Happy IWD*: Unpacking the Wild Rollercoaster of Health Challenges for Millennial and Gen Z Women
*even if its a couple days late
Okay, let's take a good hard look at the whole kaleidoscopic paradox that is being a millennial or Gen Z woman right now. On paper, they seemed to arrive at adulthood armed with all this shiny progressive armour - higher education cred, more money moves than their boomer moms, lower incarceration rates. But zoom out, and you can see those gleaming credentials getting straight-up sabotaged by the shitshow of economic headwinds pelting them from every angle.
The wildfire of inflation is a whole insidious force eating away at their hard-won wages and financial foothold. Just as they're trying to set down roots and grab their girlboss bag, the games get cruelly re-rigged so upward mobility becomes this skittish horizon line, lurking just out of reach behind the cascade of soaring prices.
Employment clout, reproductive rights, the whole cosmology of "leaning in" - it's all getting asphyxiated by the hot panic-breath of economic calamity. So while the rah-rah suite of hashtag-feminism hailed them as the ascendant vanguards of progress, the material conditions shaping their lived reality tell a more convulsed story of precipitous precarity.
Couple this with the psychological fallout still simmering from the pandemic years, and you've got a perfect storm of inner turbulence. The relentless grind of #selfcare and resilience fiction was its own frankensteined coping ritual - a girlbossification of solitude that bonded millennial #hustle with Zoomers' hyper-aware onset of digital isolation. You had this eerie mass gaslighting where the private interiors of their grief went utterly untended as we all got tennis-grunted into this stiff-upper-lip performance of “pushing through."
Now, as we survey the ashy mental health wreckage they've inherited, it's clear their vaunted resilience came at a vicious psychic cost. The pandemic's chokehold left distinctive psycho-spiritual smudges on this hyper-connected meta-cohort - imprints that will reverberate through their politics, their relationships, their recalibrated self-concepts for years to come in spectres we're just barely beginning to name.
So, for millennial and Gen Z women, striving to conjure that sleek, hot career girl mirage has become a brutally layered dissociative praxis. The forces actively undermining them are these hydra-headed tentacles - economic dismantling, pandemic devastation, the memeified insanity of our polarized political id. There's a constant cognitive dissonance between the digispheric girlboss fictions they've been prodded to inhabit and the fraughtly-materialised realities actively strangling their forward ascent.
You've got this entire generation shaped by the Internet's deliriously opstep- yet they're the same young women who've had its shadow-venom course through their veins, corroding their self-worth and mental flourishing. The exact portal that bestowed visibility and connection has also become ground-zero for a total self-annihilating übercurated wipeout. Dismantling societal pressures while swimming in the backwash of digital ones is the chilling paradox at the core of their path forward.
This International Women’s Day let's resist glazing over our struggles with the typical cloying resilience fan-fiction. Their hyper-documented conditioning as the "digitally-Delphic" Chosen generation warps into a brutal counterpoint when we actually sink into the granular ugliness of their material and psychological conditions. Is the next frontier of feminism about triage - about dismantling the corrosive forces sundering their road to self-actualization? Or is the rallying cry to reframe resilience as something thunderously internal, a quiet refortifying of boundaries and interiority and self-concept beyond the hot-shot metrics of economic ascent?
Before we decree their blazing path forward, we must reckon with the haunting nuances of what got shattered, what's still simmering in the spectral afterglow. It's about seeing the screaming dissonance between the glow-up branding and the granular traumas actively detonating their self-actualization however softly we've tried to muffle it thus far. Only by sitting with the knotted complexities of their paradox - the sundering between performance and condition, curated identity, and rawboned truth - can we architect something beyond the tired, commodified optimism rituals they've been indoctrinated into from birth. Even resilience gets flattened into an emotional capitalist script if we're not careful. Today, let's honour their anomie as much as their ascent.
This post was inspired by this article referencing the PRB Population Bulletin - GEN Z, MILLENNIAL WOMEN FACE HISTORIC HEADWINDS WHEN IT COMES TO THEIR HEALTH, abcnews