Friday Chat: Failure to Launch

Megan: Hey, hey, hey, it’s Friday. Are you ready for the weekend? I’m ready for the weekend. I’m always ready for the weekend.

Nicole: Totally. Next week’s going to be my busy holiday events week, so this weekend I hope to stay inside and do nothing except buy gifts and write cards and stuff.

Megan: This is my busy holiday week, and so is next weekend, but I will reward myself with silence and television around, uh, Christmas, I guess.

Wait, so we had a thing we wanted to talk about! Something that made me feel strange, and then annoyed, and then strange again. Millennial rehab, or what they’re calling “failure to launch” — like that movie, but for depressed millennials who can’t seem to get out of their parent’s house, I guess. Did you read this long and thinking-face-emoji article?

Inside the $27,500-a-Month ‘Rehab’ for Stuck Millennials that Attempts to Turn Them into Adults

Nicole: I did, but I want to mention Failure to Launch first, because that movie — which I’ve never seen — is from 2006 and is about a 35-year-old man played by Matthew McConaughey, which means he would have been born in 1971, which makes him NOT A MILLENNIAL, and makes that movie’s audience NOT MILLENNIALS EITHER. And yet they’re still applying that phrase to us, like we invented it. We did not.

Megan: I thought I had seen that movie, but just read the plot and I feel like I need to watch it immediately because scumbag Matthew McConaughey is my embarrassing celebrity crush. Um, yeah. He’s not a millennial and certainly wasn’t in 2006, at the age of thirty-freaking-five. Like, If I were still living in my parent’s house at that age, I would be in VERY BIG TROUBLE. Or I would be evicted. By my parents. Like, my stuff thrown in a box on the street, Angela Bassett in Waiting To Exhale style, minus the fire part.

Wow, anyway, okay! So what this article informs us is that millennials (actual ones) who are seemingly incapable of getting their lives off the ground are going to very expensive rehab facilities to be treated for what really just sounds like low-level depression and generalized anxiety.

Nicole: Well, there are a couple of different types of treatment being offered, because some people in the profile do seem to have generalized anxiety and others are addicted to heroin. But yes, the focus of the article — and the part we’re supposed to think about — is the whole “do Millennials need help, and if so, should it cost their parents $27,500 a month?”

Megan: Oh right, yep, forgot that the facility treats serious issues, like the aforementioned heroin addiction. That’s fine, by the way. I’m in full support of that. What I am definitely NOT in support of is these millennial babies causing their parents even more trouble by requiring admittance to a facility that costs as much as a public university education.

Nicole: You’d almost wonder if it would be just as helpful for the parents to use that money to support their child, either in the family home or in a separate apartment, while the Millennial looks for work. But that brings up a huge issue, because there might not be work. Or it might be work that is exploitative, or dead-end, or not in the person’s field, or unstable, or the job might only last for a few months, or all of these things. If you can’t buy your kid a job and that kind of stability, you can buy them this.

Megan: Whew. It is certainly a lot to consider. And I get that a parent probably wants the best for their child and if the parent can see their kid is suffering and can’t seem to put on anything other than sweatpants, then maybe throwing $27,500 at the problem to simply get the problem out of their house — and ostensibly to solve the problem — is one way to do it. Like, a kid could get a job that feels dead-end or “bad” or not in their field, and you know what? THAT’S STILL A JOB. I think whatever a facility like this is doing is good — it’s treating depression and a general lack of motivation that feels like it’s so deep that you can’t just shake it — but marketing it as a millennial rehab for kids who can’t get their shit together makes me deeply upset. Nothing is perfect, babies! Life is hard!

Nicole: I know that one of the reasons I went to grad school, after I graduated undergrad and found I was only eligible for temp jobs, unpaid positions, and telemarketing, was so I could have structure and a sense of forward motion. Which is also what this place is providing. It’s putting Millennials among peers, it’s saying “if you do these things your life will be better,” and it’s giving them boxes to tick to say “I did this, so I did well today.”

It’s also, and I found this same experience in grad school, kind of infantilizing. There’s a lot of “we’re going to tell you how to feel and how to express your feelings, and you have to fall in line with what we say feelings are” kind of thing.

And then we get this quote from the author at the end: “Stability is rare and fleeting. It’s not the reality for most people I know.” Which is the opposite of the program, and the opposite of what I was seeking in grad school, and so on.

Megan: Your point about grad school is very valid; I briefly considered getting my Ph.D in something not very useful, in part to combat some of the same feelings of looming panic about being dumped into the world with a lot of debt and no actual job prospects. My dad — who has a Ph.D — told me that I’m not disciplined enough to do it (LOL, he was right) and that it would be a huge mistake!! And I wasn’t even salty about it when he said that, I was just like, “Man, okay, you’re right.” And then I worked at a coffee shop for a while, and some other places, failing to launch appropriately, really, until, like this year.

But maybe the definition of “launching” for everyone is different?

Nicole: It has to be, right? I think about how hard it was for me when I graduated college in 2004, and how much harder it must be for people graduating right now. There were days, in that first year after college, where I would come home from my terrible job and just fall onto the old grungy carpet and cry, but my job — my telemarketer job — also paid enough for me to live on my own in a studio apartment, and that’s not a thing that can happen anymore.

Megan: Oh yeah, I mean, crying about my various jobs that I had that I hated was routine. A passion of mine, really. But, no, seriously, I don’t know if a telemarketer job that pays enough for a studio apartment is a thing that’s possible in 2016. So maybe the babies have it harder these days! Maybe I should be easier on them, but another CRUCIAL thing that this piece implies is that the parents of these children are well-off. I mean, obviously, they are. They can pay $27,500 a month for Millennial Rehab. They’re fine. I think a lot of people feel the way they do, BUUUTTTT a lot of those people have to just, you know, go figure something out and find some work, because their parents can’t support them.

Nicole: I also think we have to accept that not everything that happens to us will be good. Both Millennials and their parents. I also think that Millennials — and everyone really — should have access to therapy and mental health care, and that they shouldn’t have to go to an expensive rehab facility just to have someone to talk to.

Megan: That is the most valid point of all — mental health care is super important and if you’re aware enough to know that something’s wrong, you certainly shouldn’t have to pay a buttload of money to get it figured out. Make therapy affordable! Find free clinics with student therapists. It’s okay to want to feel better, but it just doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

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