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The middle-aged millennial - by Naomi Kanakia

woman-of-letters.com · 1,693 words · saved by 1 readers

One day Rajiv woke up and realized that he was in a Cheever story! He didn’t think about it precisely in those terms, since he’d never read John Cheever. But Rajiv had grown up in America, and he had during his youth absorbed a certain kind of narrative about how middle-class life in the suburbs was stultifyingly dull. And as a result he’d grown up with a horror of that existence! But...now he lived it. He was a guy in his early forties with two kids and a mortgage who lived in the suburbs and was bored with his own life! Like, this exact kind of life that he’d been taught all his life was extremely boring—it turned out that it was indeed very boring. Somehow, without intending to, Raj had ended up living exactly the same life as his parents! Rajiv had grown up in New Jersey with very conventional Indian parents who really didn’t care about happiness or job satisfaction—they cared mostly about material things, about setting up their kids to succeed in life. They had really wanted him t

The middle-aged millennial Naomi Kanakia Nov 06, 2025 72 10 2 Share One day Rajiv woke up and realized that he was in a Cheever story! He didn’t think about it precisely in those terms, since he’d never read John Cheever. But Rajiv had grown up in America, and he had during his youth absorbed a certain kind of narrative about how middle-class life in the suburbs was stultifyingly dull. And as a result he’d grown up with a horror of that existence! But...now he lived it. He was a guy in his early forties with two kids and a mortgage who lived in the suburbs and was bored with his own life! Like

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