Charlie Kirk, one of America’s leading conservative activists and a close friend of President Donald Trump’s son Don Jr., has been murdered. We do not yet know who did it, or why. We do not know how the Trump administration will respond.

What we do know, however, is that there are good reasons to be afraid.

When a prominent political figure is assassinated, the very foundations of democracy come under attack. Democratic politics is, at its heart, a system for containing political violence: a system for resolving the inevitable deep disagreements between citizens without anyone resorting to bloodshed. It works when all major factions believe that the others are committed to following the rules of the peaceful political game; when that belief erodes, it breaks down.

In the past, the American democratic consensus has been strong enough to survive assassination attempts. Some, like the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., tested its bonds but didn’t break them. Others, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr., may actually have strengthened them by creating a sense of shared grief and solidarity.

But now the American political system is crumbling, and many of its tools for containing political violence lie shattered. This probably will not be the event to break America, but we have to consider the possibility that it may be.

The democratic compact today is undeniably weak. The two major parties and their supporters increasingly see each other not as partners, but existential threats to one another’s way of life. Political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe have shown that, while few Americans outright support political murder, a growing fringe in both parties have become open to using violence against their partisan enemies.

Under conditions of extreme polarization, when the guardrails of mutual democratic toleration are blown to bits, it is all too easy to see how things could spiral out of control. Leading right-wing figures are not only already prematurely blaming the attack on “the Democrat party,” but also calling for law enforcement crackdowns on liberals and leftists as a group. If Trump acts on these calls, it would further damage the democratic respect that stands between us and the abyss. Future rounds of political violence would become increasingly more likely. Violent breakdown of the democratic order would loom.

How likely is any of that? I’m not sure.

Think back to when Trump was shot on the campaign trail last summer. Nearly everything that I’ve just said about the fraying of the democratic order was true then, right down to top Trump allies immediately, and without evidence, blaming the left. Yet the assassination attempt did not inspire a wave of attacks, nor did it imperil the democratic process.

Something similar could happen this time around too. There may be neither copycat nor retaliatory attacks, and the Trump administration may not ultimately use this as a justification to crack down on its political enemies. This would fit a historical pattern: As the political scientist Dan Trombly points out, America has long had much lower levels of political violence than you’d expect given the prevalence of guns and deep partisan animosities.

But I also think it’s undeniable that our odds of something going wrong are worse now than they were last year.

This is partly because we’re dealing with an assassination — a horrific murder — rather than a near miss. It’s partly because we do not yet know the shooter’s identity: Had the Trump shooter been clearly politically motivated, 2024 could have gone much worse than it did.

But it’s also because our democratic decline has progressed considerably in the past year.

It is undeniably true that Trump has undermined the nonpartisan structure of the American state, concentrating power in his own hands — including over law enforcement and the military. Democrats have, as result, become increasingly less confident that the democracy will survive his presidency — that they can trust Republicans to abide by the rules of the game. There has never, January 6 included, been a more dire moment for the modern American republic than the second Trump administration.

So I cannot be confident that things will turn out the way they did last summer. It is possible that they do. Under normal circumstances, I would be confident that they will.

But I cannot be. Our system is too decayed, too shot through with mutual distrust, to count on democratic faith to get us out of this one.

Traditionally, if perhaps erroneously, our idea of a midlife crisis has long involved an older man leaving behind his home and family life for a red sports car, a too-young girlfriend, and perhaps some kind of hair dye, if not a hairpiece. This midlife crisis means trading away the parts of one’s life for something newer and younger. The only thing this archetypal man can’t trade in, of course, are the years he’s already lived.

In reality, that kind of implosion fantasy doesn’t resonate with many people. No one wants to be the guy who can’t see his own desperation, flailing against his own mortality. If a guy is indeed that guy, he wouldn’t allow himself to realize it. And it especially doesn’t ring true to millennials, now entering their 40s, the time when issues of having lived half your life traditionally start to arise. This is a generation that often can’t afford the home or family life to throw away, never mind the new sports car; one that grew up hyperconscious about mental health and the benefits of therapy, encouraged self-expression and open discussion about relationships, and found value in experiences.

