Why We Can't Sleep
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A New York Times article from that same year dubbed people born on the early end of Generation X “Generation Grumpy,” because those in this cohort have entered supposedly flush times only to feel that “they are not doing as well as they might have expected.”³⁴
Predictably, the comments were along the indignant lines of: “Grumpy?!?!”
A commenter calling herself Anita from Richmond explained that Gen X wasn’t just a bunch of whiners miffed about not being millionaires: “This generation is unhappy because we are all going to be working until we die.”
The media often minimizes Gen X’s midlife angst. My favorite headline from this genre: DROWNING AT MIDLIFE? START SWIMMING.³⁵ Literally, the woman says she headed off a midlife crisis by swimming three times a week.
In the mid-2000s, mortgages were being handed out like candy. Younger Gen Xers had just entered their prime first-home-buying years and older Gen Xers who owned a home were starting to think about trading up. At last, those who’d been locked out of the American dream could think about buying property or having the home they’d always wanted.
Then came the subprime mortgage crisis. The unemployment rate went from 5 percent in December 2007 to 10 percent in October 2009.³⁶ In a flash, homes in big cities lost 10 to more than 30 percent of their value.³⁷
Gen X “took most of the hit from the housing bust,” according to a Harvard report. Home ownership rates for our demographic “have fallen further than those of any other age group.”³⁸
One forty-eight-year-old Connecticut woman I spoke with bought a big house with her husband in 2005 for $850,000. Theirs was one of the many that wound up underwater in the housing crisis. When she and her husband divorced, they sold the house for $715,000, losing the difference, plus everything they’d put into it—their total savings. They lived together for several years after they’d split, because they couldn’t afford separate places.
Between 2000 and 2005 and since 2013, home prices have outpaced salary growth³⁹—resuming a trend by which, from 1970 to 2000, the cost of buying a home rose by more than 80 percent, adjusted for inflation.⁴⁰
A forty-two-year-old friend of mine in New Jersey told me, “I’m scared as shit. We never bought a house. And now we have two kids, so the idea of buying something is like a dream—it happens in fairy tales! You look back and you’re like, ‘Oh my God. What about retirement?’ ‘Will we ever own anything?’ ‘How are we putting these kids through college?’ It’s really, really scary.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Gen X “has suffered more than any other age cohort from the housing bust, according to an analysis of federal data, suggesting homeownership rates for that group could remain depressed for years to come.”⁴¹
Since 2000, across the country the cost of renting is up, and so is the number of people trying to find cheap housing,⁴² of which there is a nationwide dearth.⁴³
“Lower your expenses” is good advice, but moving to a cheaper place or a cheaper part of the country can carry its own costs, beyond the rental truck. Even if you can’t quite afford the place you’re in, there may be no better options anywhere within commuting distance of well-paying work.⁴⁴
The economic divide between prosperous areas and poor ones has grown exponentially in our lifetimes. “If you made the wrong choice about where to live in the mid-2000s, you could be stuck now,” says Lisa Chamberlain.⁴⁵ “If you stayed in San Francisco you might be okay. If you got out of Dodge and went to Nebraska—not so much. In Cleveland you’re not going to be accumulating wealth. Millennials can still reinvent themselves. But if you put down roots and had a family somewhere with a lack of opportunities, it’s going to be very hard to get out and relocate into a more expensive market.”
Then there is student loan debt, which can kneecap a family for generations. Gen X graduated with plenty of debt, and it’s getting worse.⁴⁶ I know people who have paid off their own student loans just in time to start paying for their children’s education. The average yearly cost of a four-year public college is now 81 percent of an American woman’s median annual income.⁴⁷ And our children may have even more trouble paying back student debt than we did. Millennials in their early thirties now earn 4 percent less on average than those of us born between 1966 and 1980 did at the same age.⁴⁸
The New York Times editor M. H. Miller, a Millennial who graduated just after the 2008 Great Recession, recently wrote of how the seemingly insurmountable debt he took on in order to attend New York University has hamstrung him and his parents. “I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last decade shifting the blame for my debt,” he writes. “Whose fault was it? My devoted parents, for encouraging me to attend a school they couldn’t afford? The banks, which should have never lent money to people who clearly couldn’t pay it back to begin with, continuously exploiting the hope of families like mine, and quick to exploit us further once that hope disappeared? Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realize it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf?”⁴⁹
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.⁵⁰ According to the National Institutes of Health, chronic pain disorders, like TMJ, are more common in women, and strokes happen more often to middle-aged women than to middle-aged men.⁵¹ Our risk of getting breast cancer in our thirties is 1 in 227. In our forties: 1 in 68. In our fifties it is 1 in 42.⁵²
One woman I know was diagnosed with breast cancer when her daughter was a toddler. In the years that followed, she had a biopsy, lumpectomy, double mastectomy, implants, nipple surgery. Some of her most vivid midlife memories are of lying in recovery rooms “full of women filled up with gas to their necks, moaning.”
