Millennials were raised with inflated expectations, making the gap between ambition and reality painful.

Millennials set to be the first generation worse off than their parents, fuelling disillusionment at midlife.

Self-compassion, less social media, and gratitude can break the spiral of unmet expectations and resentment.

Where were you when you realised life wasn't going to work out exactly as planned? For me it was graduating with a degree in journalism at the height of the great recession and realising I probably wasn't going to be setting the world on fire with my writing prowess. The rude awakening of entering the workplace doesn't seem to be a purely millennial experience. Recent reports suggest Gen Z are equally unprepared for the onslaught of a 9-5, with a recent report finding that six in ten employers say they have already sacked some of the Gen Z workers they hired fresh out of college in recent months.

But it was the millennials who pioneered the trend of entering the workplace only to discover it wasn't going to live up to their dreams. The oft-quoted statistic is that millennials are on track to become the first generation to be less well off than their parents. Born between 1981 and 1996, millennials are now aged between 30 and 45 — approaching middle age, and arriving at exactly the point in life when people begin to seriously question how their careers and lives have turned out. This comes as an added shock to a generation who were tipped to become masters of the universe. The irony of being told you could do or become anything you wanted, only to end up faring worse than your forebears, seems to add insult to an already injured generation.

I know this territory intimately — not just from personal experience, but from my research into the careers and life experiences of women with ADHD. The women I interview are often in their late thirties, early forties, and beyond, as that is the trend for when women are most often diagnosed. They are, in other words, millennials arriving at midlife and taking stock. And an overwhelming theme that emerges from these conversations is the deep disappointment felt at the gap between where their lives and careers are now and where they feel they "should" be. It is from these women — and their candour in sharing their experiences with me — that the following words come:

"I remember growing up in the 90s… it just felt like anything was possible… now, it feels like the walls are closing in, the complete opposite of that optimism."

"I remember growing up in the 90s… it just felt like anything was possible… now, it feels like the walls are closing in, the complete opposite of that optimism."

This disappointment is what Christine Hassler termed the "expectation hangover" — the crash we experience when things do not go as we planned or hoped. And research suggests that millennials might be in for an even bigger expectation hangover than most, something akin to a night fuelled by tequila shots and Red Bull, as their expectations may have been even greater than normal.

Researcher Jean Twenge wrote a book on how millennials were brought up to inherit the world, but ended up unemployed and living in their parents' basements. In her book Generation Me, she summed up the quandary millennials found themselves in: told they could be anything they wanted to be, they faced widespread unemployment; raised on dreams of material wealth, more than a third lived with their parents well into their twenties. No one told them it would be this hard.

This all leads to a psychological spiral of entitlement, leading to disappointment, which then leads to resentment — which is where a lot of millennials find themselves now, washed up on the shores of Disappointment Island, having been shipwrecked from the HMS Millennial Optimism. Why do unmet expectations grate on us to the extent that they do? The answer might lie in what's known as Prospect Theory, where people evaluate events not by absolute values but by deviation from expectation — the classic example being that losing one hundred pounds hurts more than winning the same amount brings joy.

"Young people are told to 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' — but we're not even wearing the same shoes anymore."

"Young people are told to 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' — but we're not even wearing the same shoes anymore."

What remains true is that some level of disappointment and the ensuing expectation hangover is a given for any human experience. We are all going to face deep disappointment, disillusionment and unmet expectations at some point. The question should be: how do we deal with it in a healthy way that doesn't involve wallowing in shame, failure and regret? How do we come to terms with a life that doesn't look anything like the one we had envisioned?

Self-compassion involves forgiving your own failures and missteps and appreciating yourself as a fully human, fallible, and imperfect being. We are often harder on ourselves than we would ever be to others, and if we extend the same kindness to ourselves that we would offer another person who told us their disappointments, we can find the peace that comes with acceptance. In this age of hyper-individualism and self-optimisation, it can be a radical and life-changing act to simply accept oneself as human and forgive oneself for the inevitable failings that arise.

Limiting social media is one majorly overlooked advantage previous generations had over us: They weren't bombarded by 24-hour comparison in the form of social media. Years ago, if someone from your school became CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you might hear about it from your mum when you went home for Christmas — but nowadays we are relentlessly assaulted by the achievements and highlight reels of everyone we've ever known. Do yourself a favour and come off social media for a while; observe the impact this one act alone has on your mental health.

Gratitude — okay, hear me out. I can almost hear the eye-rolls as I mention the G-word, as it has become so clichéd and synonymous with a certain brand of woo-woo pop psychology over the years. But it works. Strip away the new age connotations and gratitude performs a simple process of disrupting the psychological pattern that feeds resentment — the tendency to fixate on what we don't have while becoming blind to what we do. Research has found that people who perform focused gratitude rituals report higher levels of well-being, optimism, fewer physical complaints, and greater progress towards personal goals.

https://www.intelligent.com/1-in-6-companies-are-hesitant-to-hire-recent-college-graduates/

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/advanced/a-new-generational-contract/

Expectation Hangover; Overcoming disappointment in Work, Love, and Life. New World Library. 2014\

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.

Twenge, J. M. (2014). Generation me-revised and updated: Why today's young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled--and more miserable than ever before. Simon and Schuster.

Neff, K.D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2, 85–102.

Gross, J.J., & John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

Emmons, R.A., & McCullough, M.E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377

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