Читать книгу Why We Can't Sleep - Ada Calhoun - Страница 9
ОглавлениеYou come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.
—Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
One woman I know had everything she’d ever wanted—a loving partner, two children, a career she cared about, even the freedom to make her own schedule—but she still couldn’t shake a feeling of profound despair. She spent months getting a babysitter for her toddler daughter in the middle of the day, using the time to go alone to noon movies, where she sat in the dark and cried.
A former coworker told me that her impressive LinkedIn profile was misleading. In truth, she was underemployed and for years since her last layoff had been taking one low-paying gig after another. She’s unmarried, never had kids, and while that part is okay with her, she has started dreading her upcoming fiftieth birthday, having realized that she will probably never own her own home and has saved nowhere near enough for retirement.
A neighbor with a small army of adorable young children was doing part-time work she enjoyed. Her kids’ father was a friendly, hardworking man. She was baffled by the rage she had come to feel toward him. She’d begun to imagine that divorced she might have a better shot at happiness. “I’d leave,” she said to me one day when I asked how things were going, “if I had more money.”
Another woman told me she had started to fear that she would die alone. Just like her married friends, she’d gotten a good education and had a good job, had made a nice home and was staying in shape. But somehow she’d never found a partner or had children. She woke up in the middle of the night wondering if she should have married her college boyfriend, if she should freeze her eggs, if she should have a baby alone, if she should do more or less online dating, and just how much more she could take of her friends’ sons and daughters smiling on social media before she threw her laptop out the window.
An acquaintance told me she’d been having a rough time, working at three jobs as a single mother since her husband left her. Determined to cheer up her family, she planned a weekend trip. After a long week, she started packing at 10:00 p.m., figuring she could catch a few hours of sleep before their 5:00 a.m. departure. She asked her eleven-year-old son to start gathering his stuff. He didn’t move. She asked again. Nothing.
“If you don’t help,” she told him, “I’m going to smash your iPad.”
He still didn’t move.
As if possessed, she grabbed a hammer and whacked the iPad to pieces.
When she told me this, I thought of how many parents I know who have fantasized or threatened this very thing, and here she had actually done it. I laughed.
“Yeah, my friends think it’s a hilarious story, too,” she said. “But in reality, it was dark and awful.” Her first thought as she stood over the broken glass: “I have to find a good therapist . . . right now.”
Since turning forty a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with women my age and their—our—struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential despair.
Looking for more women to talk to for this book, I called my friend Tara, a successful reporter a few years older than me who grew up in Kansas City. Divorced about a decade ago, she has three mostly grown children and lives on a quiet, leafy street in Washington, DC, with her boyfriend. They recently adopted a rescue dog.
“Hey,” I said, happy to have caught her on a rare break from her demanding job. “Do you know anyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?”
The phone was silent.
Finally, she said, “I’m trying to think of any woman I know who’s not.”
Generation X (born 1965 to 1980) make up the bulk of the midlife demographic, though those born at the earlier end of the Millennial birth years (1981-96) and younger members of the Baby Boom (1946-64) are also among the middle-aged.1 The name—or anti-name—Generation X was popularized by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Prior to that, it was the name of an excellent 1970s British punk band featuring Billy Idol. The band itself was named after a 1964 book containing interviews with British teenagers—on the cover: “What’s behind the rebellious anger of Britain’s untamed youth? Here—in their own words— is how they really feel about Drugs, Drink, God, Sex, Class, Color and Kicks.”
Over time, the term “Generation X” came to signify a hazy, as-yet-to-be-determined identity. No one knew quite what was up with us, and so we were deemed unknowable. For a while, some experts tried dubbing us “13th Gen,” because we were the thirteenth generation post–founding fathers.2 But after some “Who Is Generation X?” cover stories in the 1990s, the culture more or less shrugged and turned away.
In the words of the Pew Research Center, Generation X is “America’s neglected ‘middle child’ . . . a low-slung, straightline bridge between two noisy behemoths.”3 We are the Jan Brady of generations—overshadowed by Boomers (our parents, aunts, uncles) and Millennials (the kids we babysat). By one count, at 55 million, we’re a smaller group than Boomers (76 million) or Millennials (62 million),4 and we will never be the largest cohort in the country. Any day now, when Millennials surpass Boomers, Gen X will still be millions smaller than either.5 A CBSN report on the generations in January 2019 left out Gen X entirely. That same week, a Saturday Night Live game-show skit pitting Millennials against Boomers gave Keenan Thompson this line: “I’m Gen X. I just sit on the sidelines and watch the world burn.”6
Gen X has arrived in middle age to almost no notice, largely unaware, itself, of being a uniquely star-crossed cohort. “Gen Xers are in ‘the prime of their lives’ at a particularly divisive and dangerous moment,” Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me.7 “They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They’re squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they’re exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.”
