stuck
Can 30-somethings like me, caught between ambition and reality, shifting definitions of success, and an unraveling world, choose adaptation over stagnation?
I often think about a scene in Donnie Darko where Drew Barrymore’s character, Ms. Pomeroy, walks behind a chain-link fence of an athletic field and screams a guttural FUUUUUUCCCCKKK to herself. She’s just been fired for assigning Graham Greene's "The Destructors" to her high school students—deemed filth by the administration. "I'm sorry that you have failed," the principal tells her.
The image of her furious exhale defined my entry into my thirties, shaped by the pandemic and its aftermath. As I was craving expansion, the world was closing in. My father was sick with cancer. A brief but promising relationship collapsed weeks into quarantine when I could no longer ignore our differences. The pandemic disrupted the undergrad experience I’d begun in my late twenties after leaving acting, and I never returned to in-person classes.
As a woman on her own, I became consumed by the shifting time signature of my body, my wishes for marriage and motherhood sometimes suffocating beneath it. Loss seeped into every surface, every conversation, every thought.
The grief I experienced living in isolation, despite having friends and professionals to talk to, still froze the parts of me that were in motion, halting my excitement about life's next steps. My twenties were filled with work and personal adversity, but I could recognize when life met me with ease. In my thirties, however, I was unable to luxuriate in life's uncertainty.
I watched high school friends posting their baby’s pictures, New York friends committing, moving in, getting married. Colleagues flaunted fancier, more contrived job titles on LinkedIn. In isolation, it was easy to spiral, to believe it was only me. But later, when out of isolation, I realized I wasn’t alone—30-somethings in big cities and small towns alike were wondering the same thing: When will it be our time?
I had met my own expectations as an undergrad and gained admission to several graduate programs, including my top choice. On the surface, I was showing up, but in the quiet of my home, curled up on one side of my bed, I felt my 30-something future unfurling night after night. I felt stuck.
For nearly a decade, many in my generation have wondered who the true leaders of the people are—especially now, as in less than a month, Trump has waged an assault on the American government and its people. He's signed executive orders to leave the World Health Organization, withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, revoke birthright citizenship, issue pardons for over 1,500 rioters in connection with the Capitol Attack on Jan. 6th, 2021, dismantle key actions to address Climate Change, cut DEI programs, gut the Education Department, and others. He most notably used his Executive Orders to create the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an ad hoc agency, essentially a bunch of unelected college students, led by the unelected billionaire, Elon Musk, to reduce wasteful federal spending, but instead threatening to decimate the federal workforce. DOGE has gained access to many agencies (e.g., the State Department, Department of the Treasury, Department of Education, Department of Defense, etc.) and programs, like USAID, delving into sensitive government databases and, in the case of USAID, attempting to shutter a program that has been part of US foreign policy for 60 years.
Where are the grown ups? Who are the grown ups?
But later, when out of isolation, I realized I wasn’t alone—30-somethings in big cities and small towns alike were wondering the same thing: When will it be our time?
That question extends beyond politics. For The Wall Street Journal, Rachel Wolfe explored 30-somethings in arrested development, asking, "What happens when a whole generation never grows up?" Millennials, already burdened by economic bad luck and disillusionment, now face an uncertain future shaped by AI, political polarization, climate change, and corporate resistance. "The conventional explanation for what's freezing young adults in place is that they can't afford to grow up," Wolfe writes, pointing to inflation and soaring housing costs. Many—though not all—feel the quiet shame of struggling to piece together the lives they once wished for.
The absence of traditional adulthood milestones like marriage and children can deepen the sense of stagnation for 30-somethings. For those who aspire to these markers, the statistics are bleak—a third of young adult Americans will never marry, and the percentage of adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children rose by 10% between 2018 and 2023.
Wolfe presents a snapshot of 30-somethings stuck in limbo—a 38-year-old lawyer drowning in $200,000 of student loan debt while sharing a New York City apartment with three roommates, a 31-year-old still living in her unicorn-wallpapered childhood bedroom in New Jersey, and a 39-year-old payroll manager earning $100,000 but still splitting rent with a roommate in Los Angeles.
"It feels like the instructions for how to live a good life don't apply anymore," one says. "I still feel like a little kid," another admits. But "I feel like a failure" resonated with me the most.
When I broke my first big story during my first semester of journalism school, I was home for Christmas break—sick with a cold, scrambling to finish a past-due paper. As I prepped for a media interview, my mother drilled me with hypothetical questions while I dabbed foundation onto my raw nose, blew into a tissue, reapplied, and repeated.
