Taylor Deer didn’t expect to feel this way at 35.
“If 25-year-old me knew I’d still be single at this age, I’d be very disappointed, ” said Deer, who is a travel content creator.
“I started grieving the life I thought I’d have once I hit my mid-30s,” she said.
Joey Pedras, a 35-year-old marketing director in New Jersey, hit the same wall over a career that didn’t unfold the way he planned.
“There was a story a lot of us were sold that just wasn’t true anymore,” he told Straight Arrow. “If you did everything right, it could still all fall apart or just not work at all.”
Deer and Pedras are but two voices in a growing national chorus of people approaching their 40s and 50s who say their lives aren’t what they expected at this stage. Deer has traveled to more than 65 countries and lives in her dream apartment outside New York City. But she still longs for the family life she imagined.
“I think a lot of us Millennials, especially those of us who were raised on Disney fairytales, are the ones grieving something we believed was definitely going to happen by a certain age,” Deer told Straight Arrow.
Mental health professionals have a name for it: grief. Not the kind tied to a death, but the kind tied to a future that never materialized.
A different kind of loss
“The loss of the future you imagined for yourself is also a form of grieving,” said Stacy Sheller, a licensed marriage and family therapist at The Grove Recovery Community, a recovery and mental health treatment center in Santa Ana, California. Sheller said that can include the family, homeownership or career someone pictured for themselves. When those milestones don’t arrive on schedule, people can feel defined by the gap between the life in front of them and the one they’d envisioned.
Dr. Max Doshay, a licensed clinical psychologist and co-founder and CEO of KMN Psych, said the loss is easy to dismiss because it’s invisible to everyone but the person carrying it.
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“Although this type of loss may be less noticeable to other people, grieving for the dreams that were never fulfilled is still legitimate,” said Doshay, whose work focuses on anxiety, depression, life transitions and relationships.
There’s data to back up what people are feeling. Research published by the National Institutes of Health found that one-third of adults in their 40s are now unpartnered, and psychological distress — driven in part by financial strain — peaks in midlife.
It’s not that Millennials abandoned the plan. The plan changed underneath them. Compared with generations before them, Millennials have endured more student debt, a job market shaped early on by the 2008 recession, a housing market that priced out an entire generation of first-time buyers and even later marriages.
When the resume doesn’t translate to real life
Joy McNeil, 45, built her life around achievement.
She checked every box her parents’ generation told her mattered: A PhD, a private practice, a home of her own.
“I figured that the internal rubric I used to become successful in school, college, work and beyond would be the same rubric for the rest of life,” McNeil said.
“Yeah right.”
She didn’t recognize she was grieving until her late 30s, when she finished her dissertation and found nothing left to chase.
“I looked around and felt I had held my breath for years while others had been having what appeared to be the time of their lives,” she told Straight Arrow.
An autoimmune diagnosis in her late 30s made having children biologically difficult, adding another layer to her mourning. Therapy, her own profession, has been the tool that helps her make sense of it.
“I’ve experienced self-doubt, guilt and even depressive symptoms where I did not believe in myself,” she said. “I questioned every part of my life, every decision, every hesitation.”
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For Pedras, the reckoning came at 30.
“I became anxious and paranoid that nothing seemed to work out as I thought it ‘should’ve,’” he said. The career he’d built without a college degree wasn’t enough to offset what he felt was missing — a house, a big friend group, a published novel.
The financial math doesn’t help
Money is threaded through nearly every version of this story. The Pew Research Center found Millennials carry significantly more student debt than Gen Xers did at the same age, and their median household wealth trails what Boomers had accumulated by their 20s and 30s.
Tiffany Graham, a nurse practitioner in West Palm Beach, checked off her boxes in the exact order she was taught: first the degree, then marriage, then children.
She was married at 21 and divorced about a decade later. After that, she went through a second relationship that also ended. Each time, she rebuilt from scratch as a single mother.
“I feel like I did everything right according to society’s standards,” Graham said. “But it did not work out how I imagined.”
She didn’t realize she was grieving the life she expected until recently.
“I gave up my own identity and happiness for someone else,” she said. “It has been difficult to let go of some of the decisions I have made in the past that was not in alignment with my own happiness.”
Therapy and self-forgiveness eventually pulled her out of isolation.
“I’ve had to learn how to give myself grace and be patient with my journey,” she said. “There is no timeline and my journey is very personal.”
What actually helps
Experts told Straight Arrow that naming this grief is the first step in healing.
“Identifying this experience as a form of grief will help reduce the individual’s self-blaming,” Sheller said, “and provide an opportunity for a healthier approach to coping.”
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Doshay points to self-compassion, therapy and reconnecting with personal values instead of society’s checklist. McNeil has redefined success around small, steady things such as walks with her dog, new recipes and quiet nights in. Pedras has stopped measuring his life against the word “should.”
“It’s important to not neglect your grief or try to wash it out or ignore it,” he said. “I’m a big proponent of letting your grief take you on a journey of self-discovery.”
The milestones that felt unreachable in their 30s and 40s are compounded by another looming worry as younger adults brace for a retirement system that may not hold up: Two-thirds of adults under 30 don’t expect Social Security to exist by the time they retire, and the average Millennial has saved a fraction of what Boomers had banked by the same career stage.
Mental health professionals say the way out isn’t complicated, even if it’s slow.
“People often begin coping by realizing that life does not have to follow the exact plan we envisioned,” Sheller said. From there, she points to acknowledging the disappointment without judgment, reconnecting with what still matters most, and leaning on relationships, self-compassion and counseling.
Still, the people living through this aren’t giving up on the idea of a good life. They’re just rewriting what it looks like.
“It’s never too late to write a new story for myself,” Graham said.
Round out your reading
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- ‘The end of American science as we know it.’ White House funding plan sparks alarm.
- AI data centers are popping up everywhere. What exactly do they do?
- The Trump administration is accused of breaking a law built to target the KKK.
- One Republican senator is dead, another is still alive. Both are the center of conspiracy theories.