I had dinner tonight with some millennial writers and it was sort of amazing. They are reading all kinds of obscure literature and poetry and plays. They are writing plays and putting them on. Some are in therapy. Some love their parents. Their post college years have been decimated by Covid and yet they are full of the future, full of questions, in love with their friends. They make plans. They live in Brooklyn, they like to dance, they host theme parties, and help with the dishes. I felt old and young. I was very neurotic in my mid-twenties. All I wanted was to know how things were going to turn out.
What kind of twenty something were you?
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Betsy Lerner 
Work-wise, encumbered by my own and others’ expectations, beaten down by other more competitive 20 somethings and no real idea how to get to what I didn’t know I wanted. It was a strange and distesssing time. Lucky I was in love.
20 – identity crisis
22 – drafted
23 – married
25 – divorced
28 – fled to Europe
“What kind of twenty something were you?”
Stoned.
Wed.
Divorced.
Enrolled.
Graduated.
Wed again.
Drunk.
Enrolled again.
Parent.
Drunk again.
Lived in Africa.
Through no effort of my own I was offered a book deal the head of the publishing company said would make me famous. With the advance I bought a Cadillac and a white German Shepherd dog that bit everybody, including me. I’m not famous so you know I F-d up the book deal. The dog was hit by a pick-up, thank God, or one of the neighborhood kids that teased him would not have had a face left.
Went into business, had an affair with a married guy, lost my business, lost the guy.
It was a hell of a decade.
At 23 I was a very young mother and widow who wrote poetry for all my dates. I burned them all a few years later. Those days I lived fully without effort every day, worried, happy, sad, delighted by my son. I did wonder whether I would ever be able to be a successful writer. At 70 I’m going all out.
Working in publishing
Married to 1st husband
Controlled by demons
Did the dishes
At 73 still working in publishing
Married to husband #4
I’m controlling demons
22 We were going to the moon. I helped. Anything is possible.
25 Met the perfect girl, still married, 3 kids, 1 died.
28 Made computers talk, solved the AI equation, automated a factory.
30 Began writing… still trying.
“What kind of twenty something were you?”
A dumb one – truly.
No real guidance. No real choices. So I got married too young, had babies too young, became a single working mother who spent too much time in the clubs with lots of good and bad boys.
I was a reliable and responsible young woman for the most part, with so much to learn.
I think I was more qualified to be an adult in my twenties than I am now in my sixties…
What a fascinating question. (And answers.) i
Oops my iPad ran off without me. Starry eyed and sure I knew it all. 19, married, teaching. 20-24 living in Switzerland, first child. 24-29 3 more children. 30, just about ready for a feminist revolution and writing.
John C. Krieg
Penetrating question. I’ve been pretty hard on millennials and Generation Z, and I don’t like that they refer to us boomers as “hoarders.” It’s not my fault that I lived in a time when you could get ahead. I do admire that they are capable of functioning under the yoke of the Orange Furer. Jean M. Twenge explains it all in Generations (2025), but my biggest takeaway is that every generation feels that the succeeding generation is soft and unmotivated which is self-condemnation in the extreme because who in the hell do they think raised them?
The kids are alright, and it’s not lost on me that the “reminiscence bump” is a very real thing although I highly suspect that very few of us were ever as dynamic as we remember ourselves as being.
Covid, AI, robotics taking away jobs – there’s a lot for them to deal with, and now the banks are trying to issue 50 year mortgages. They have a very rough road ahead of them, but just like us, their lives are their own and they will have to find a way.
Anyway, to specifically answer the question: In1974 at 23 I graduated college. Nixon got reelected and I will say that everything bad in a hippy’s life begins and ends with Nixon. At 24 I got my first job with an architect in Buffalo. At 26 I lived in Phoenix, Arizona working as a landscape architect. Ever see The Last Days of Disco? It was like that. Then, God help us all, the country/western bars hit and were gone two years later. Everything after that is a blur except in 1980 when I was 29 Reagan got elected which I personally view as the beginning of the end with the birth of trickle-down economics because nothing ever trickled down to me.
Nixion begat Reagan, and Regan begat Bush 1, and Bush 1 begat his dim-witted kid, who begat the Mad King. But I digress…
Yeah – neurotic is a very accurate word that describes my twenties, my entire life actually, and my neurosis has been crippling on occasion. But no matter what hardships we are burdened with, in order to have a functioning society, we are expected to rise above them which brings us back to the children that we speak of (Bowie ripoff). It’s their life and no one else’s, and life is for the living which they appear to be doing just fine. I also admire the fact that they make plans because they obviously see a future for themselves, and besides that, whose life is it anyway?