By the time I reached the interview—which thankfully turned out to be an off-camera pre-interview—the producer told me this story would change my career. I'm an actress, too; I've heard everything. I knew that was a lie. But deep down, a part of me wanted to believe.
I couldn't find a job for a year after graduate school. Landing an interview felt impossible. Despite building a network of accomplished people who generously offered advice, nothing ever materialized. I pitched an investigative story I’d worked on for over a year in my Graduate program to editors which I felt could impact an entire industry, only to see it rejected over and over with little feedback. Meanwhile, my friends—whom I loved and admired—were publishing in major outlets or securing jobs. Though their lives weren’t perfect either, they didn't seem to have the same desperation at the dinner table to discuss how life wasn't meeting their expectations. They lit the room. I was consumed by the flame.
Six months after graduation with a freshly minted Master’s degree in May 2023, in my six-floor walk-up on Broome and Sullivan—snagged at a COVID steal, only to jump nearly $1,000 at renewal—I wrapped glass lamps in cable-knit sweaters and wedged framed art between velvet pillows. With each box bursting at the seam, I was reminded of how I made the difficult decision to end a friendship, distanced myself from my father, and had my heart broken in a blind-sided break-up. I lost my health insurance, my therapist, and now my apartment. “I’m sure you made mistakes,” my gynecologist told me in the middle of my pap smear. “He’s probably seeing someone else already. You should go ahead and freeze your eggs.”
The absence of traditional adulthood milestones like marriage and children can deepen the sense of stagnation for 30-somethings.
Running out of savings and unable to get a job, I had no other options. I had gone from being a young girl battling the elusive deodorant mark on every dark dress, bringing such bad wine to Upper East Side parties that hosts would lovingly say, "Great, I'll use this in our dinner," to a young woman attending panels, book launches, premieres, and, on occasion, a dinner with the Baldwins to this. I put my furniture in storage and moved back to my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, to live with my parents. Though I had accomplished what I set out to in New York City—a place I called home for fifteen years—I still left feeling like not having the job, the money, or the relationship meant I had somehow failed.
There are two ways to read Wolfe's piece, which doesn't break new ground. Millennials feeling as though they’ve been dealt a bad hand is nothing new—it’s almost become masturbatory to churn out content about millennial misery. From podcasts like Guardian Australia's Who Screwed Millennials or Millennial: Pretend Adulting, Real Talk, to think pieces that underline a generation's "concrete hunger for order, security and stability" and emphasize the notion that financial woes for millennials mean "hitting people who have already been hit." It’s true that most millennials have far less financial cushion, having never recovered from the Great Recession and many forced to settle for menial jobs that depressed their career income potential, yet they're more diverse and educated. Millennials have been called the unluckiest generation and the most economically divided.
But the other through line is their sense of entitlement—to wanting more than is realistic in today’s world. Wolfe writes that 30-somethings today have "outsized dreams of what a good life looks like," and I agree. The 31-year-old, who has lived with her parents in New Jersey for ten years and was laid off in 2021, remains at home until she can get the job she wants, not needs—yet she admits this makes her feel like she is a spectator in her own life. The 38-year-old lawyer makes double what his parents made at his age but tells Wolfe that he's "disappointed by what it affords him in New York City." The 39-year-old in Los Angeles says that her $100,000 salary leaves her feeling disillusioned with how “little it buys” in Los Angeles.
We've embraced the narrative about our generation: that life promises us nothing in return for hard work. Yet, even as 30-somethings who have experienced this to be true over and over, we continue to hold onto hope of a better return. Why does lack of homeownership, marriage, and children have to be why 30-somethings can't grow up? Everyone profiled in this story insists on living in big cities with dreams of owning a home, but perhaps those dreams can be better realized in a city that doesn't require more, more, and more. Maybe it is not just that it is harder to achieve a feeling of success in this world, but also that we have unrealistic expectations as to what we are “entitled to”.
As a woman on her own, I became consumed by the shifting time signature of my body, my wishes for marriage and motherhood sometimes suffocating beneath it.
Living at home as a 30-something is difficult, even if your parents are among your favorite people. Initially, it was good for me. I'd been working hard but tasked myself with working even harder to move out and move on. Numerous publications and a feature film later, I found myself feeling more successful and purposeful than ever, yet I was broke. With growing friction with my parents, and needing a real-life connection to people my own age, I temporarily moved out of my parent's house and back to New York to sublet a room in a friend's apartment in Harlem, which they shared with two other roommates.