Millennial lives don’t look like boomer or even Gen X lives, and neither do their midlife crises.

While in years past the midlife crisis might have been fueled by a dawning reaction to one’s own mortality, for new 40-somethings, it’s more like a progress report. For one thing, the stability that previous generations found stifling can be hard to find. Many are looking for an opportunity — a fitness journey, a new career, a personal awakening that might involve tattoos — instead of something necessitating an intervention.

What remains, however, is that creeping reality that we only have one life to live. It can’t help but feel a little like dying.

Fully understanding the midlife crisis means deconstructing the ideas about what it looks like. Which is to say: The rug-wearing, skirt-chasing, Lamborghini jerk we all know and fear was always largely a myth.

“The thing about those stereotypes is that they’re not actually very common. People don’t actually abandon their spouses and buy red sports cars because of a midlife crisis,” says Hollen Reischer, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies how people find meaning in their life experiences.

Though Reischer assures me that there are no historic statistics that show a spike in red sports car purchases with a direct relationship to divorce rates, she explains that the urban legend is important for a different reason. Midlife crisis stereotypes like that guy or, as Reischer points out, the fear-mongering myth of the menopausal woman condemned to a life waving off hot flashes in front of her fridge allow us to project and obliquely explore our fears of getting older. Those include fears about how we’re perceived and what we might lose along with our youth: beauty, value, potential, health.

We know how we don’t want to age, but aren’t totally sure how we do.

To some degree, that’s the problem Sam, 42, is facing. In the last four years, Sam — who Vox is referring to by a pseudonym so she can speak frankly about her experience — has come out as bisexual, changed careers, and gotten a bunch of tattoos.

But the changes in her life weren’t always welcome. During the pandemic lockdowns, her marriage ended, and she was laid off from her job, prompting these larger shifts.

Sam describes changes in her life — a new relationship with a woman, a more secure job that doesn’t make her feel “like garbage” the way her previous career did, an apartment where she lives alone, five tattoos in the last six months — as positive, but she has some uneasiness. “It’s just really hard to find a feeling of being settled,” she explains. She’s coming to terms with not just her age, but the political climate she’s living in, her parents getting older, the lingering fear that she didn’t hit the milestones she had envisioned for herself, and an uncertain future.

“I think I’m happier because I’m not hiding parts of myself anymore and I’m acknowledging who I am fully,” Sam tells me. “But I also can’t say that the stability of marriage, kids, and all of that stuff, isn’t appealing still, and maybe that’s where the crisis comes in. … Sometimes it makes me feel kind of — bummed isn’t the right word, but just wistful, I guess.”

Even if millennials like Sam see opportunity in midlife, that doesn’t mean it comes without doubts or longing for security. Being able to admit that is part of Sam’s process, as is being optimistic about the future.

“In 10 years, I think I’ll probably feel more satisfied with where I am than where I was like when I turned 40,” she tells me, explaining that the support from her circle of friends — some of whom are queer, some of whom don’t have kids, and some who are on a similar life path — has made navigating part of her life easier.

“It’s an ongoing journey, and even though I feel like I look back at the past a lot, I also am trying to keep an open mind about what’s coming,” Sam adds.

As Sam indicates, there are some outside factors impacting the millennial midlife crisis, including the economy. Most of the cohort entered the workforce in, around, or following the financial collapse of 2008, only to be hit again by the Covid 2020 recession, and now join the ranks of the middle-aged in whatever kind of economy we’re facing in 2025. That might be why, according to a 2024 study from the Thriving Center of Psychology, 81 percent of millennials polled said they couldn’t “afford” to have a midlife crisis. It may also explain why so many millennials don’t feel like they hit adulthood milestones, which often involve large purchases if not total financial stability.

Financially secure or not, though, at a certain time in our lives, knees and lower backs do begin to ache. Parents get older. So do children, for those who have them. Responsibilities and expectations pile up, and aspirations get more urgent or complicated. Perhaps the idea of making millions of dollars at a dream job seems more like an impossibility than it did 10 years ago. All of these factors make the transition to midlife real, frighteningly so. And shifts in everything from the economy to our lifestyle to our life expectancy mean that the experience has changed.

