Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

Gen X has arrived in middle age to almost no notice, largely unaware, itself, of being a uniquely star-crossed cohort.

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.”

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.

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.

Deborah Luepnitz, a Boomer psychotherapist practicing in Philadelphia, said, “What I see in my Gen X patients is total exhaustion. They feel guilty for complaining, because it’s wonderful to have had choices that our mothers didn’t have, but choices don’t make life easier. Possibilities create pressure.”

Today, suicide rates are soaring among middle-aged women.40 For women ages forty-five to fifty-four, it is now the seventh most frequent cause of death, ahead of diabetes, influenza, and pneumonia; for white women in that age group, it’s number five.