A full-fledged Gen Xer, I was born in 1976. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric. When video games came around, I played Moon Patrol on my Atari and Where in the World Is Carmen San diego? on my school’s PC. As a teenager, I worked as a printer in a photo lab and wrote hyper-sincere op-eds for the school paper while wearing overalls and Revlon Blackberry lipstick. I had an ur-’90s job, too: I interned at SPIN magazine, back when Nirvana was on the cover. (Fact-checking a writer’s story on a new singer, one “Mary J. Bilge,” I was told by her publicist, “It’s Blige, honey.”)
Whether to identify as Gen X is a decision every woman must make for herself, but I believe that if, like me, you were a kid in the Reagan years, had a Koosh ball, or know what sound a dial-up modem makes, you count.
Generation X women tend to marry in our late twenties, thirties, forties, or not at all; to have our first children in our thirties or forties, or never. We’re the first women raised from birth hearing the tired cliché “having it all”8—then discovering as adults that it is very hard to have even some of it. That holds true regardless of whether a Generation X woman has a family or not.9
Since the 1990s, when the older members of Gen X began having families, we’ve been pitted against one another by a tedious propaganda campaign about the “mommy wars.” This fake debate conceals the truth: that our choices are only part of the story. Context is the other piece, and the context for Gen X women is this: we were an experiment in crafting a higher-achieving, more fulfilled, more well-rounded version of the American woman. In midlife many of us find that the experiment is largely a failure.
We thought we could have both thriving careers and rich home lives and make more and achieve more than our parents, but most of us have gained little if any advantage. Economist Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, told me that a typical forty-year-old woman in America now makes $36,000 a year working full-time. After child care, rent, food, and taxes, that leaves only about $1,000 for everything else.10 Even women who make much more may feel uneasy about their financial future, stunned by how hard it is just getting through the week, or disappointed by how few opportunities seem to come their way.
We diminish our whole generation when we dismiss these women’s complaints as unreasonable griping. Societal, historical, and economic trends have conspired to make many women’s passage into middle age a crucible of anxieties—and to make us envy one another rather than realize we are all in the same leaky boat. I hope this book will help us hear women’s concerns not as whining but as a corrective to the misleading rhetoric extolling an American dream that has not come within reach for us—and likely will not for our children.
Some might argue that American Generation X women have it easy compared with women in other countries or of other generations. Boomers and Millennials may claim their own, perhaps even worse, cases.
“No, my generation was the first who were told they could have it all!” one Boomer woman said when presented with this book’s premise.
The concept did emerge in the Boomers’ generation, but it wasn’t until Gen X arrived that it was a mainstream expectation. Boomers deserve full credit for blazing trails while facing unchecked sexism and macroaggression and for trying to raise children without giving up their own dreams. But Gen Xers entered life with “having it all” not as a bright new option but as a mandatory social condition.
“I’m supposed to have it all, too!” a Millennial woman said. “We have it just as bad!”
Millennials, certainly, have reached adulthood with crushing student loan debt, unprecedented social and economic inequality, poisonous political polarization, and a rapidly changing world with many industries in flux. But, by the time Millennials were entering the workforce, the illusion of infinite possibility had finally come under broad attack, giving way to more realistic expectations.
With all due respect to our elders and juniors, when it came to the “having it all” virus we all caught, Gen X was infected with a particularly virulent strain.
That said, Boomers and Millennials, sadly, are likely to find a lot to relate to in this book. I hope that younger Millennials and Generation Z and those to follow will find our cautionary tales useful and that Boomers will not be too dismayed by how far we have not come.
Put simply: having more options has not necessarily led to greater happiness or satisfaction. “By many objective measures, the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past thirty-five years,” wrote the authors of an analysis of General Social Survey data a decade ago, as Generation X entered middle age. “Yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.”11
This observation is often cited as proof that second-wave feminism was foolish—that if women had only stayed in the home they would be happier. How reductive that is. The truth is that we’ve never really tried what those feminists proposed. Yes, women went into the workforce, but without any significant change to gender roles at home, to paid-leave laws, to anything that would make the shift feasible. If you make a new law but don’t enforce or fund it, do you get to call the law misguided?
In 2017, another major study found that the two biggest stressors for women were work and children, with a compounding effect on those having both.12 We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days while still saddled with traditional caregiving duties. We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising—in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.
One in four middle-aged American women is on antidepressants.13 Nearly 60 percent of those born between 1965 and 1979 describe themselves as stressed—thirteen points higher than Millennials.14 Three in four women born in 1965–1977 “feel anxious about their finances.”15
For a while, I thought only corporate strivers were having a hard time managing. Then I started hearing the same angst in the voices of women with all variations of work and home life. I was shocked when a friend whom I’d never seen rattled by anything told me that in her forties she’d become so consumed by caring for her two little kids, full-time job, side hustles, marriage, and ailing father that she worried constantly about money and couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept well.
