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

by Ada Calhoun

Last year, I accepted an invitation to appear at a conference where I would listen to entrepreneurial attendees’ spiels and give them advice on pitching their projects to the press. I would receive $250 to be there for a few hours, and I believed I would be useful. Having worked at magazines on and off since the early 1990s, I felt confident that I could give them advice on what to do and not do. What I did not know is that a huge number of those pitching that year were aspiring life coaches. The stories I heard from many of them were ghastly: One told me she had eight family deaths and five miscarriages in one year. Another said her child was abducted. Several had survived domestic abuse or cancer. These experiences made them want to transform their lives, to help people, and so they had become empowerment speakers. They were following their passions. But it was unclear to me how these passions would result in the paying of bills. Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, calls the rhetoric around pursuing work you love “aspirational labor”: “Aspirational labor is a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love.”55 The problem: doing what you love often does not pay.