Ayano Swisher’s business started as a joke about her own mood. During the pandemic, she did collage, printmaking, and eventually ceramics in a spare room of the apartment where she lived at the time. She called it the Sad Girl Lab, and the name stuck. Her roommate, who Swisher describes as “a very attract-positive-energy person,” once suggested Happy Girl Lab instead.
“Ew,” said Swisher, 33. “It just did not flow the same.”
Sad Girl Lab became a business this past spring, after Swisher was laid off from her job managing social media accounts at a private equity-owned entertainment marketing agency. The same day she was cut, she went to the bank, opened a business account, and got a tax ID number. Now, from her home in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, she makes handmade martini sets and dinnerware, which she sells at flea markets, as well as through the social e-commerce site Depop and her own website. She occasionally takes on restaurant commissions for custom plates and bowls. Swisher also publishes a zine with an astrologer friend that is stocked in boutiques in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.
As she launched her business, she collected unemployment for a few months, eventually taking on freelance contracts for the sort of entertainment marketing work she used to do full-time: live-tweeting events like the Oscars and Golden Globes, as well as TV show airings. All the while, she has continued interviewing for full-time jobs, too.
“My millennial hope is what drives my ambition,” she said in an interview.
Millennials’ success is news to millennials
The Economist recently declared Swisher’s generation a success story. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996 and now aged 30 to 45, “earn more than any other recent generation did at the same age, and are catching up in terms of home-ownership,” the magazine said.
Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, and increasingly the ones in charge, after pandemic retirements left a senior-management vacuum and millennials filled it. Millennials also account for more than twice the share of America’s billionaires that Gen X $TWTR did at the same age. The Economist credited the rebound to “markets and events, not the state-funded rescue that some once called for.”
Those statistics portray some real progress. But catching up on homeownership is not the same thing as catching up on housing wealth, if only because buying later means fewer years of building equity and missing price gains, too. Nor does economic progress necessarily translate into feeling more secure. In Deloitte’s 2026 global survey, 45% of millennial respondents reported feeling burned out, and 30% said they felt stressed or anxious most or all of the time. In other words, statistics about senior management and billionaires don’t change how a lot of millennials still feel about work.
Add to that a recent Glassdoor survey of more than 1,800 U.S. professionals, with 76% of millennials saying they’re actively questioning their career path, and 68% saying career uncertainty had delayed a major life milestone. Glassdoor characterized millennials’ response to all this uncertainty as “stability stacking,” or seeking to develop different skill sets, sources of income, and professional networks so that no one job, boss, or layoff can “knock you flat.”
Stability stacking may be about safety, but it’s plausibly related to burnout, too. Stacking happens after hours, on top of a full-time job, or in place of one that disappeared, so in that sense, it’s little wonder the burnout numbers look the way they do.
Maybe it’s just the timing that makes it strange. Call it stacking or call it patching — piecing together a living from several jobs is a familiar phase of many people’s early 20s, the dog-walking, barista, yoga-teaching years before something steadier and more coherent comes along. But millennials are building backup careers in the years when the first one was supposed to pay off, the prime career years, when experience usually turns into more leverage and power, and for college-educated women especially, when wage growth starts to flatten.
A layoff that came in installments
Swisher had worked in entertainment social media for about a decade, a job that meant long hours and going beyond stated job duties to keep clients happy. She spent almost six years at one agency, but felt there was little room to grow. “I definitely felt a bit stunted,” she said. After a ceramics studio opened near her house in 2019, the pandemic gave her time to explore the craft. The pandemic years had another thing going for them, Swisher said: Employers seemed to take work-life balance seriously. But in the years after the crisis, that focus receded, while more and more projects landed on her desk.
She moved to an agency she loved, with bigger-budget work for streaming companies. The wrinkle? It was owned by private equity, in an industry increasingly consolidating around her. Layoffs became a constant, but her own came in stages. First, her position was converted to freelance, then her contract wasn’t renewed, on the same day that the company cut much of her division. She had known it could happen. “When it’ll happen, you just don’t know,” she said. “Then you think, ‘Oh, OK, it’s my turn now.’”
Her severance was minimal. Her job search since has included interviews canceled mid-process because of layoffs or hiring freezes, and multiple rounds of interviews for short-term freelance roles.
Sad Girl Lab costs her about $350 a month to run, including a studio membership, booth fees for markets, and software subscriptions. She projects it will break even this year. A set of martini glasses takes about 30 hours of handwork and roughly two days in the kiln. The marketing, her old job, takes minutes. On a zero-dollar budget, she posts short videos of her work to Instagram, and a few have taken off, drawing orders from strangers outside her circle of friends.
Meanwhile, her health insurance is a subsidized Covered California plan, cheaper than COBRA and thinner than her old agency coverage.
“I was joking with my parents,” she said. “Interviewing is giving me zero dollars, and this is at least bringing in some money.”