As I’ve spoken to hundreds of middle-aged women around the country across the geographic, racial, religious, and political spectrum, I’ve marveled at how similarly they talk about their lives:
Over a diner breakfast, a successful single woman in Texas told me she thought she’d have a husband and kids by now. She asked, “What did I do wrong?”
While her baby slept on her chest, a married mother of three in Oregon said she thought she’d have a career by now. “What did I do wrong?” she asked.
While scientific study of aging has increased in the past decade, the research still often skips middle age.16 Where research is done on the middle years, the focus is typically on men. The rare middle-aged-woman book usually addresses Boomers’ work disappointment or marital disillusionment17 or tries to make light of physical signs of aging, with emphasis on our necks.
The term “midlife crisis”18 is usually attributed to psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who used it in a 1965 journal article exploring how the creative expression of male artists—Dante, Goethe, Beethoven, Dickens—often changes in quality and content when they pass the age of thirty-five. “Working through the midlife crisis,” he writes, “calls for a reworking through infantile depression, but with mature insight into death.”19
In the 1970s, developmental psychologist Daniel Levinson claimed that about 80 percent of the men he studied experienced “tumultuous struggles within the self and with the external world” in midlife.20 “Every aspect of their lives comes into question,” he wrote. “And they are horrified by much that is revealed.” They may find that they’ve given up creative dreams or sacrificed their values for a stable income—a theme taken up in countless hits in popular fiction and cinema, from the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire.
As rendered in popular culture, the stereotypical male midlife crisis involves busting stuff up— mostly marriages but also careers, norms, reputations. Panic may commence when a man starts losing his hair, resulting in a frenzy to unearth college vinyl. Treatment: regular application of younger women and brightly colored motor vehicles.
There have been any number of movies and books about such men—some even played by actors who are not Michael Douglas. The Woody Allen–American Beauty–Sideways industrial complex has given us dramas in which women provide a reliably boring backdrop—the shrill wife, the tedious aunt, the sad sister—to men’s life-affirming hunger for the passionate life, which materializes with suspicious frequency in the shape of a teenage girl.
A middle-aged woman’s midlife crisis does, I know, pose a dramaturgical problem. In my observation—and as many experts I’ve spoken with have affirmed—women’s crises tend to be quieter than men’s. Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular—a big affair, a new career, a “she shed” in the backyard—but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.
From the outside, no one may notice anything amiss. Women might drain a bottle of wine while watching TV alone, use CBD edibles to decompress, or cry every afternoon in the pickup lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they might lie wide awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There has yet to be a blockbuster movie centered on a woman staring out her car’s windshield and sighing.
So I understand why some people consider “crisis” too extreme a word for high-functioning women experiencing what can look like merely malaise or a funk or a rough patch. When I appeared with prominent academic Susan Krauss Whitbourne on a panel this year, she said that there was no scientific evidence for a predictable breakdown in midlife and that calling midlife stress a “midlife crisis” was “an excuse for bad behavior.
“If you’re depressed in midlife,” she said, “there may be many reasons for this, the least of which is your ‘age.’”21 And yet, even Whitbourne granted that Generation X is a particularly morose bunch and that women of this generation were “very stressed out.”
I do take her point. And can we really say women are in “crisis” if, despite how they feel inside, they’re able to crank out well-structured PowerPoint presentations and arrange elaborate gift baskets for teachers on the last day of school?
My friend’s sister, Jenny, a mother of three employed in the STEM field before a recent layoff due to federal budget cuts, said she didn’t think she’d had a midlife crisis. Then she politely added: “Or does the tanking of my marriage, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and a move to LA after twenty-six years in Seattle following my aneurysm constitute a midlife crisis? If so, you can interview me.”
When I asked my friend Aimee, who lives in Baltimore, if she was having a midlife crisis, she said no. Then she said, “Wait, like a ‘What the hell have I done with my life and who am I?’ sort of freak-out? I am definitely having one of those.” While that’s probably an apt description of what many of the women I talked to for this book are undergoing, I still prefer the term “midlife crisis.” I like it because it makes what’s happening sound like the big deal I believe it to be. In my experience, Gen X women spend lots of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.”
And that’s true enough. We are fortunate in so many ways. America today, in the global scheme of things, offers us far more opportunity than our grandmothers or mothers had. Although many women are trying to make it on minimum-wage jobs (and have a crisis not specific to middle age), the overall wage gap is closing. Men do more at home. There’s more pushback against sexism. Insert your “reason why we don’t deserve to feel lousy” here. The complaints of well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class women are easy to disparage—as a temporary setback, a fixable hormonal imbalance, or #FirstWorldProblems.
