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

by Ada Calhoun

Health care is another expense that can wipe out a family’s savings, even if they have health insurance. Middle age is when conditions like type 2 diabetes are most likely to be diagnosed.

According to the Social Security Administration, the year in which the Social Security trust fund is projected to be exhausted is 2034.

Baby Boomers, the biggest and richest generation in US history, will transfer $30 trillion in assets to their Generation X and Millennial offspring.59

A short Retro Report documentary called The Mommy Wars10 dismantled the “toxic myth” that lasted through the 1990s: that putting young children in daycare or with other caregivers while mothers worked would damage them.

In 1971, Judy Syfers Brady wrote the justly famous essay “I Want a Wife”: “I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after me.”11

The whole “throw money at the problem” solution is awkward also because it suggests that fixing rich or middle-class women’s problems requires poor women’s work: the manicurist, the takeout delivery person, the night nurse, the Uber driver, the masseuse. Talk about invisible labor.

she was dismayed to learn that the men she desired in her twenties were not actually crafting a new model of masculinity. They just spent the 1990s on Ecstasy.20

He definitely defers to me all the time with all the decisions, and I’m like, What is that about? Is he afraid to make the wrong decision, so he just waits? Or is it putting the wife in the mommy position? I don’t know.”

This sounds like my parents.

In New York City, where I live, there are 400,000 more women than men.15

Some discovered on dating apps that fifty-year-old men who still wear Star Wars T-shirts were hunting for twenty-eight-year-old women.

One popular mantra is HALT, meaning that when you’re about to start flipping tables, you should ask yourself if you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired and take appropriate action (eat a sandwich, go to therapy, call a friend, take a nap; then flip the table).

The writer Darcey Steinke’s 2019 book Flash Count Diary is a search for meaning in a physically grueling menopause that had her flashing multiple times a day.

If you live long enough you quit chasing the things that hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.”34

Among middle-aged women in the United States, 38 percent are obese, according to a comprehensive study by age group done in 2011.

Nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves.

Carol Hanisch, best known for popularizing the adage “The personal is political,”

So many women I spoke with—objectively successful women—felt ashamed of their perceived failures.

“The people I know who are happy realize they can’t care about everything,”

“The minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces,”

all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked.”

These are healthy alternatives to dairy, a food group which a significant portion of adults have an intolerance toward. It may cause folks stomach upset or digestive issues or allergic reactions. Maybe they are choosing to be vegan. American dairy cows are treated in an inhumane way and raising them presents a devastating ecological impact. Also, cow milk is full of hormones and who knows how that has affected our physiology and psychology for years.

“We take basically good ideas and turn them into something with which to self-flagellate,”

It’s about telling the story of our mistakes, our life, in a new way, in which we’re heroines worth rooting for.

Eerily, Strauss and Howe predicted a 2020 crisis brought about by Boomers, one for which Gen X will “provide able on-site managers and behind-the-scenes facilitators, the ones whose quick decisions could spell the difference between triumph and tragedy … In an age of rising social intolerance, the very incorrigibility of midlife 13ers will at times be a national blessing.”