Hey, I’m Stevie! I’m a former lawyer turned entrepreneur, writer and mum of two from the Gold Coast, Australia. I’m so glad you’re here.
For most of my adult life, I’ve been very good at doing the things.
I became a lawyer. Built a business from scratch that went on to make more than $3 million. Started a podcast that hit 2 million downloads. Bought the house. Had the babies. Worked hard. Built a life that, from the outside at least, looked a lot like success was supposed to look.
Then, somewhere around 40, I started questioning almost all of it.
Not because everything was wrong. I just started wondering whether the things I’d spent decades working towards were actually the things I wanted for the decades ahead.
Questions like:
- How much money is enough?
- Do I really want to work five days a week until I’m 65?
- Does a successful business have to keep getting bigger?
- Do our kids have to be educated the same way we were?
- Could I live and work in a completely different way?
- What happens when relationships end, identities shift, careers stop fitting, or you realise the life you built for one version of yourself doesn’t quite fit the person you’ve become?
And the big one under all of it: is there another way to do this?
That’s what Millennial-ish is about.
Why Millennial-ish?
Because I think millennials are having a collective “wait… is this it?” moment.
We’re properly grown-ups now. We built the careers, started the businesses, bought the houses, had the kids. We did most of what we were told adulthood was supposed to look like.
We’re old enough to have lived the default version, but young enough to have another 30, 40, maybe 50 years ahead of us. And more and more, I see people around me wondering whether we actually want to spend those years doing it the way it’s always been done.
I think we’re a generation reconsidering how it wants to live.
The “-ish” matters to me, too. I’m not interested in writing another rulebook for how life should be done. I don’t have a ten-step blueprint for the perfect life, and I’m not going to tell you to quit your job, homeschool your kids, sell your house or move to Europe.
I’m figuring it out too.
Millennial… ish.
Successful… ish.
Grown-up… ish.
Certain about what comes next… definitely ish.
This is a place for the messy bit between following the script and working out what you actually want instead.
Life, reconsidered.
What I write about
Millennial-ish lives in four worlds.
Work + money. Lifestyle business, financial independence, investing, enoughness, remote work, career pivots, and the idea that maybe the point of work is to fund a really good life, not become your entire life.
Millennial life. Motherhood, friendship, relationships, education, ageing, loneliness, technology, nostalgia, and all the weirdly specific things nobody warned us would happen when millennials hit middle age.
Travel + adventure. Travelling with kids, travelling alone, temporarily living somewhere else, my Pretend Living experiments, and refusing to postpone adventure until the kids are older or retirement finally arrives.
Reinvention. Starting again. Changing your mind. Identity shifts, big transitions, health, confidence, relationships, rebuilding, and working out who you want to be when the person you were doesn’t quite fit anymore.
Some posts will be practical, some personal. Occasionally I’ll disappear down a rabbit hole because I desperately need to know why something we all accept as normal became normal in the first place.
But it all comes back to one question: what happens when we stop automatically accepting the default settings of adulthood and start asking how we actually want to live?
Why subscribe?
This is where I’ll write the things that need more room than an Instagram caption. That means personal essays and dispatches from my own life in transition, and experiments with money, work and travel. It means thoughts on motherhood, friendship and getting older.
I want it to feel less like being taught how to live and more like sitting around a table with smart women saying, “Okay, but why do we do it this way?” And then actually exploring the alternatives.
I’m living a lot of these questions in real time, so I can’t promise neat conclusions.
Where to start
New here? These are a good place to begin:
The softer challenge that helped me write a book, find $20K to invest and get my spark back.
A bit more about me (the real stuff)
I’m 44 and live on the Gold Coast with my two kids.
Travel is probably my favourite thing in the world. I’m much more interested in pretending I live somewhere than racing around its tourist attractions. That’s how I ended up spending months living on a Greek island with my kids, and why I’m forever mentally relocating us to London, Copenhagen or wherever I’ve fallen temporarily in love with.
I love books about money, psychology, identity and people who’ve chosen unusual lives. I’m fascinated by financial independence but have absolutely no desire to be frugal for the sake of it. I want money because I like freedom.
I love business. I just don’t want one that consumes my life.
I like beautiful houses, nice hotels and good restaurants, while also questioning why we’re all working so hard to accumulate more stuff.
I change my mind. A lot.
After spending most of my adult life thinking success meant knowing exactly where you were going, I’m starting to think there’s something pretty exciting about admitting you don’t.
Right now, my own life is very much in transition. Rather than wait until I’ve figured it all out to write about it, I want to document the middle, mistakes and unexpected good bits included.
Because I don’t think there’s a right way to do adulthood. I think we’re allowed to decide for ourselves.
If you’ve ever looked at a perfectly good life and quietly wondered, “But is this actually the life I want?”, I think you’ll feel at home here.
Welcome to Millennial-ish.
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