Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

Millennials are having their midlife career crisis

Bright statistics about senior management and billionaires don’t change how a lot of millennials still feel about work

Ayano Swisher started Sad Girl Lab after she was laid off from her job at an entertainment marketing agency. (Photo by Sela Shiloni)

Ayano Swisher’s business started as a joke about her own mood. During the pandemic, she did collage, printmaking, and eventually ceramics in a spare room of the apartment where she lived at the time. She called it the Sad Girl Lab, and the name stuck. Her roommate, who Swisher describes as “a very attract-positive-energy person,” once suggested Happy Girl Lab instead.

“Ew,” said Swisher, 33. “It just did not flow the same.”

Sad Girl Lab became a business this past spring, after Swisher was laid off from her job managing social media accounts at a private equity-owned entertainment marketing agency. The same day she was cut, she went to the bank, opened a business account, and got a tax ID number. Now, from her home in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, she makes handmade martini sets and dinnerware, which she sells at flea markets, as well as through the social e-commerce site Depop and her own website. She occasionally takes on restaurant commissions for custom plates and bowls. Swisher also publishes a zine with an astrologer friend that is stocked in boutiques in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. 

As she launched her business, she collected unemployment for a few months, eventually taking on freelance contracts for the sort of entertainment marketing work she used to do full-time: live-tweeting events like the Oscars and Golden Globes, as well as TV show airings. All the while, she has continued interviewing for full-time jobs, too.

“My millennial hope is what drives my ambition,” she said in an interview.

Millennials’ success is news to millennials

The Economist recently declared Swisher’s generation a success story. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996 and now aged 30 to 45, “earn more than any other recent generation did at the same age, and are catching up in terms of home-ownership,” the magazine said.

Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, and increasingly the ones in charge, after pandemic retirements left a senior-management vacuum and millennials filled it. Millennials also account for more than twice the share of America’s billionaires that Gen X $TWTR did at the same age. The Economist credited the rebound to “markets and events, not the state-funded rescue that some once called for.”

Those statistics portray some real progress. But catching up on homeownership is not the same thing as catching up on housing wealth, if only because buying later means fewer years of building equity and missing price gains, too. Nor does economic progress necessarily translate into feeling more secure. In Deloitte’s 2026 global survey, 45% of millennial respondents reported feeling burned out, and 30% said they felt stressed or anxious most or all of the time. In other words, statistics about senior management and billionaires don’t change how a lot of millennials still feel about........

© Quartz