The fear of getting stuck, again
Sam Crunkilton, 36, who’s based in Las Vegas, spent a dozen years in data and tech, most recently in SaaS consulting. She went in expecting stability. “There was a lot of money to be made and a lot of opportunities, and it felt like the world was open to me,” she said.
She was laid off for the first time in 2022, from a job she loved, and then again in January. AI hype made the consulting gigs that followed worse, she said, because clients “want instantaneous results that magically fix every problem they have.” In the months since, she’s been trying to move into nonprofit work.
Her stability stacking now includes an LLC for consulting projects, a willingness to take contract work, and studying for a certified management accountant exam. She treated her job search like a full-time job, one she would get up for early each morning. She is covered by her partner’s health insurance, so, as she said, “I don’t have to worry about being tied to a job.” To prepare for lower pay, she cut back both on online shopping and eating out. But her season tickets to the Chicago Cubs were always non-negotiable.
She finally started a new job this month, leading operations and business strategy at what she called a “political tech firm.” It’s “not quite the drastic shift to nonprofit work” she’d been looking for, she said, but “a mission-driven organization and not a typical tech firm driven by investors’ priorities.”
“My greatest hope as I'm making the switch is to truly love what I'm doing and feeling like I am making a difference every day,” she said. “My worst fear is that I will get stuck back in a job or career that I feel drained. I want to work to live, not live to work, and my fear is that those will flip again.”
Daniel Maghini
Feeling the ‘existential anxiety’ — and longing for ‘baseline security’
Daniel Maghini, 32, spent four years in the Army as an infantry mortarman, specializing in the 60mm mortar. After college, he went into enterprise software sales, first at a 600-person startup and then at a much smaller one. An “is this it?” feeling showed up about a year into the first job, he recalled. He left the smaller startup last year to work full time on The Gift Whisperer, a gift-recommendation site he runs alone from Austin, built and maintained with AI coding agents. “I absolutely could not have done this five years ago,” he said. He would have needed a technical co-founder, plus much more money and time.
Even so, his income is about 10% of what he made in sales. His health insurance comes through the Department of Veterans Affairs. He bought a house while he still had a steady sales paycheck, which made leaving “a much scarier decision,” he said, and also “a little extra motivator.” Asked whether any of this amounts to a midlife crisis, he offered an alternative: “maybe existential anxiety is a better fit.”
Nicole Kelner, 33, used to freelance, turning climate science into illustrations for clients including the Department of Energy and MIT. Last year she even published a book, Quietest Places in New York City, with the publishing house Rizzoli. On launch day, she saw it on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and spoke to more than 100 people at Rizzoli’s bookstore.
“But the next day, I realized my life wasn’t going to change overnight,” she said, explaining that she was realizing the dreams that had brought her to New York a decade before — and at the same time, thinking about how she had barely made art for fun in years. “I turned my hobby into my job and realized I want my hobby back,” she explained.
Looking to switch things up, she left her studio apartment near Prospect Park that cost almost $3,000 a month and moved back in with her parents in suburban Philadelphia. She was a little embarrassed at first, she said, but the moment she boarded the train home, relief came flooding in. These days, she and her parents cook and eat dinner together every night, and afterwards, they trade favorite songs for a shared “Family Dinner” playlist.
The change, she said, has made her realize how much she wants to be part of a team and to have a steady salary. So now she’s interviewing for product roles at startups. “I think my creative practice could actually thrive more once I have that baseline security,” she said.
The midlife crisis, revised for millennials
The psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques introduced the term “midlife crisis” in 1957 and published “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis” in 1965. His subjects were mostly artists in their late 30s confronting mortality and the limits of their talents. In 1973, a federal task force report applied the idea to middle managers who had plateaued inside big corporate bureaucracies and saw only decline ahead. Those managers had climbed as high as the company would let them.
But many millennials haven’t had the chance to either plateau or climb. Swisher, who runs Sad Girl Lab in Los Angeles, said many in her generation have accepted that they won’t hit the milestones their parents did. She’s adding the midlife crisis to the list. “I feel like millennials don’t get to have a midlife crisis due to the amount of ‘unprecedented,’ once-in-a-lifetime events we face,” she said.
“I’m not in midlife crisis territory, but I do feel like I’m starting over again and I’m back to square one when it comes to my career,” she said. “It feels like I’m in my early 20s again, but this time I have the leg up of having more knowledge and confidence on how to navigate everything.”
Her advice to burned-out millennials weighing a jump is short. “Do it,” she said. Companies don’t offer the loyalty or pensions their parents and grandparents had, and “you don’t know if you’re gonna get laid off tomorrow or not. So it’s just, like, why not?”
In the next moment, she revised her statement, adding a condition: Go for it if you have family money or a spouse who will support you.
She has neither. She’s going for it anyway.