All My Millennial Friends Are Rethinking Their Lives. Maybe I Should, Too

“Watching you build a life together reminded me that a loving partnership can be a beautiful thing,” I told them. “Keep building.” 

Indeed, they did: By the end of the year, my friend and his wife had left Manhattan for New Jersey, purchased the requisite family SUV and welcomed a gorgeous baby girl into their lives. 

The truth is, watching them build a new life has also reminded me that I am not.

My friends’ journey is but one of numerous examples of peers around me who have embarked on seismic life changes over the past two years—some in defiance of the pandemic, others fueled and stretched by the conditions it created. Like the millions of millennials who are steering the “great resignation,” they are changing careers and demanding higher wages as well as pursuing untethered lifestyles, free to live and work wherever they please.

While I’m elated for them and their newfound self-fulfillment, I can’t help but wonder, “When is it going to happen for me?”

Standing still

It started somewhere between the first vaccinations and the reality check of the Delta-variant surge. I’ve found it difficult to shake the feeling that the world outside my apartment—which still serves as my office, gym, church, and maybe five or six other functions—has been moving along briskly and dynamically without me.

That married couple is already discussing the possibility of moving even farther from New York, possibly somewhere rural and Midwestern. Another friend recently launched a fashion brand and has rededicated himself to his DJing side hustle—bye bye, weekend hangs—while another ended her five-year tenure at an architecture firm to start a nonprofit for underserved neighborhoods.

In talking to my friends, most of them described how the pandemic illuminated a gap between what they wanted from their lives and how they were actually living it. But no one I know exemplifies this more than one particular companion.

She moved to New York nine years ago to work in fashion, and the mere thought of ever leaving was anathema. Once the lockdown happened, though, all of that changed: She found herself

Airbnb

-ing in Hawaii for four months, while scrimping elsewhere so she could keep her apartment in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

When she realized this was the life she wanted—to see the world and work from anywhere—and that her employer wouldn’t sanction such a change, she found a remote-first job in a completely different field that granted her the largest salary jump of her career.

She had already been feeling underpaid and undervalued, and saw the move as a win on several fronts. “Coming up on 35, I was just like, is this where I want to be at this age?” she says. “It was 100% the pandemic. It opened up my mind for the first time in nine years.”

Ouch. At 36 years old, the disconnect between who I feel I am and how I’m living has become more glaring for me, too. As an extrovert who thrives on community and social engagement—yet who works from home every day in a city his friends are increasingly fleeing—it feels as if something is withering inside of me that I cannot water fast enough.

Trips to visit my family in Mississippi become guilt-inducing reminders that I am forgoing those fleeting early moments in the lives of my nieces and godson by living so far away. And sure, call me old-fashioned, but I would very much like a husband in the near future. I’ve matched and unmatched so many times in New York that the dating apps have started suggesting women. (I have the screenshots to prove it.)

So, how do I even begin to figure out what the “rethink” looks like for me?

Preliminary steps

Apparently, I first need to supercharge my savings. In a testament to the flexibility and options that money can bring, my friend who used to work in fashion told me that she had saved $12,000 in anticipation of a moment like this—a stash that was separate from her emergency fund. “About five years ago I started saving for a journey that I didn’t know what it was yet,” she says.

Assessing how I spend in the first place is also crucial, according to an architect friend. Whereas I had gobbled up much of my pandemic savings by taking on more living expenses, she had used the moment to think about expenses she could live without, building a six-month emergency fund in the process. “The cutting back is Covid-induced,” she says. “I’m not going out as much as I used to. When you have to make certain sacrifices, it makes you better understand what you really need.”

I also need to think carefully about what it is I really want to do, and what’s feasible logistically. In addition to regular talks with my therapist about what’s absent from my life and the most realistic ways to achieve it, I’m also researching what my job will and won’t allow me to do, and learning from the experiences of friends who have moved, committed to long-term travel, and started or joined new social organizations or business ventures.

All of that means weighing some difficult trade-offs. I moved to New York, the media capital of the world, to build my career as a writer and journalist. Long term, would I be hampering my ambitions by living elsewhere?

Socially, I’m more hesitant to start dating someone and possibly get attached, in case my rethink takes me to a different city. What if my hypothetical thoughts today result in a teary dissolution tomorrow?

I’m not sure yet where I fit amid the great rethinking, but I know that I can no longer sacrifice my mental and spiritual health by putting off the reassessment that many of my friends have done. And I can no longer do nothing as the pandemic forces drastic and unwelcome changes to my life.

The only question that is left is how I’ll choose to change with them.

Mr. McCorvey is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York. Email him at jj.mccorvey@wsj.com.