Girls without direction

In 2025, I feel like every female character who was vocationally and financially adrift. Kiera Knightley in Laggies, Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha, Lena Dunham in Girls and Selena Gomez in Only Murders in the Building. All of them were girls without direction.

Megan: overeducated underachiever

Wikipedia describes Knightley's character in Laggies (2014) as an "overeducated underachiever." Her name is Megan, she lives with her boyfriend, who is about to propose, but she hasn't yet decided on a career path. Besides, she works turning a sign on the street for her father's accounting office, being voluntary underemplyed. Unwilling to get married or make a decision, she lies to her boyfriend about her weekend, saying she is going to a coaching event but she is not interested about it.  

Megan doesn't fit into any of the social circles she should be in, not even with her friends, but probably not because of immaturity, she doesn't know what she wants and the opportunities presented to her are the wrong ones. 

She doesn't find enlightment, only lives trying to be cool and having fun, so she finds a new teenager girlfriend and starts to feel romantically connected with her father.

Laggies takes place several years after the 2007 financial crisis, so her problem isn't financial, homeless, or due to student debt; it's simply a reluctance to acknowledge that her ideal romantic and career choices aren't what truly interests her.

I had already mentioned in another article that I felt like Frances Ha (Gerwig, 2012), but like a sequel, with the hangover from credit card debt after traveling to Paris overnight, without a stable job and a place to live. 

Hannah y Mabel en New York 

The four main characters of Girls (2016-2021) experience highs and lows, more lows than highs, and the finale only left one of them unscathed: the hardest-working and most success-obsessed. The most beautiful and coolest were left adrift, and Hannah underwent a major life change. But I particularly identified with Hannah in the third season, when she wins a writing grant but realizes she has nothing to write about. Furthermore, her move to a new city for the grant meant leaving her boyfriend, the show's main love interest, who was already living with someone else when she returned. 

Mabel from Only Murders in the Building (2021) is turning 30, without a career, a place to live, and with two older men as her best friends, with whom she has a casual true crime podcast. And an aunt who let her live in the Arconia. Mabel no longer has a peer support network like Hannah, and in this post-pandemic society, single-friend groups like those on Friends or How I Met Your Mother are nowhere in sight. 

My situation becomes more complicated if I place myself in a big city, but not in a New York or Seattle. I live in a developing southern country and  I am older than all the characters mentioned in this article. 

I almost forgot Winona Ryder and all her friends in Reality bites, but I already talk about them this year.