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Women of this generation, she said, are living “cyclical lives that demand they start over again and again.”
Back then, nothing was sugarcoated—except our food.
The pressures of this stage of life, coinciding as they do with difficult physical changes, are enough to make anyone storm out of the house or snap at people or fantasize about having less responsibility. Feeling that our life is robbed of joy is a mainstay of middle age for most people at some point or other.
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The Boomers and oldest Gen Xers were the first to be described as a “sandwich” generation—squeezed by the need to care for children and aging parents and perhaps also grandparents—simultaneously.
1965 mothers spent nine hours a week on paid work and ten hours on child care. In 2016, mothers spent twenty-five hours on paid work and fourteen on child care. Something has to give, and it’s usually women’s leisure time or sleep. Even so, of mothers with full-time jobs, 43 percent still lament spending too little time with their children.
Generation X women keep many lists: grocery lists, chore lists, deadline lists, schools-to-apply-to lists, holiday-card lists. Some are on paper and some on smartphones or sticky notes or whiteboards, but they can also seem to loop on a scroll behind the women’s eyes.
Gen Xers helicopter over our kids because we have too-vivid memories of what happened—or could have happened—to us when our parents didn’t hover. That visceral sense of danger is hard to reason with.
We are some of the best-educated human beings ever and among the first adults in recent American history in worse financial shape than our parents.
The gap between the richest 1 percent and everyone else has been increasing for the past thirty years; it widened greatly in the 1990s, as we were entering the job market.188
rising in the US class structure is less and less possible, with middle-class families seeing the sharpest decline in opportunity.
In our forties, we are often still scrambling the way we did at twenty-five.
Graduating into a strong economy versus a weak one could amount to as much as a 20 percent difference in wages over time.
“This generation is unhappy because we are all going to be working until we die.”
Between 2000 and 2005 and since 2013, home prices have outpaced salary growth226—resuming a trend by which, from 1970 to 2000, the cost of buying a home rose by more than 80 percent, adjusted for inflation.227
Health care is another expense that can wipe out a family’s savings, even if they have health insurance.
Nikita told me she has started to think of building a new career for herself, but she hesitates: “The idea of starting over and having zero experience and zero credibility doing something else is really daunting and scary. I keep telling myself, ‘People do it all of the time.’” Still, she’s stuck in the grind of daily obligation and can’t seem to make a decision about what direction to take. And she seems not to fully trust herself.
Of the four generations polled, Gen X was the most distraught.
Nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves.
Our problems are beyond the reach of “me-time.”
For me, the first step to peace in middle age has been learning that the game is rigged.
Almost every story I’ve heard of a Gen X woman pulling herself out of a midlife crisis has involved, in one way or another, the letting go of expectations.
