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