Chip Conley, an entrepreneur, author, and the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which focuses on reimagining midlife as a positive transition, explained to me that the notion of the midlife crisis was born mainly out of fears of mortality. But as time has passed and people live longer, the “crisis” doesn’t feel so terrifying or set in stone. Millennials, he says, have benefited from that outlook.

“Millennials have taken a ‘path less traveled’ mentality to their lives,” Conley tells me.

Compared to generations before them, millennials have had more options to shape how their lives will unfold. Whether it’s taking a gap year, going to grad school, waiting to get married, taking more time to have children, or not having children at all, millennials have been less locked in than previous generations when it comes to what their adult lives should look like.

“Boomers and maybe even Gen X-ers, there was this sense that you’re supposed to live your life based upon this set of rules — your parents’ set of rules.” Conley says. “I don’t think that there’s this feeling where millennials are waking up one day and saying, Whose life is this?”

That isn’t to say that millennials haven’t been dealt some unfortunate hands, particularly when it comes to wealth (millennials’ retirement prospects compared to older generations look not so great), or that millennials are immune to expectations or material envy. But if they do wake up with that realization, millennials might be more equipped to handle it in a healthy way than previous generations.

For some, it’s literally fitness.

James McMillian has seen his fair share of millennial midlife crises turn into fitness journeys. McMillian is the chief innovation officer at Tone House, where he and his fellow coaches offer training for HyRox, an extreme fitness race that’s seemingly inspired by gulags.

McMillian says that though HyRox — which features eight ultra-challenging lifting events coupled with eight kilometers of running — is open to a wide age range (he’s seen participants in their 70s), one of the most popular age ranges is 35 to 39.

“We can’t control our careers. We can’t control our relationships. But when you’re training or when you’re doing fitness, that is something — one of the rare things — you can control,” McMillian says. So much of millennial life has been dictated by circumstance, and wellness is one thing that’s in their own hands.

“This is their chance to become an athlete,” McMillian adds.

Kate Lahey, a six-time HyRox participant in her 30s, is one of those athletes, and she confirms that she gets a sense of growth and control from the workout. “I mean, it’s definitely or at least a little bit of death — I die every time I do it,” Lahey tells me. “I see my body change. I see myself getting healthier and these competitions — my growth year over year, making new friends year over year, my daily workouts — that’s my journey.”

For many millennials, a midlife crisis involves reevaluating their careers. Being tethered to your job is perhaps one of the more old-fashioned things about the supposedly open-minded generation. But as Elise Hu, the co-host of the self-care Forever35 podcast tells me, it makes sense because millennials have been told, over and over, to work hard.

“Culturally, there was this real sense that you were supposed to just work harder — just work your way out of it,” Hu says, referring to graduating into the Great Recession of 2008. At the time, just having a paying job meant you should consider yourself lucky, and just a few years later, many millennial women were told to “lean in” and climb the ladder. Whatever hardship life contained, putting your head down and working was going to be the best way to conquer it.

It’s only natural that, after all these years of working hard and not having much to show for it, the question would arise: Where did all the years of labor go? Was it worth it? Did any of it make us happy?

“Covid was a real reckoning, right?” Hu asks. “Because it was like, Oh, wait, I don’t have to be doing things and hustling all the time.”

Julie Bogen, 33, a former audience editor (and, full disclosure, a former Vox employee) and now a freelance writer, thought so. She tells me that the compounding factors of the pandemic, having a child, and working from home full-time all culminated in her experiencing burnout around the 2024 election. “I was fucking drowning,” Bogen says.

Her job, in particular, had become a complication. “There’s a lot in my life that’s really, really important to me, and it got really hard for me to make myself prioritize things like analyzing the Instagram algorithm,” Bogen says, noting that The 19th, the news organization she worked for, gave her the grace and support she needed while making the decision to step away.

She explains that while she felt equipped and empowered to quit her job, she is still working to organize her life around the things in life that make her happy, including her children, learning how to cook, barre, and getting bylines at more publications.

