The middle-aged millennial
One day Rajiv woke up and realized that he was in a Cheever story! He didn’t think about it precisely in those terms, since he’d never read John Cheever. But Rajiv had grown up in America, and he had during his youth absorbed a certain kind of narrative about how middle-class life in the suburbs was stultifyingly dull. And as a result he’d grown up with a horror of that existence!
But...now he lived it. He was a guy in his early forties with two kids and a mortgage who lived in the suburbs and was bored with his own life! Like, this exact kind of life that he’d been taught all his life was extremely boring—it turned out that it was indeed very boring.
Somehow, without intending to, Raj had ended up living exactly the same life as his parents!
Rajiv had grown up in New Jersey with very conventional Indian parents who really didn’t care about happiness or job satisfaction—they cared mostly about material things, about setting up their kids to succeed in life. They had really wanted him to have a nice, safe, stable life—preferably as a doctor.
But Raj had said fuck you to that! I’m gonna achieve great things! So instead he went into consulting and, after two years, took a job at a tech firm. During his twenties, he pulled down six figure paychecks, and spent lots of time partying, doing drugs, and dating girls.
He’d worked for a few startups and had even taken a year off to do his own venture. Raj had these dreams of being a billionaire founder type, had really believed in his idea with all his heart.
But in retrospect people had been laughing at him. You know, people always laugh at a great idea—that’s what you hear. But it’s not true. In Silicon Valley, when people hear a great idea, they usually open their checkbooks. That didn’t happen to Raj.
His girlfriend had really stuck by him—Saundra was the only good thing to come out of that year. He’d realized that Saundra was something different, something special. It was hard to explain, because all of his friends had claimed to believe in him. But after a few months, they started avoiding him. And this girl, Saundra, who he’d been seeing only casually—she had really drawn closer to him.
He’d waffled a bit about proposing to her. It just—it wasn’t what he’d dreamed for himself, right? He was a man, he’d always gone through life seeing these fabulously beautiful girls who were smart and witty and dangerous, and he figured at some point one of those girls paid attention to you—you won them over somehow—and then you married them.
With Saundra it wasn’t like that. She was someone he met in a bar and took home. Afterwards she texted him a few times, and she was easy to talk to—really simple, no strings attached.
She was just a nice, pretty girl whose company he enjoyed.
And who was he to expect more than that? He’d gained a little weight since college, and even in college he wasn’t that hot. Like, honestly, they were a good match.
But he’d just always wondered—how do two ordinary-looking, ordinary-seeming people actually fall in love? People like his parents—folks who were so lifeless and dull—and yet somehow they claimed to love each other.
In his case, he couldn’t say he was head-over-heels for Saundra. But when he looked into the future, he always saw her. He was grateful she’d come into his life. He couldn’t imagine going out on the apps and auditioning for the interest of all these basic girls who happened to have high cheekbones. Fuck them.
So he married Saundra instead. By then he’d dropped his venture and gotten a job at another tech company. They were in their early thirties, and it seemed like having kids was the thing to do.
Rajiv wasn’t totally sure, but Saundra really wanted them. So they got a loan from his parents, put together their financials, and they bought a two million dollar house on the south side of the city.
Now he was forty-two years old, and he had two children, and he was exactly like his own parents! He was spending all his time driving these kids around to various activities and lessons and things.
And he was pretty unhappy.
He had no more ambition to do great things, which meant instead he spent a lot of time planning for retirement, which would only be in twenty years.
But all his retirement calculations hinged upon him continuing to have a job. Except his company had recently done a round of layoffs. What if they cut him in the next round? If he hit the bricks at age forty-two, with his resume, he wasn’t sure he’d find something else. And in the meantime, they’d still need to pay their mortgage, pay all their other expenses.
It was pretty terrifying. He could put in more hours at work, but...would that really be a good use of time? Layoffs were theoretically not for cause, and lots of good people had been laid off he knew. So even if he spent the next five years working harder, putting more strain on Saundra, making her do more pick-ups, he could still get laid off randomly.
