Having grown up in a small tourist town in Northern Michigan, Memorial Day weekend has always been a different experience for me and mine. Tawasians don’t leave town for three-day weekends. Not only are we already in the kind of place most of the country is escaping to, but often, we work on Memorial Day. A town can’t close down when half the state is visiting. Plus, there’s invariably some parade of indiscernible tone happening that you have to be in or organize or attend.
How to get to what’s next: Balancing ambition and comfort
I went to prenatal yoga at 11am yesterday. It was a Monday. Perhaps nothing has made me feel more at the top of the human food chain. Who does that? Who gets to change out of their pajamas at 10:30am, drive downtown on a Monday and spend 75 minutes doing yoga?
As it turns out, the answer really shouldn’t have been me. I only went because I can’t make my evening class this week, and at 31 weeks pregnant, I am fearful of what could happen to my poor body if I go a week without making sure it can still bend in half. But though I worked before and after the session, it screwed up my productivity of my entire day to the point that I just gave up around 7pm and decided to start again tomorrow.
But here’s the thing: That was just fine. I wasted a day of my regular productivity, and I was fine. I have a beautiful home, the mortgage for which I can afford, even with an occasional day off; I control my own schedule; I genuinely enjoy what I do, so if I spend 14 hours doing it tomorrow, that’s fine; I absolutely have 14 hours to dedicate to work each day; but I don’t have to. I stop when I want.
Who is this person? When, I began to wonder when assessing all of this, did I become a person surrounded by comfort? And exactly how is it going to destroy me?
The role of the millennial elder
If I had a dollar for every article I’ve read about how the business world is readying itself for the millennial workforce, I might not be insanely rich, but I could at least take pretty swank trip to Spain with my loot. I know this because I’ve written a bunch of those articles, and dozens of others for research. And each time I do, I think, “Wow. Would have been pretty cool if the world cared so much about this 10 years ago, when this millennial was entering the workforce.”
Ah. The woes of a millennial elder. Though the dates bookending my generation vary, the most common – and accurate, in my experience – call 1982 the dawn of the millennials. This means I am seven days away from being as old as millennial gets.
Now, of course the lines are blurry. I know people up to a year older than myself who definitely fit into my generation, and those a year or so younger who are startlingly Gen X-ish. But, by and large, if there a way to define a millennial elder, someone born in January, 1982 is about a close as it gets.
Natalie Burg 