If there is one thing that millennials have perfected, it’s the fine art of just *winging it*. Eyeliner? Wing it. A presentation at work that you didn’t finish on time because you spent the entire night anxiously trying to find the right font? Wing it. The terrifying moment when you’re looking around for an adult to solve a problem, only to realise you are the adult? Wing it. Realising it’s the absolute final night to file your taxes and you have zero documents ready? Open the portal and wing it.
It’s absurd how we keep handing our overwhelming tasks over to a “future you” whom we inexplicably imagine to be a calm, organised genius with their life together. Do we genuinely believe we’ll wake up tomorrow with a fresh perspective and suddenly realise how pointless it is to keep putting off the inevitable? All we end up doing is disappointing our imagined future selves by passing on unfinished business. For all we know, future us had plans to be wildly productive, emotionally stable, and possibly even ahead of schedule for once, instead of spending another day dealing with the things we swore we’d get around to yesterday.
Clearly, we are all confidently making it up as we go along. We are living in a period where there is plenty to be anxious about: building a career, finding your passion, making money, complicated relationships, artificial intelligence, politics, and the general state of the world. Yet somehow, people are still booking holidays six months in advance. They are starting businesses and going to pottery classes on the weekends. For some, making plans is a way of creating order when everything feels unpredictable. For others, it’s a way of refusing to put life on hold until we feel ready, secure, or certain. We don’t necessarily make plans because we are confident things will work out. We make them because uncertainty hasn’t eliminated our desire to do things.
Colour-Coded Chaos
The number of times we’ve bribed ourselves with overpriced coffee or a K-beauty shopping spree to complete basic adult chores needs to be studied. I don’t think we even know if we’re rewarding ourselves for doing something difficult or simply trying to make mundane life a little more enjoyable. Micro-treats have become our everyday defence mechanism.
We stress over making a doctor’s appointment over the phone, yet we’re ready to travel across the country to get a matching tattoo with a stranger. We’re scared of commitment, but so ready to fall in love for the sixth time. We put a down payment on a house and decide to completely change the direction of our lives at 2 a.m. We’re somehow walking the fine line between being afraid of making major life decisions and being terrified of committing to the wrong thing.
Buying a brand-new planner or notebook convinces us that this new addition, with its colour-coded appointments and to-do lists, will be what it takes to finally organise our lives and resolve our existential crises. The next few hours are spent happily watching Japanese stationery haul videos. A fresh notebook offers the comforting illusion of a fresh start without requiring us to actually change anything. Planning feels productive, and organising our lives feels considerably easier than living the lives we are trying so hard to organise.
We thrive in this chaos, in this frantic attempt to make our lives look controlled and structured on paper, even as that carefully organised routine collapses by Tuesday afternoon. It’s the art of putting bright, pretty colours on top of everyday anxiety, finding temporary comfort in the illusion that we have it all under control.
Stubborn Optimism
For us millennials, the transition into adulthood has looked quite different from that of previous generations. They bought houses, raised kids, and “settled” into life, often on a single income and with a whole lot of adult responsibility. But us? We were pushed into adulthood while simultaneously being held back or delayed by economic and social realities. The old milestones became less predictable, and the sequence in which we were expected to achieve them no longer felt as straightforward or attainable.
That’s not to say earlier generations had it all figured out. Their lives weren’t necessarily easier, either. Limited choices and rigid social expectations brought their own uncertainties, and the lives they built weren’t always the lives they would have chosen for themselves. But there was a certain acceptance of how life was supposed to unfold. There was a roadmap, however imperfect, and a shared understanding of the steps you were expected to follow. Get an education, find a job, get married, buy a house, raise a family. Follow the script, fulfil your responsibilities, and you could reasonably expect to build a life of relative stability and contentment, even if happiness wasn’t always guaranteed.
We, on the other hand, have been handed an ever-expanding menu of possibilities. We’re encouraged to find our passion, pursue meaningful work, reinvent ourselves, question the status quo, and build lives that reflect who we truly are. That’s a wonderful thing, in many ways. But when there are a hundred different ways to live a life, how do you know which one is right for you? Every choice seems to come with the possibility of a better one left unexplored. And the freedom to change direction can feel an awful lot like the pressure to get the direction right in the first place.
Somewhere along the way, the timeline became less fixed, the milestones less certain, and the blueprint a lot harder to follow. Perhaps that’s where our wonderfully weird combination of resilience and delusion comes from, or perhaps it’s simply the human tendency to carry on regardless.
Maybe we are not uniquely broken. Maybe we’re just trying to make sense of a life that no longer comes with quite the same instructions.
Do we have all our ducks in a row? No, we don’t. Do we even know what or where our ducks are? Not a clue! Are we still making plans in circumstances we cannot control? Absolutely, yes. Intellectually, we know the future is uncertain, bleak even. But psychologically, we still have to behave as though a bright tomorrow exists. That’s why someone can spend the entire night worrying about their future and still wake up to book flights to Japan simply to buy stationery.
We are not necessarily in denial about how uncertain the future is; we’re just stubbornly unwilling to behave as though it holds nothing worth looking forward to. We worry, we work, we overthink, we plan, we have an existential crisis, and then, somehow, we carry on. Make the plan, change the plan, make another one. Cluelessly, confidently, and optimistically. So we book that pottery class again or buy another plant, even after the first five never survived.
Maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe that’s just how we get to the next day.