“It doesn’t feel like I blew up my life — it feels like I took a really big risk,” Bogen says, acknowledging that her family is “really lucky.” “I think the hard part is like, getting from A to B for me, where it was like, I made this choice, I feel good about this choice, and now I have to make some decisions about what’s next.”

Looking at midlife and older adulthood as an opportunity rather than a “crisis” is something that can benefit anyone, Reischer, the professor at Buffalo, says. In her work, she studies how humans understand their own life experiences and how that shapes their connection to their own identity. Seeing life as an open-ended tale and ongoing narrative can help make us satisfied, more realized, more mentally healthy people, especially later in adulthood — even if something feels unsure or uncertain in the moment. It’s all part of our bigger life story.

“It allows you to say, this is where I am now and I know this is where I want to go,” Reischer says. “If you’re not acknowledging where you are, it’s very hard to get to the next place.”

That “next place” is where Patrick Drislane, a 39-year-old teacher, already has in his sights. Drislane talked to me about how the millennial midlife crisis has felt uniquely disorienting. From financial setbacks, to social media, to being governed by boomers, it all feels like we’re in a “generational waiting room,” Drislane says.

Even though Drislane followed the formula his and so many other parents taught their kids — school, then college, then a job, and then saving money — it never felt as though those things led him to the same milestones his parents achieved. That might be the defining trait of the millennial midlife crisis: learning to accept that our lives don’t look like the ones our parents had.

During his crisis, Drislane has been planning and mapping out his future. In 10 years, he thinks he’ll have saved enough to retire from teaching and pursue a different career on his own terms. He doesn’t know what that’ll be — but it’s the prospect of it being his decision that excites him. Ideally, he’d like to own a home, preferably a small place in the Catskills.

“I know what it feels like to live 40 years, and that’s what I have left,” Drislane tells me. “How can I figure out who I am without giving up my integrity, without giving up my values. How can I make the most of that? That’s the sports car I want.”

Air travel is such a common part of modern life that it’s easy to forget all the miraculous technology and communication infrastructure required to do it safely. But recent crashes, including near Washington, DC, and in San Diego — not to mention multiple near misses — have left many fliers wondering: Is it still safe to fly?

That concern is particularly acute at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, which has recently experienced several frightening incidents and near misses in as radio and radar systems have gone dark. This has left an under-staffed and overworked group of air traffic controllers to manage a system moving at a frenetic pace with no room for error.

Andrew Tangel, an aviation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recently spoke to Jonathan Stewart, a Newark air traffic controller. In early May, Stewart experienced a brief loss of the systems showing him the locations of the many planes was directing. When the systems came back online, he realized there’d almost been a major crash.

According to Tangel, Stewart “sent off a fiery memo to his managers, complaining about how he was put in that situation, which he felt he was being set up for failure.” Stewart now is taking trauma leave because of the stresses of the job. After many delayed flights, United Airlines just announced that it will move some of its flights to nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport.

To understand how we arrived at our current aviation crisis, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Darryl Campbell, an aviation safety writer for The Verge.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You recently wrote about all these issues with flying for The Verge — and your take was that this isn’t just a Newark, New Jersey, problem. It’s systemic. Why?

You’ve probably seen some of the news articles about it, and it’s really only in the last couple months because everybody’s been paying attention to aviation safety that people are really saying, Oh my gosh!

Newark airport is losing the ability to see airplanes. They’re losing radar for minutes at a time, and that’s not something you want to hear when you have airplanes flying towards each other at 300 miles an hour. So it is rightfully very concerning. But the thing is, what’s been happening at Newark has actually been happening for almost a decade and a half in fits and starts. It’ll get really bad, and then it’ll get better again.

Now we’re seeing a combination of air traffic control problems; we’re seeing a combination of infrastructure problems, and they’ve got a runway that’s entirely shut down. And the way that I think about it is, while Newark is its own special case today, all of the problems that it’s facing, other than the runway, are problems that every single airport in the entire country is going to be facing over the next five to 10 years, and so we’re really getting a preview of what’s going to happen if we don’t see some drastic change in the way that the air traffic control system is maintained.

We heard about some of these issues after the crash at DCA outside Washington. What exactly is going on with air traffic controllers?

