The Great Millennial Meltdown
Cosmopolitan UK|April 2017

If your twenties are meant to be the best years of your life, then why are so many young women experiencing crippling anxiety, abject loneliness and the advent of what they’re all calling a ‘quarter-life crisis’? Jennifer Savin, 24, checks into a retreat that claims to have the cure…

Jennifer Savin
The Great Millennial Meltdown

Try to imagine the scene, if you will. I am dancing and chanting while simultaneously having to make very intense eye contact with six total strangers in a ballroom high up in the Spanish hills. The act of doing all three at once is bad enough, and that’s before I’ve caught sight of my reflection laughing back at me from the glare of the window. What am I doing here? What are we, half a dozen seemingly normal young women from across the UK, doing here? Let me explain.

We have gathered in a four-star hotel in the Spanish town of Benahavís to spend the next week meditating, practising yoga and eating vegan meals, while spiritually exorcising ourselves. Each one of us has paid £300 to be here, and dutifully filled in a very thorough application form. (‘Are you familiar with gluten-free, plant-based eating?’ No, no, I am not, but I can name every dessert from the Pizza Hut menu, if you like.) Our reasons for this trip vary, from the two 29-year-old women in post-break-up wilderness, to the 30-year-old managing director who wants a career change and is feeling the pressure to get married. Yet we are all united in one thing: that we feel lost, cut adrift from the life path each of us thought we would travel. And so we have gathered here under the auspices of the retreat’s 29-year-old founder (bear with me, I’ll come onto her later) to seek spiritual guidance and life-affirming renewal. We have come, as the website puts it, because each of us believes we are experiencing ‘a quarter-life crisis’. 

This story is from the April 2017 edition of Cosmopolitan UK.

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This story is from the April 2017 edition of Cosmopolitan UK.

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