The Great Millennial Melt Down

If your 20s are meant to be the best years of your life, why are so many young women experiencing crippling anxiety, abject loneliness and a ‘quarter-life crisis’? Jennifer Savin checks into a retreat that claims to have the cure.

- Jennifer Savin

Try to imagine the scene, if you will. I’m dancing and chanting while simultaneously having to make 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 in the window. What am I doing here? What are we – six seemingly normal young women from countries around the world – doing here? Let me explain.

We have gathered in a four-star hotel in the Spanish village of Benahavis to spend the whole week meditating, practising yoga and eating vegan meals, while spiritually exorcising ourselves. Each one of us has paid quite a lot of money to be here, and dutifully filled in a very thorough application form. (‘Are you familiar with glutenfree plant-based eating?’ No, I am not – but I can name every pizza on 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, and cut adrift from the life path each of us thought she’d travel. So we’ve gathered here under the auspices of the retreat’s 29-year-old founder (bear with me; I’ll come to her later) to seek spiritual guidance and life-affirming renewal. We’ve come, as the website puts it, because each of us believes she is experiencing a ‘quarter-life-crisis’.