Fine. Let’s agree that Generation X women shouldn’t feel bad.22
So why do we?
When I started working on this project, I knew I felt lousy, but I didn’t yet fully understand why. I just knew that I was having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad June. Cue the 1984 Bananarama hit “Cruel Summer.”23
I said, often, that I was very lucky and had no right to complain.
I’d been with my husband for seventeen years. Our eleven-year-old son had been accepted into a great public middle school. My twenty-three-year-old stepson was looking at physical therapy grad programs.
Workwise, I felt better than ever. I’d just published a new book and it had run the table on press coverage—the Today Show! The Washington Post! No less than Star called it a Hot Book.
From the outside and on social media, I knew my life looked enviable.
So why was I miserable? That summer I woke up every day at 4:00 a.m., plagued with self-doubt and anxiety. Lying there, I thought of all the things I really should do or absolutely should not have done until either I’d cycled through my full list of regrets or it was time to get up.
Before even opening my eyes, I would see a number: $20,000. That’s how much credit card debt we had. I walked around under a cloud of worry. That spring, thinking we had money coming in, we’d taken a family vacation to the Grand Canyon and done some home repairs. Three freelance gigs that were supposed to keep us comfortable until the fall and pay off our credit card debt had evaporated. One boss let me go right after I delivered what I’d thought was a completed project. Another replaced me with someone else. A third went AWOL. And now it was summer, the worst time to find work. We had only a month’s worth of cash on hand and it was disappearing fast.
After nearly a decade of freelancing, I began applying for job-jobs. When I’d left the full-time workforce following a layoff in 2009, I’d been making six figures, plus full benefits. Now I was looking for anything that would give me a steady paycheck and—dare to dream—insurance. Health insurance for my family costs us $1,186 a month. We have the cheapest “bronze” plan, with a deductible of several thousand dollars a year. (And, again, I’m lucky; a third to half of middle-aged people in this country go without necessary health care because of cost.)24
I’d always told myself that returning to a full-time job was my “fallback plan.”
Oh, fine! I imagined saying to the corporate world. You can have me!
Only, now that I was willing to fall back, no one was there to catch me.
As I frantically applied for jobs and fellowships, I felt like I was living in the children’s book Are You My Mother? I sent out dozens of résumés and was called in for two interviews. One was for a teaching job paying $600 for a six-week class. I took it, even though, between the time I spent prepping for the class and the time I spent marking papers, this worked out to less per hour than I’d made as an office manager when I was a college student.
The other interview was for a full-time job paying far less than the one I’d held fifteen years earlier. It would be a huge demotion, working for a company that seemed not very stable. But what the hell, right? I knew the industry was in a bad place, and a job’s a job. The interview went well. On the way home, I wrestled with my hopes and dreams. I decided that I would go ahead and accept, overqualified though I was, shaky though the workplace seemed.
I didn’t even get a callback.
I resolved to broaden my search, explore all my options.
Options. We still have them in midlife, but they can start to seem so abstract. Yes, I could go to graduate school and get a doctorate, but where would I find the tuition? I could switch careers—therapist? Zamboni driver?—but at this stage of life, do I really want to start from the bottom, surrounded by twenty-year-olds? If I went on an Eat, Pray, Love walkabout, who would pick up the kid from school?
“Every decision you make in life sends you off down a path that could turn out to be a wrong one,” writes the British musician Viv Albertine in her memoir of midlife. “A couple of careless decisions somewhere along the line, that’s all it takes to waste years—but then you can’t creep along being so cautious that you don’t have adventures. It’s difficult to get the balance right.”25
“Difficult” is an understatement. How do you know when it’s time to give up a dream? How do you know if you’re like one of those success stories, the type who never surrendered in spite of everyone telling them they were deluding themselves, or if you’re a sap who needs to stop kidding herself, be realistic, and grow up already?
As my family enjoyed the summer, I brooded. I was sure that my career was over, mortally embarrassed to be in debt, and I couldn’t stop agonizing about what to do. My thoughts were dark:
If only I’d never gone freelance.
If only we’d stockpiled cash for a rainy day. If only my husband were a day trader.
We were dumb to take that vacation.
Each morning, I looked in the mirror and saw a very tired middle-aged person—no longer young, no longer vibrant. I was forty-one, but didn’t look, to myself, two years older than thirty-nine; I looked a century older. There were deep wrinkles around my eyes. My skin was ashen. The skin under my arms was loose. I’d been hearing “In middle age, you’re more likely to gain weight around the middle of the body” for a while; and now I knew what the magazines were talking about. I had widened, and I did not like it.
Some of this was vanity, but I also felt disoriented: Whose body was this?