The first problem is just one of staff retention and training. On the one hand, the air traffic control system and the people who work there are a pretty dedicated bunch, but it takes a long time to get to the point where you’re actually entrusted with airplanes. It can be up to four years of training from the moment that you decide, Okay, I want to be an air traffic controller.

Couple that with the fact that these are government employees and like many other agencies, they haven’t really gotten the cost-of-living increases to keep pace with the actual cost of living, especially in places like the New York and New Jersey area, where it’s just gone up way faster than in the rest of the country.

This is bad at Newark, but you say it promises to get bad everywhere else too.

The cost of living is still outpacing the replacement level at a lot of these air traffic control centers. And the washout rate is pretty high. We’ve seen the average staffing level at a lot of American airports get down below 85, 80 percent, which is really where the FAA wants it to be, and it’s getting worse over time.

At Newark in particular, it’s down to about 58 percent as of the first quarter of this year. This is an emergency level of staffing at a baseline. And then on top of that, you have — in order to keep the airplanes going — people working mandatory overtime, mandatory six-days-a-week shifts, and that’s accelerating that burnout that naturally happens. There’s a lot of compression and a lot of bad things happening independently, but all at the same time in that kind of labor system that’s really making it difficult to both hire and retain qualified air traffic controllers.

These sound like very fixable problems, Darryl. Are we trying to fix them? I know former reality TV star and Fox News correspondent — and transportation secretary, in this day and age — Sean Duffy has been out to Newark. He said this: “What we are going to do when we get the money. We have the plan. We actually have to build a brand new state-of-the-art, air traffic control system.”

To his credit, they have announced some improvements on it. They’ve announced a lot of new funding for the FAA. They’ve announced an acceleration of hiring, but it’s just a short-term fix.

To put it in context, the FAA’s budget usually allocates about $1.7 billion in maintenance fees every year. And so they’ve announced a couple billion more dollars, but their backlog already is $5.2 billion in maintenance. And these are things like replacing outdated systems, replacing buildings that are housing some of these radars, things that you really need to just get the system to where it should be operating today, let alone get ahead of the maintenance things that are going to happen over the next couple of years. It’s really this fight between the FAA and Congress to say, We’re going to do a lot today to fix these problems.

And it works for a little while, but then three years down the road, the same problems are still occurring. You got that one-time shot of new money, but then the government cuts back again and again and again. And then you’re just putting out one fire, but not addressing the root cause of why there’s all this dry powder everywhere.

People are canceling their flights into or out of Newark, but there are also all these smaller accidents we’re seeing, most recently in San Diego, where six people were killed when a Cessna crashed. How should people be feeling about that?

There’s really no silver bullet and all the choices are not great to actively bad at baseline. Number one is you get the government to pay what it actually costs to run the air traffic control system. That empirically has not happened for decades, so I don’t know that we’re going to get to do it, especially under this administration, which is focused on cutting costs.

The second thing is to pass on fees to fliers themselves. And it’s just like the conversation that Walmart’s having with tariffs — they don’t want to do it. When they try to pass it on to the customer, President Trump yells at them, and it’s just not a great situation.

The third option is to reduce the number of flights in the sky. Part of this is that airlines are competing to have the most flights, the most convenient schedules, the most options. That’s led to this logjam at places like Newark, where you really have these constraints on it. Right before all of this stuff happens, Newark was serving about 80 airplanes an hour, so 80 landings and takeoffs. Today, the FAA’s actually started to admit restrictions on it, and now it’s closer to 56 flights an hour, and that’s probably the level that it can actually handle and not have these issues where you have planes in danger.

But no airline wants to hear, Hey, you have to cut your flight schedule. We saw that with United: Their CEO was saying that the air traffic controllers who took trauma leave had “walked off the job,” which seemed to suggest that he didn’t think they should be taking trauma leave because you have to have more planes coming in. That’s a competitive disadvantage for him, but you also have to balance safety. It’s difficult to understand. It costs a lot of money to fix. This is your textbook “why governments fail” case study and it’s not really reassuring that in 24 hours I’m going to be in the middle of it again, trying to fly out of Newark.