As I turn 40, I’m letting go of perfectionism and choosing something else

On the eve of turning 40 last month, I was pondering why milestone birthdays make us so afraid. Yes, they’re a reminder of the fragility of life, and our own mortality. That time marches on despite our protests. But for Millennials like me, I wonder if the start of our fifth decade on earth isn’t more complicated still.

We are the first generation to age online. Our lives rendered in real-time, sliced into captions and stories and curated for an audience that stretches well beyond people we know. We don’t just live, we curate a timeline. We don’t just age, we evolve while staying true to our personal brand. In the public sphere, growth is content and birthdays require planning for a sufficiently engaging annual content drop.

Social media taught Millennials to narrativise ourselves – and now the story is getting scary.

We fear a loss of social currency because we conflate visibility with self-worth. Youth is rewarded not only with attention, but with validation, licence and power. Millennial women, raised on an unsophisticated reality television diet of Next Top Model and The Biggest Loser, learned early that looking older is to be avoided at all costs.

And costs are precisely what we incur in the course of that avoidance. Because with enough money, time and tolerance for pain, the visibility of age can now be quite effectively denied. We can plump our skin, erase its lines, smooth its crinkles and cover its dark spots. One tap of a credit card, and we are drinking our collagen, boosting our protein intake, optimising our cellular metabolism, personalising our fitness routines, and standing on a vibrating plate, wearing a sheet mask, while brushing our teeth before bed.

We moved out of home later, we married later, we had children later, and many of us will never own our own homes.

We fear irrelevance because our generation has been on the front line of accelerated media and trend cycles. Having spent our teenage and adult years immersed in online culture, Millennials are sharply aware of how quickly the centre moves. The world feels younger, faster and more iterative than before. Where once we set the trends, now we’re scrolling past them. We’re being left behind by a new version of the world we were once so fluent in.

In the age of LinkedIn, the big and fundamental life questions of who we are and why we matter are subject to immense performance pressure. Our 30s are now the decade of “knowing yourself”, while in our 40s we learn to “no longer care what people think”. At each stage, the stakes are higher. Our self-doubt boiled down to a monetisable algorithm.

We fear diminishment because ageing requires confronting our bodies as imperfect vessels. Injuries linger longer. Recovery is less reliable. Energy is a limited resource. Illnesses become chronic and our tummies are always unhappy. While the physicality of ageing is the reality for every generation, it is further complicated for the Millennials who have hustled to optimise literally everything about ourselves.

We were raised in the church of self-improvement. We believed that to be extraordinary, we must transform our passions into professions, and our identities into brands. We’ve even commoditised self-care. Ageing disrupts that momentum. In doing so, it thankfully makes room for other values, such as acceptance and care. But these are harder to quantify in a way that Millennials are satisfied by: in a dashboard or slide deck.

To age is to see more clearly the finitude Millennials have managed to ignore more effectively than any generation before. We moved out of home later, we married later, we had children later, and many of us will never own our own homes. In the absence of traditional markers of adulthood, the Millennial future always seemed abstract and elastic. Now it appears with outlines. There are only so many more projects we get to start, so many more cities we will live in, so many more people we will love. Our possibilities have narrowed and our losses have expanded to fill the space.

As my peers and I grapple with the next stage, my hope lies in profundity on the other side of fear. Ageing comes with permission to loosen our grip on perfectionism. It softens ambition and opens opportunities for discernment and wisdom. Ageing feels scary when we confuse it with losing our edge. But meaning doesn’t live on the edge. It occupies another place, where life is slower, more tender and less performative.

I wonder if 40 isn’t my chance to step off the treadmill. To stop trying to become someone, and instead to sit comfortably beside the person I already am, away from the glare of the blue light and the dopamine hit that comes with likes and shares. To get to know her more fully and perhaps learn to like her, for who she really is.

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