Oh, and my very first mammogram showed an “irregularity.” Two ultrasounds, a biopsy, more than $1,000 in co-pays, and weeks of dread later, it proved to be nothing. But the experience felt like the first rattle of a car ready to be traded in.
And the periods! Sometimes they’d be two months apart, sometimes two weeks. Sometimes light. Sometimes so heavy I’d bleed through a tampon, a pad, and jeans. The cramps were apocalyptic. I found myself emotionally erratic, too, in a way that seemed out of proportion to the money and work pressure. I’d slam drawers, so irritated I could hardly look at my husband. A day or two a month, I would cry so hard it was as if someone had died.
I went to the gynecologist, who said nothing was physically wrong with me. She prescribed Swedish flower pollen delivered via online subscription at $40 a month for my mood, and evening primrose oil for breast aches, and she encouraged me to take a multivitamin with calcium and vitamin D. If none of that worked, she said, we could try antidepressants—something I resisted because while on them a decade earlier I’d lost my sex drive, gained twenty pounds, and didn’t want to write.
The supplements did not seem to be helping, though I took them every day and tried to convince myself that they were effective. Meanwhile, I followed every bit of reasonable advice the books and internet offered for someone hoping to feel better on a budget. I went for long walks outside in nature, took the stairs instead of the elevator, drank lots of water, cut back on alcohol and caffeine, ate vegetables, wore sunscreen, packed my lunches, planked.
I woke up every morning and showered and took care of my kid and went to the dentist and bought groceries and listened to my husband talk about his day and helped the neighbor girl with her high school applications and plucked my eyebrows. I read the books about how midlife was an opportunity in disguise. I watched TED talks and listened to advice shows.
“So,” my husband said, sounding distressed. “You’re a podcast person now?”
After doing everything I was supposed to do, I felt a little better, maybe? But there was still the money fear and the feeling that my career was over and the bone tiredness.
There were flickers of joy, particularly when friends came over. One night a friend texted me: “I need an OUTING.”
“Want a beer?” I wrote back. “YES,” she replied.
Minutes later, she was at my place, telling me about the fight she’d just had with her husband and how much pressure she felt being the primary breadwinner, her own ambitions often delayed to make way for her family’s needs. She told me that everyone at her job was younger and that after many years of being happy with how she looked, she’d started googling things like “noninvasive procedures.”
“I haven’t shot anything into my face—yet,” she said. “I’m still wondering if it’s better to go no-makeup-don’t-care or lots-of-makeup-making-an-effort.”
She thought spending money to look younger might pay off in the long run, because it could keep her from being pushed out by the Millennials angling for her job. The topper: she concluded she couldn’t afford to have anything done.
What I didn’t know that summer is that historic forces have been at work in the lives of Generation X women:
We were born into a bleak economy and grew up during a boom in crime, abuse, and divorce. We were raised “prespecialness,” which meant not only no participation trophies but also that we were shielded far less than children today from the uglier sides of life.
We started our job hunts in the early 1990s recession, which was followed by a “jobless recovery.”26 If you were born later into Generation X, you might have entered the workforce around the 1999ish stock market peak, but then the tech bubble started to burst, landing you in the 2001 recession. Yes, the economy began to recover, and by the mid-2000s you might have taken advantage of easy-to-get mortgages, but then in 2008 the sky fell. Now, in middle age, Gen X has more debt than any other generation27—a whopping 82 percent more than Boomers and about $37,000 more than the national consumer average.28 Compared with other generations, we also have less saved—and women have less than men. At the same time, we face a much higher cost of living than Boomers did at our age, particularly for essentials like housing.29
Generation X marks the end of the American dream of ever-increasing prosperity. We are downwardly mobile, with declining job stability. It used to be that each generation could expect to do better than their parents. New research confirms that Generation X won’t.
Many of us have delayed marriage and children into our thirties and forties.30 This means that we are likely to find ourselves taking care of parents in decline at the same time that we are caring for little children—and, by the way, being urged to ask for raises and lean in at work.
This stress is compounded by the hormonal chaos and associated mood swings of the years leading up to menopause. In a cruel twist, the symptoms of hormonal fluctuation are exacerbated by stress, while the symptoms in turn raise stress levels.
Meanwhile, we are bombarded with catastrophic breaking news alerts, social media’s curated images of others’ success, and nonstop work obligations—not to mention phone calls, texts, and email. Workers in upper management today spend an average of seventy-two hours a week making themselves available to work.31
Our lives can begin to feel like the latter seconds of a game of Tetris, where the descending pieces pile up faster and faster. Worse, at this hectic age, we have to make many of the toughest decisions of our lives: Is it time to give up on starting my own business? Is it time to switch careers? Should I get married? Should I get divorced? Am I done having kids? Will I ever have kids? Where should the kids go to school? Do I put my parent with Alzheimer’s into a nursing home, and, if so, who’s going to pay for it? When it comes to realizing my dreams, is it too late?
