Redefining Tradition in a World That Forgot Us

MJ Wynn
Jun 3
5 min read

11:43 PM and I'm sitting here in my favorite oversized sweater, second cup of sleepytime tea getting cold next to me (again), thinking about how absolutely wild it is to feel both like a grown-ass adult and simultaneously like I missed some crucial life orientation meeting that everyone else somehow knew about. 😢

You know that feeling when you're doing all the "right" things—paying bills on time (mostly), making your therapy appointments, doing that bougie little skincare routine you saw on TikTok—and for a moment you're like "yes, I am CRUSHING this adult thing"... and then you open your bank app or hear someone casually drop their five-year plan into conversation like it's nothing, and suddenly you're back to feeling like a lost kid in a Costco? Yeah. That.

God, we're all trying so hard. Not in that girlboss-gaslight-gatekeep way, but in that real, raw, sometimes-I-cry-in-my-car-between-errands way. We're attempting to build lives we can actually live in. Not just survive in, not just curate for the 'gram, but genuinely inhabit. And yet—I look around at my friends, at myself, and we're all walking around with this quiet suspicion that we're somehow doing it wrong.

🧠 The Blueprint Wasn't Made for Us

Curled up on my bed tonight, scrolling past another "30 Under 30" list I'm now too old for, it hit me:

we were promised a world that doesn't exist anymore.

We were handed this boomer-flavored life recipe: get good grades, go to college, land a stable job, buy a house, get married, have 2.5 kids, retire at 65. Throw in some Pinterest-perfect weddings and Instagram-worthy backyard BBQs, and boom—you've made it.

Except... plot twist. The economy said "new phone who dis," the housing market ghosted us harder than that Hinge date from last month, and the job market? It left us on read like your ex watching your story but never liking your posts.

So here we are—a generation of adults without a map, trying to build something beautiful out of vibes, therapy memes, and collective burnout. We're redefining stability not because we're trying to be rebellious, but because capitalism literally left us no choice.

I know 36-year-olds living with roommates, still carrying shame about it even though their roomie situation is healthier than half the marriages I see. I know brilliant, beautiful humans living their best single lives while fielding constant "but when are you settling down?" questions at every family gathering. And I know people who checked all the boxes—the spouse, the kids, the mortgage—who still DM me at 2 AM wondering if they're doing it right.

We're not broken. The system is.

(And yes, I know that sounds like something I'd reblog on Tumblr circa 2012, but it's still true.)

🌱 Our Traditions Are Growing Out of the Cracks

But here's the thing that makes me want to happy-cry while high-watching nature documentaries:

We ARE creating tradition. It just looks different than what our parents would have planned (they're still trying to print out Facebook, bless their hearts).

Instead of formal Sunday dinners with matching plates, we have chaotic group chats and FaceTime sessions where someone's always eating and someone else is always walking somewhere and someone's showing off their cat. We do potlucks where everyone brings random Costco's apps and someone's rescue dog is definitely eating snacks off the floor and nobody cares.

Our families aren't nuclear—they're chosen. They're the friends who show up with soup when you're sick, the group chat that feels like a warm hug in your pocket, the people who'll drive you to a doctor's appointment or sit with you in silence after a breakup, passing a joint back and forth while you process your feelings.

We're building lives around intention, not performance.

Soft mornings with oat milk lattes in mismatched mugs. Weekly therapy sessions we sometimes attend from our cars. Living room dance parties to Taylor Swift. Tarot readings when we're too anxious to make decisions. Canceling plans to rest without guilt. Crying at 3 AM because capitalism is exhausting and no, you're not lazy, you're just fucking tired.

And yeah, it's messy. But it's ours. 💫

🧷 Why It Still Feels Like We're Failing

The truth is (and I'm writing this part through tears because my milk expired AND Mercury's in retrograde), even as we carve out these new ways of living, we're carrying the weight of the old ones.

There's this quiet guilt that sits in our chest every time our parents ask about marriage, or when someone at work does that thing where they say "YoU dOn'T hAvE kIdS yEt?" with that specific inflection that makes you want to throw your ergonomic mouse across the room.

And the grief? Oh, the grief is real. Grief for the life we thought we'd have by now. The security we assumed would come with age. The certainty our parents seemed to have (even though we now know they were just as lost, they just didn't have Instagram to compare themselves to).

I look at my friends—my beautiful, resilient, slightly unhinged friends—and I see people doing the absolute most with the absolute least. Creating magic on a budget that barely covers rent. Starting businesses while working full-time jobs they hate. Somehow managing to heal from childhood trauma AND meal prep AND keep their plants alive (mostly).

We're not behind. We're building a new road while walking it, which is objectively harder than following an existing path.

But when no one before you has done it quite this way, it's so easy to feel lost. And lonely. Even in our hyper-connected, always-online world.

🌿 Maybe "Figuring It Out" Isn't the Point

What if—and I'm typing this as my cat taps my shoulder for the fifteenth time tonight—we just... stopped trying to "arrive" at some final form of adulthood? What if we just existed in this beautiful, messy in-between?

What if our tradition is just... this? Group therapy memes and daily 420 rituals and showing up for each other when capitalism tries to crush our spirits?

What if being a millennial means permanently living in the space between what we were promised and what we're creating? Between burnout and breakthroughs? Between the nostalgia of Beanie Babies and the comfort of Squishmallows?