We laughed at the howling cats competing with the adhan to the Mosque next door, echoing through the alley between buildings. We watched RuPaul's Drag Race on Fridays, and braced for the unpredictability of the steam pipes working on the coldest nights in winter. Initially, it was good for me. Walking down Riverside Drive to work at Columbia's libraries every day, I plotted my escape, knowing I was no longer in love with New York. I spent almost every hour applying and interviewing for jobs—most of which happened to be remote, which didn't help clarify where I wanted to go next. Every other week, one person seemed to be determining my future, every single time ripping it away.
Even though I'd secured full-time employment with a remote editing job in Big Tech, the pay barely covered week-to-week expenses, let alone a move to a new city. I’d already spent parts of the year crashing on air mattresses in friends’ living rooms while reporting stories, hopping from bedroom to bedroom while filming, and rotating through borrowed spaces in New York. The nomadic creative jig was long up.
For the second time, within a year, I had to move back home again. "Leave it all behind. There's nothing left for you to do here,” my friend whispered in my ear as they saw me off and, this time, for good.
I'd decided that I wanted to move to Los Angeles because it was far away, and I'd briefly lived there before. All spring and summer, I interviewed for numerous positions and came close, but, again, nothing materialized.
"No" paired with being a woman turning 35, draped me in despair. I couldn’t separate universal post-graduate challenges from my previous life as an actor, viewing every rejection as part of one continuum. When you feel you have nothing, that you own no part of your life, it’s easier to covet your failures. The self-criticism that had once propelled me to do better curled into self-hatred.
My mother refused to indulge me, insisting that the only way through was forward. I’d watched her rise in her medical career, despite being a single mother with two children, and living with a chronic disease. She had never taught me to linger in self-pity, instead she charged against the quiet erosion of time. I’ve always led with my feelings—prone to moodiness, often drawn too easily to the plaintive seasons of life. I’ve longed for her emotional mobility, the ability to move through feelings without becoming trapped in them.
When you feel you have nothing, that you own no part of your life, it’s easier to covet your failures.
It was true that in recent months, desperation had outpaced my ambition. I was no longer a dreamer—I was just angry. For most of my life, I had resisted feeling whole, convinced that leaving space for creativity meant diluting visions of a happier life. I built big, plastic dreams to shield myself from the sting of my failures. The more my life tried to reveal its beauty—that I was already enough and had enough— the more I clung to the promise of more.
By autumn, the red maple never looked so red, and the sugar maple never looked so orange. Nature quiets the aggrieved ego. On every walk, I felt the sway of trees put it to death. On a walk a week before my birthday in late October, I quietly admitted to myself that I didn't want to go to LA. LA is where people go to find themselves, and if I went there, it was because I was looking to lose myself. The truth is terrifying, but I’ve wanted nothing more than normalcy and safety to replace the chaos caused by pain and isolation—two things that are, contrary to my long-held belief, not essential for living a creative life. Like many other 30-somethings, I believed that because bad luck was a kind of baseline, didn’t I deserve at least the minimum? And if I was failing at attaining the minimum, then was it so bad to desire for more? This search of a big life was a big lie keeping me stuck, keeping me from growing up.
I don't know the interior lives of the 30-somethings included in Wolfe's article, but I, like many, can relate to their feelings of falling behind. I would say to them what I've had to admit to myself, and it’s that growing up is a choice. It's taking your current salary and making it go further in a less expensive city. It's taking a job that you need, not that you want. It's finding a way to become a mother and a wife with what I currently bring to the table, not what I hope to. There is no bigger and better life waiting for us on the other end. We are the other end, and we don’t have a ton of time.
In "The Destructors", a gang of young boys in London decide to destroy a beautiful, damaged home that remarkably survived The Blitz of World War II. With nothing tangible to rebel against, the boys demolish the house in the pursuit of notoriety, to disregard material possessions, and with a fervent desire to change the established social order. Finding money in the owner's mattress, they burn it instead of stealing it. During a class discussion in Donnie Darko, Donnie, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, reflects on the story, telling Ms. Pomeroy that the boys "used destruction as a form of creation," burning the money without personal gain. "They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart."
Our country can also feel like it’s being torn apart for no reason. Our world is on fire, but fire can be a force of creation as much as destruction. Maybe our role isn’t to flounder in the failings of our 30-something lives, but to step up as creators—the adults we’ve been waiting to become. Growing up is choosing to show up and shape the world, refusing to burn up with it.