Being beset with these hard questions while dealing with all of the pressures of midlife is like coming upon an emergency situation for which you’re untrained. Your performance is unlikely to be maximally efficient.
In this, Gen Xers are ill-served by our default cynicism. When we saw the 1989 film Say Anything in our youth, kickboxing romantic hero Lloyd Dobler’s dinner-table speech, something many Gen Xers can recite verbatim, may have seemed profound: “I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” This proposed wisdom has not aged well.
Dobler’s “unifying philosophy was adorable and original and so crazy it might work in 1989,” a friend said to me the other day, “but now that guy is sitting on your futon playing Grand Theft Auto in a Pavement T-shirt.”
The year I was born, Gail Sheehy published the mega bestseller Passages, which took seriously both men’s and women’s midlife reckoning with their mortality and described predictable phases of life in the manner of the terrible twos, with tags including “Trying 20s” and “Forlorn 40s.”
It was a new spin on the influential psychologist Erik Erikson’s work with what he described as eight psychosocial life stages. He said that infancy is about the tension between trust and mistrust. If you complete that phase successfully, you achieve the basic virtue of hope. Your adolescent years are a crisis of identity versus role confusion. Ages eighteen to forty are about intimacy versus isolation. At issue from ages forty to sixty-five, according to Erikson, is avoiding stagnation, with the goal being an investment in society that leads to “generativity,” shaping a legacy and having a lasting impact on the world.
According to Sheehy, the years between thirty-five and forty-five are the “Deadline Decade,” during which people might feel they are running out of time. She argued that Erikson’s writing on the stages of growth applied only to men: “If the struggle for men in midlife comes down to having to defeat stagnation through generativity, I submit that the comparable task for women is to transcend dependency through self-declaration.”32
When Sheehy wrote a new introduction to Passages in 2006, she acknowledged that Gen X women were a whole new ballgame: “There are still broad, general stages of adulthood, and predictable passages between them. But the timetable has stretched by at least ten years, and counting. Age norms for major life events have become highly elastic. Since there is no longer a standard life cycle, people are left to customize their own.”33 Women of this generation, she said, are living “cyclical lives that demand they start over again and again.”
Gen X women had sky-high expectations for themselves. The contrast between our “you can be anything” indoctrination and the stark realities encountered in midlife—when you might, despite your best efforts, not be able to find a partner or get pregnant or save for retirement or own your own home or find a job with benefits—has made us feel like failures at the exact moment when we most require courage. It takes our bodies longer to recover from a night of drinking and it takes our spirits longer to bounce back from rejection. We may wind up asking questions like the one my friend posed to me the other night: “Do you think my life is ever going to be good again?”
“You may or may not run out of money,” another woman said. “But you will definitely run out of time.”
As dark as all this may sound, I promise that there is cause for hope.
When I told someone recently what my book was about, he said, “That must have been depressing, talking to hundreds of women about how miserable they are.”
Actually, I found it the opposite. The project made me feel less alone, and it gave me clarity about my life and my friends’ lives. I see now, finally, a way out of our crisis. It begins with facing up to our lives as they really are, letting go of the expectations we had for ourselves growing up, and finishes with finding a viable support system and realizing that this stage of life doesn’t last forever.
Writing this book gave me the perspective I needed when, in the months around its January 2020 hardcover publication, I hit a patch of bad luck. Just a few weeks apart, my father-in-law had a stroke and died, my parents’ apartment was destroyed in a freak building fire, almost killing them, and my father was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer and given six months to live. I didn’t think things could get any worse. Then I started to hear reports of a terrible virus spreading through Wuhan, China.
Meanwhile, at every stop on my winter book tour—Chicago, L.A., San Antonio, Miami—I was meeting auditoriums full of women who made me feel less alone. They told me that this book had given them permission to discuss their lives more openly and that it made them feel validated and seen. Many of these women would come to the signing table with multiple copies—for their sisters and friends, who they thought would relate, and for other people in their lives, who they thought would understand them better after reading it.
The book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. I was interviewed by dozens of reporters and podcasters and radio hosts, and I went on several morning shows. In the dressing room of Tamron Hall’s show, she’d left me a handwritten note that read, “Your book is a powerful reminder of what’s at stake—our lives!” Kelly Ripa talked about it on air. Busy Philipps did a series of Instagram stories about it. Sarah Michelle Geller posed reading the book while wearing a sexy oversized white shirt, drinking a glass of red wine, and reclining in an empty bathtub—the ultimate Gen-X pinup girl.
