Bridie Jabour and the Millennials' age of misery

In a year where it's been tough to be a Karen, I find myself somewhat distracted by stereotypes. I'm Gen X, in so many ways, (although being born in 1966 it scares me sometimes how close I am to the cusp of being a Boomer); apparently we can be a little cynical. No, really. I never would have guessed.

I started reading Trivial Grievances in this frame of mind. Very early on she's talking about a dinner party she was at where the women, all in their 30s, were bemoaning their marriages, their lack of success with online dating, how she'd personally published her first book before her 30, but "had been experiencing a certain kind of tedium for a little while". I wanted to poke all these women in the eye.

I barely remember 30. So much has happened since. If you're worried, I began thinking, about all these things, no, young things, just you wait until life has thrown another 20 years of tedium at you, then you can talk to me about misery.

But the more I read - and Jabour, who is opinion editor at The Guardian, is very readable - the more I came to - like her is perhaps not the right term - I actually found myself deriding her out loud on occasion - but came to understand her, and through her, the so-called plight of Millennials. Because I started to realise that no matter what stage or age you're at right now, or what decade you turned 30, or 50 even, we are all still questioning our place in the world.

Some Millennials seem to think the world revolves around them. That they are unique and special and that their problems are the most relevant and important. I dare not tell them it's been 20 years since Ally McBeal felt that way (McBeal, the young lawyer from the eponymous series, probably was, when you think about it, a Millennial, long before they were even invented). Why were her problems bigger than anyone else's? Because they were her problems.

Jabour, bless her, is a fun interview. Direct conversation is another Gen X trait so I'm frank with her from the beginning. I told her I didn't want to like her, that I was tempted to go at least part Karen on her. But she had won me over.

She laughs, and has been buoyed by the response of the older generations, who, for the most part, have seen that the book, that her malaise, is more than a Millennial whinge fest. That the book is about us all reassessing, questioning, what it is that is important in our lives.

She wrote a lot of the book during 2020, and she says the pandemic has made us all question where we're at.

"It's been a bit of a wake-up call," she says, from her home in Sydney.

"When you're locked in your house for months at a time it really gives you the space to think.

"It has really made people question their lives - should I be working this hard, should I be living this way, living here, do I want to be in the city, do I want a bigger garden and fresh air, what do I really want from the rest of my life?"

She first wrote about the idea in The Guardian. The article, "The Millenials at 31: Welcome to the age of misery" went live on New Year's Day, 2020.

Overnight, it received more than 600,000 clicks, and now it's been viewed more than half a million times. "The response was like a tsunami of discontent."

"I'd been feeling maybe a little bit despondent and certainly questioning things," she says.

"I wasn't exactly unhappy, but I realised, wow, this is what my life is like, I've said no to certain things and decided not to do certain things in my 20s, which I didn't think that much about at the time, like choosing to move cities or which job to go to.

"And then it hit me ... wow, those decisions really meant something, like they really closed off certain paths to me. It hit me that life wasn't as wide open to possibilities as it used to be.

"I suppose a little bit, I just started thinking about the cliche of what is the meaning of it all."

Things changed overnight; there were requests for interviews from around the world, emails from India, South America, Ireland. "I still get messages about it sometimes even now."

She knew she'd struck a nerve.

"It wasn't me being self-indulgent, there was something going on, something in the atmosphere." The article developed into the book, a series of essays, if you like, addressing different issues.

It was with the publisher in April 2021, when Jabour, her husband Matt and their young sons, just 10 months old and three, were hit by a truck as they were driving home; the car rolled three times.

The accident was so serious the air ambulance helicopter was called. But everyone walked away. Jabour broke her shoulder, her baby had a cut on his big toe, the only injury either of the children suffered.

"That night, I was in the pediatric ICU, which is a horrible place to be, but, thankfully, I was only there because the baby needed observing. I was just lying there at 10 o'clock at night, next to my sleeping baby thinking, wow, my book is so right, I'm glad I wrote that, because what I think the book ended up being about is what is important in life and how do you find joy in an ordinary life."

For all its complaining - she doesn't deny that part of it - Trivial Grievances is full of optimism, hope that we will all sort this out, that the secret to a happy life is less than we think it is, that there is a way.

"Life can be so great and I don't think you need very much to have an amazing life either," she says.

"Once you've got the basics covered, food, shelter, you're paying your basic bills, that sort of thing, and if you're healthy and able, there are so many extraordinary things you can notice each day. You have to remind yourself, whatever situation you're in, because there are frustrating parts of life, that this is a very normal and natural thing.

"The big reminder I give myself is sometimes, my kids are three and one, they're very energetic, and sometimes I get to the end of the day and I cannot listen to them say 'mummy' one more time, I cannot have another arm wrapped around my leg, I cannot pick up another freakin' book from the floor, and then I just think, this isn't going to stay like this forever."

Ah, Millennials. This is where I want to tell her that no, it won't stay like that forever, it might get worse, much worse. Wait til your babies are driving, or at a party with people you don't know, or pushing boundaries with drugs and sex, wait til they're in relationships you see are wrong, just wait. Oh, what I'd give for a pudgy little arm around a leg.

But that's not my place. The Millennials will work it out for themselves - the oldest of them are turning 40 for God's sake, if they haven't got it worked out by then.

But when do any of us have it worked out? Never. We've all been asking questions, questioning ourselves, since we could formulate a thought. It's what we have to do.

"Life is not just a series of things that happen to you," she says. "Ultimately you are the one who has to live your life, so what do you think about it?"