Anyway, this life felt boring. It had no joy, no aspiration. He had two kids, a son and a daughter. What would they think of him when they grew up? What would they tell their friends about him? He worked so hard just to give them a stable home and take them to school, but honestly their college fund was looking kind of scanty. And he wasn’t sure he could give them a downpayment for a house like his parents had for him.
He wasn’t raising them with any particular sense of responsibility or obligation. His parents hadn’t necessarily raised him that way either—they’d just wanted him to make money and have a family, to perpetuate himself.
Raj understood now why people had affairs. At best, it was some excitement. At worst, it broke you loose from this life. But he honestly didn’t know where he’d find the time to cheat on his wife. It would be difficult. Maybe if he traveled more for work.
It was strange that so many years had passed in this country, and this pattern of life was still so durable! That in the 50s, you had people bored at home by their boring lives. And their kids, the boomers had grown up pledging to be different, but they’d also ended up bored at home with their boring lives. And their kids, the millennials, had also sworn to be different, but the same thing had happened to them.
Rajiv’s parents had come from India, and they’d seemed somehow immune to this angst and yet very much a part of this bourgeois, middle-class life. Maybe that was the answer: his parents had a great adventure in life. They had come across the ocean to a new place. Everything they had was different and new.
Now Rajiv had the same things as them, but his journey was a lot smaller, so none of it felt worthwhile. Honestly, retirement was the only thing keeping him going. He sort of wanted to rent an RV and travel around the country, but his wife always nixed the idea.
One night in bed, he asked Saundra, “Are you happy?”
“What?” she said. “Yes, of course.”
“Really?” he said. “You’re not bored?”
“Why would I be bored?” she said. “You are a terrorist! Asking me these Are you happy? questions every month like you’re on a menstrual cycle.”
“I do not ask you every month,” he said.
“You do. You really do.”
“Okay, but...that doesn’t make you unhappy?”
“No!” she said. “It’s reliable.”
“So you don’t worry about me?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. Should I be?”
“I don’t know. This life...it is boring,” he said. “We’ve gotta figure out something to do with the kids besides taking them to soccer practice.”
“That...yes,” she said. “I agree. So...let’s do something on the weekends that isn’t boring. Let’s use our free time in a way that’s not boring.”
“It sounds so revolutionary when you say it,” he said. “But okay you know what this means...”
“Now I’m afraid.
“We have to rent an RV! We have to do it! Let’s take the plunge—find a long weekend.”
“No, come on, no.”
“I am going to talk to the kids about this. That’s my secret weapon. I am going to sell them on this idea. Priti will go for it, you know she will—she read that book—that camping book.”
“You’re horrible.”
“This is so good, it prepares us for all eventualities. Best case scenario, we have something fun to do on the weekends. Medium-case, I get laid off, and we need to downsize and live in an RV.”
“Worst-case?”
“Huh?”
“What’s the worst-case scenario?”
“Nuclear war, collapse of civilization, but I guess it’d be hard then to find fuel for the RV. Anyway...we’re doing it.”
“No, come on.”
And, like many a generations of middle-aged suburban dads before him, Rajiv developed a sudden passion for camping and RVs and the outdoors. During one trip, another guy turned him on to a particular history podcast, and for days all Rajiv could talk about was Alexander the Great.
He read many books about Alexander the Great, and he got a surprisingly large contingent of the other dads in the neighborhood to get into Alexander the Great. They all started listening to this history podcast (it was Hardcore History, of course) and dragging their families camping together.
It turned out that his boredom wasn’t existential—he was just literally bored. Once he found something to occupy his attention he was more or less content.
Haha, I love the ending. And the wink to the "thinking about the ancient Roman empire" meme, even if it was ancient Greek empire here.
I was TERRIFIED of this boredom and saw that in all the stories people just suddenly found themselves there, 40 with two kids and a boring job, like they had been Sleeping Beauty and suddenly woke up.
I was so terrified of it that I have thought about it literally every day since I was a teenager. Every decision I make about my life is held up to scrutiny.
I am happy to report that my life is great and not boring at all, but it could have gone another way. People make decisions towards stability and predictability for a reason.
I liked this one. The anticlimax is always fun.