Then Covid-19 hit the U.S. The rest of my tour was canceled. In quarantine, I started hearing from one woman after another who saw the pandemic as almost an inevitable next chapter for this generation. We’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop since childhood. Here it was, the other shoe. Everything that was bad suddenly got much, much worse: more caregiving, less job stability, more isolation, less financial security. Readers told me that they now saw the book as a kind of prequel to the pandemic horror—an explanation not just of why midlife can be rough for us but also for why our generation was at once so logistically vulnerable to and yet also so psychologically prepared for the devastation.
Just like always, the crisis found us caught between Boomers and the younger generations. Our parents were right in the disease’s crosshairs; our Gen Z children were sent home for us to educate. Many seniors weren’t being as careful as we wanted them to be. A lot of younger people were still partying over spring break.
But Generation X was almost trained for this emergency. Unlike many of our parents, we already knew how to use Zoom. Unlike many of our children, we already knew how to entertain ourselves without video games. We are a group of people that does not need to be told twice to prepare for the worst, to stay home, to watch a lot of TV.
I asked a friend if when all this was over she thought we’d be considered the (at least a?) greatest generation.
Her response: “Sure. Gather round, kids! I’ll tell you about the heroic year we snacked and watched Tiger King.”
Touché.
As I conducted book events virtually through the spring and summer of 2020, a surprising number of women told me that in the midst of the misery, there were some bright spots. One said that her older, by-the-book boss had finally realized that everyone didn’t have to be in the office all the time—and now that everyone had to do meetings with a dog barking or a baby on their lap, having a personal life became normalized. A woman who was laid off from a job she hated found that, thanks to the abundant, unexpected free time and extra unemployment assistance, she could finally stop for a second and figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
At the national level, many women told me they saw the country having a long-overdue reckoning with racism and felt called to action. For as cynical as Generation Xers have been about politics, we had to admit that something felt different this time.
When I was doing the research for this book, two and three years before any of us had heard about Covid, a lot of women told me they were at a breaking point. Some of them said they wished they could hit a reset button and rearrange everything in their lives: a common refrain was, “I wish I could just blow it all up and start over.” In a way, that’s what happened in 2020.
“Build back stronger” became an invitation not just for governments, but for each of us. This book lays out a case that the old American dream—the fantasy of eternal upward mobility and of “having it all” effortlessly—was never truly on the table for our generation. The pandemic has erased any lingering doubts about that. Maybe now that the traditional dream of picket fences and endless prosperity is over, we will find a way to dream new and even better dreams.
1 There are many opinions about what counts as Generation X. The Harvard Center’s years are 1965–1984. So, from the year Doctor Zhivago came out to the year Ghostbusters did. George Masnick Fellow, “Defining the Generations,” Housing Perspectives, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, November 28, 2012. I’ve also heard 1961 as a starting year—though in my experience people born in the early 1960s tend to identify more strongly with the Baby Boom—and either 1981 or 1985 as the Gen X end year. I tend to put most stock in the Pew Research Center: Silent Generation 1928–1945, Boomers 1946–1964, Gen X 1965–1980, Millennials 1981–1996, Generation Z 1997–2012. Michael Dimock, “Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation X Begins,” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019. I’m also well aware of the fact that plenty of people think the whole business of describing a generational experience or ethos is a fool’s errand. For this argument see, for example: David Costanza, “Can We Please Stop Talking About Generations as If They Are a Thing?” Slate.com, April 13, 2018. No, we can’t. Next question.
2 Neil Howe and William Strauss, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (New York: Vintage, 1993). And in their 1991 book Generations, the same authors called us “Gen 13ers.”
3 Paul Taylor and George Gao, “Generation X: America’s Neglected ‘Middle Child,’” Pew Research Center, June 5, 2014.
4 You can run these numbers a few different ways. By another measure, the breakdown is: Generation X at 66 million, Boomers at 74 million, and Millennials at 71 million. Kimberly Lankford, “Generation X: Time Is on Your Side for Retirement,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, January 3, 2019.
5 Richard Fry, “Millennials Projected to Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation,” Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018. (Also, note: some people count Gen X as just 1965–1977, in which case we’re 45 million versus 75 million Millennials and 78 million Boomers.) Some demographers push for another category: Generation Y, which is generally thought to overlap a bit with both Gen X and Millennials. When people go with the Gen X years 1965 to 1979, the Gen Y birth years are typically given as 1980 to 1994. This category has always felt extra forced to me, though, so in this book I just stick with the bigger umbrellas of Boomer, Gen X, and Millennial.
6 Ed Mazza, “Generation Xers Have the Most Gen X Response to Being Left Off the List,” Huffington Post, January 21, 2019.
7 Faith Popcorn, interview with the author, August 30, 2017.
8 Jennifer Szalai, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,” New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2015.
