criminally low minimum wages and welfare that’s below the poverty line.
Also, we will be devoured by climate change, while also being too young to have been able to make a measurable difference while it still counted.
Caught between a generation that didn’t talk about its feelings and a generation that only talks about its feelings, we were raised on junk pseudo-psychology. We’ve been directed to find hope from within – as my friend Kaitlyn worded it, to “spin hope out of thin air”. We find comfort in content about how depressed everyone is. We’re subjected to endless affirmations, Instagram posts that remind us that it’s our fault if we feel bad, instructions to manage our own emotions, take deep breaths, learn to sit with the horror that is the reality of our futures.
Year after year, we watch people who won’t be here make decisions on our behalf about the burning planet we will inherit, and then we get up the next morning and read some memes and laugh so we forget to think about deforestation. Our friendships are based in a common mortal suffering: in it together, commiserating the impending loss of everyone we love to climate disaster, geopolitical unrest, hate, poverty, despair.
Therapists – if we can find an appointment – help us to ignore how awful everything is and keep going anyway. The media we consume is designed to distract and divert us – watching the same comfort TV, immersed in virtual worlds, swapping tiles on mobile games, tweeting until our internet gets shut off – so we can cope just well enough to stop plummeting into existential grief.
I know everyone is tired, but hear me when I say: millennials are tired.
But waking up on Sunday morning, still in a wondrous stupor/chocolate hangover after election night, I felt something new. A tiny brightness. A feeling sitting somewhere between hope and relief.
Not because I necessarily think the Albanese government will drive real change (they still have to prove it) or because there are any real climate policies to speak of (though maybe the indies will draw them out) or because I’m naïve enough to believe it will all be different now (lol). What I felt was a general lightness. A weight had been lifted.
I pondered this while I watched my gym membership payment come out of my account because I don’t have the energy to cancel it.
What made this hope significant?
I think it might be this: the hope is external.
In the lead-up to this election, rightwing politics and the media that supports it said nothing would change. They gloated that teal independents had no chance, that bigotry was inevitable and that women would do what they were told.
So, we did what we always do, which is to scrape the lining of our internal organs for the last remaining fibres of a reason to keep moving forward. We voted.
And things changed.
Not in the way they have been changing. As we have watched abortion rights be forcibly undone in the US, anti-abortion candidate Amanda Stoker lost her seat. With trans children and their parents in some US states facing felony charges for existing, Liberal drop-in and anti-trans commentator Katherine Deves made barely a dent in Warringah.
We didn’t have to spin this hope out of thin air. Today is the first time in a long time that I’ve felt hopeful without having to go to therapy or watch TikToks by smarter-than-me teenagers to learn how to create that feeling myself. An actual change, not just convincing myself it will get better, even though there’s no evidence to suggest it will. There is an objective, statistically significant reason to be optimistic.
For today – and maybe only for today, but we’ll see how things pan out – I feel held. Not fighting the solipsistic dread with weapons made out of my own wellbeing, but part of a community that has chosen to vote for the betterment of others. That’s new. It feels good to sit with it, to briefly imagine, in the words of famous internet depressed person Allie Brosh, that maybe everything isn’t hopeless bullshit.
