Millennials' midlife reset

Ayano Swisher's business started as a joke about her own mood. During the pandemic, she did collage, printmaking, and eventually ceramics in a spare room of the apartment where she lived at the time. She called it the Sad Girl Lab, and the name stuck. Her roommate, who Swisher describes as "a very attract-positive-energy person," once suggested Happy Girl Lab instead.

"Ew," said Swisher, 33. "It just did not flow the same."

Sad Girl Lab became a business this past spring, after Swisher was laid off from her job managing social media accounts at a private equity-owned entertainment marketing agency. The same day she was cut, she went to the bank, opened a business account, and got a tax ID number. Now, from her home in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, she makes handmade martini sets and dinnerware, which she sells at flea markets, as well as through the social e-commerce site Depop and her own website.

Piecing together a living from several jobs is a familiar phase of many people's early 20s, the dog-walking, barista, yoga-teaching years before something steadier and more coherent comes along. But millennials are building backup careers in the years when the first one was supposed to pay off, the prime career years, when experience usually turns into more leverage and power, and for college-educated women especially, when wage growth starts to flatten.

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President Donald Trump received his lowest economic approval rating of either term in the latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey, less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 congressional elections.

Trump's economic approval stood at 34%, down from 38% in July, while disapproval climbed from 60% to 65%. His net economic approval of -31 is nine points lower than in July. The 65% disapproval figure tops that of every other president in CNBC's surveys, which extend back to Barack Obama's presidency.

Trump's job approval has held steady, with 40% of respondents approving and 59% disapproving. His net approval of -19 is down from -8 at this point last year.

Pessimism about the economy has climbed among Republicans. Among the public as a whole, 63% hold a downbeat view of both present conditions and the outlook, a one-point increase from July. That view is shared by 35% of Republicans, a six-point jump and the largest Republican share during either Trump administration. Four in five Americans describe the economy as only fair or poor, a larger share than at any point since December 2023.

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