Never Enough
On generational scripts, Millennial striving, and the myth of arrival
PSA: On June 17th, I’m hosting a Book Club with Byredo at Liberty London. I’ll be sharing my cherished summer reads and would love to hear yours. Tickets are available here.
Often, when I conduct interviews for Deep Read, I find myself lingering on certain sections and soundbites. Afterword is a format I’m experimenting with as a space to return to these ideas and expand on them in whatever form feels appropriate. This is the fourth instalment – here’s the first on artistic sovereignty, the second on over-creation, and the third on our economy of envy.
Lydia Pang’s new memoir ‘Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts and Food’ is, among other things, a book about ambition. I spoke about it with her for Deep Read #52.
Lydia and I are the same age. We come from very different backgrounds and grew up in very different settings (she in rural Wales, me in central London), but there are lots of parallels in our stories. I’ve never met Lydia in real life but I recognised a lot of my own trajectory in her book. As I said to her during the interview, reading it made me think about the insidious messaging that many women of our generation have been absorbing since childhood — and that we continue to absorb now, in different forms.
Despite little overt parental pressure, Lydia and I grew up to believe we must strive to be exceptional. That doing so would necessitate that we look a certain way and work a certain way. That we should relocate to New York City - the mecca of ambition - and not stop moving until our bodies literally stopped us in our tracks — Lydia through fertility struggles that she documents in the book; myself after a series of debilitating back injuries. When we found ourselves back in the UK during the pandemic - voluntarily but often resentfully - we both struggled to reconcile the plot twist with the broader narrative we had ascribed to our lives: a regression in a tale of relentless forward motion. Lydia has written about all this. One day I might too.
Lately I’ve been thinking about what container ambition will take in this new-ish chapter of life. In our early 20s, the Girlboss era provided - for better or worse - a language and aesthetic for Millennial pop-feminism and a shiny package for neoliberal values. Then COVID came, and with it the Great Resignation, ’quiet quitting’, and the soft life narrative – all of which provided a framework for its dismantling. At the time I wrote a manifesto of sorts for moving forward, but the world soon became too violently chaotic (and expensive) to apply its learnings with any true consistency.
Like many of our generation, Lydia and I have now settled into family life and become parents. The conventional markers of adulthood are, in some form, present and correct: a home, a child, a professional reputation, and a committed partner. And yet, a feeling of standing somewhere near the beginning of things often persists.
Glancing broadly at the cultural discourse, it seems that Millennials are not coping well with the entry to middle age. This is partly the result of the startling rise of the cost-of-living, widespread geo-political chaos, and climate doom, to name but a few factors. But I wonder if there’s something deeper at the core: a continuation - maybe even an intensification - of impossible standards that has defined our generational story from the start. Raised in an endless culture of doing and becoming, it turns out we might not be so good at just being.
Recently, my therapist (sorry) asked me about my family script around money.