9 It’s worth noting that Helen Gurley Brown, who popularized the term with her 1982 bestseller, did not have children. Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money—Even If You’re Starting with Nothing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
10 Generation Unbound author Isabel V. Sawhill sees three issues that could make a real difference in the lives of women: birth control, so women can decide “if, when, and with whom to have children”; wage equality; and measures in aid of work-family balance (child care, flexible hours, paid family leave). Isabel V. Sawhill, “Improving Women’s Lives: Purposeful Parenthood, Decent Wages, and Paid Family Leave,” Talk for Bucks County Women’s Advocacy Coalition, May 23, 2018. Provided to the author via email May 30, 2018.
11 Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1, no. 2 (August 2009): 190–225.
12 In December 2017, Gallup reported that eight in ten Americans say they frequently or sometimes encounter stress in their daily lives, with women and people between the ages of thirty and forty-nine more likely than men or people of other ages to report frequent stress. The poll showed 49 percent of women reporting frequent stress, compared with 40 percent of men; and 56 percent of those aged fifty to sixty-four claimed frequent stress compared with, for example, 24 percent of those sixty-five and older. “Eight in 10 Americans Afflicted by Stress,” Gallup.com, December 20, 2017.
13 Roni Caryn Rabin, “A Glut of Antidepressants,” New York Times, August 12, 2013. Also: Daniel Smith, “It’s Still the ‘Age of Anxiety.’ Or Is It?” New York Times, January 14, 2012.
14 AARP Snapshots: Generation X Health. Retrieved August 5, 2018.
15 “Gen X Women: Flirting with Forty,” J. Walter Thompson Intelligence, Slideshare.net, May 19, 2010. Retrieved August 5, 2018.
16 Margie E. Lachman, “Mind the Gap in the Middle: A Call to Study Midlife,” Research in Human Development 12 (2015): 327–34.
17 There are some books about women going through crises in midlife. The cover of A Woman’s Worth (1993) by Marianne Williamson (the presidential candidate) shows a sepia-tone, topless woman hunched over. I opened to a random page and read: “Most women today are borderline hysterical.”
18 One interesting history of the concept of a midlife crisis is Susanne Schmidt’s “The Anti-Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA,” Gender and History 30, no. 1 (March 2018): 153–76. She argues that the usual way the “midlife crisis” idea is understood—as discovered by male social scientists and then popularized by Gail Sheehy’s bestseller Passages (New York: Ballantine, 2006)—is wrong. She says, “the midlife crisis has historical roots in debate about gender roles and work and family values, and the shape these took in the United States in the 1970s.” In other words, it was a conversation people were having; Sheehy reported on it; then a bunch of male social scientists whose work she had discussed along with her reporting and feminist critique said she had “popularized” their “discoveries.”
19 Elliott Jaques, “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” in Creativity and Work (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1990), 306.
20 Daniel J. Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Knopf, 1978), 199.
21 Susan Krauss Whitbourne, “The Top 10 Myths About the Midlife Crisis,” PsychologyToday.com, July 21, 2012.
22 Someone could write a dissertation on women insisting they don’t deserve to feel bad. In 1975’s The Romantic Englishwoman, the wife (played by Glenda Jackson) is asked in bed by her husband (played by Michael Caine): “Are you discontented?” Her reply: “I would be, but I don’t feel I have the right.” The husband steals the line for a screenplay he’s writing.
23 The song was also covered in 1998 by Ace of Base. After I broke up with him, my boyfriend when I was fourteen left many notes in my locker that sometimes included Ace of Base and Wilson Phillips lyrics. This did not rekindle the passion.
24 Richard Eisenberg, “Boomers and Gen Xers Skipping Health Care Due to Cost,” Forbes.com, March 27, 2018.
25 Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened (London: Faber and Faber, 2018), 21.
26 Jim Tankersley, “Jobless Recoveries Are Here to Stay, Economists Say, But It’s a Mystery Why,” Washington Post, September 19, 2013.
27 Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, “5 Interesting Facts About Generation X,” AARP.org. Retrieved May 18, 2018. According to research by Experian, Millennials average $52,120 in debt (including mortgages, credit cards, and student and car loans); Boomers and the Silent Generation $87,438; Generation X, $125,000. Also see: Chris Matthews, “America’s Most Indebted Generation? Gen X,” Fortune.com, August 27, 2014.
28 Khalfani-Cox, “5 Interesting Facts About Generation X.” Retrieved August 5, 2018.
29 Jeffry Bartash, “Higher Rents and Home Prices Drive Increase in Consumer Prices in December, CPI Finds,” MarketWatch, January 12, 2018.
30 The average age of a college-educated first-time mother in big cities like San Francisco or New York City is now thirty-three. Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller, “The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America,” New York Times, August 4, 2018.
31 Clive Thompson, “You Know Who’s Really Addicted to Their Phones? The Olds,” Wired, March 27, 2018.
32 Sheehy, Passages, 345.
33 Ibid., xviii.