About 75 percent of autoimmune patients are women, Virginia T. Ladd, president and executive director of the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, told me, and autoimmune diseases overall are on the rise. The reason why such afflictions—particularly thyroid disorders like Hashimoto’s disease—are booming remains mysterious. “It’s most likely something in the environment, because genes do not change that fast,” Ladd told me. “We’ve added lots of things to our environment, including the overuse of antibiotics, which may significantly change the gut, the microbiome. It’s probably also influenced by how our world is compared with how it was thirty or fifty years ago.”⁵³
According to the Social Security Administration, the year in which the Social Security trust fund is projected to be exhausted is 2034.⁵⁴ That’s right as many of us will be hitting retirement age. Roughly three-quarters of Gen Xers don’t believe Social Security will provide them with full benefits when they retire.⁵⁵ If the reserve funds are depleted, that doesn’t mean no more Social Security checks.⁵⁶ But it may well mean people receive just about three-quarters of what they’re counting on; cuts to Social Security would hit women hardest.⁵⁷
“Chances are, Social Security will still be around once you hit the eligibility age,” writes New York Times finance columnist Ron Lieber. “But it probably won’t provide enough money, after taxes, for all the expenses you’ll face in retirement. Plus, it’s possible that some of the rules will change before it’s your turn to collect.”⁵⁸ His guide on how to save for retirement includes the ever-popular compounding-interest chart, showing that if you sock away $5,000 a year, starting when you’re twenty-two rather than ten years later, you end up with a surplus of about half a million dollars at retirement. No mention there of the payoff if you don’t start until forty-two. Good. I don’t want to know.
Now for financially positive morbidity: Generation X will probably become solvent one day—when they inherit their parents’ wealth. According to CNBC, over the next few decades, the Baby Boomers, the biggest and richest generation in US history, will transfer $30 trillion in assets t
o their Generation X and Millennial offspring.⁵⁹
“Gen-Xers are within hailing distance of their prime years,” reads a 2018 Blackbaud Institute report. “Regardless of the fascination with Millennials, Gen X is poised to be the next big thing for philanthropy … The ‘Age of X’ in philanthropy may be as little as a decade away.”⁶⁰
The size of the inheritance is, of course, contingent on many factors, such as how much of their fortunes Boomers will need for long-term care. The average cost of a private room in a nursing home is $7,698 a month.⁶¹
There are those who argue that regardless of whether we come into money Gen X has a potentially game-changing capacity for doing good in the world. A decade ago, writer Jeff Gordinier argued in his book X Saves the World that Gen X’s cautious attitude was just what society needed. A 2018 book by Matthew Hennessey of the Wall Street Journal and a 2017 article in Vanity Fair by Rich Cohen made similar arguments.
According to Cohen, Gen Xers are “the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.” He said that our supposed cynicism and dread amount to sanity: “We could not stand to hear the Utopian talk of the boomers as we cannot stand to hear the Utopian talk of the millennials. We know that most people are rotten to the core, but some are good, and proceed accordingly.”⁶²
“Unlike the millennials, we remember what life was like before the Internet invaded and conquered nearly everything,” Matthew Hennessey writes. “In that memory resides the hope of our collective redemption, the seed of renewal that could stem the rot, decay, erosion, and collapse all around us.”⁶³
Without a psychological overhaul, though, it could be that Gen X women will never save the world or ever feel financially secure even if they inherit a pile of money. When I ponder the last decades of our parents’ lives—and then try to wrap my mind around stemming rot and decay in society—I don’t feel empowered. I think: That all sounds very expensive.
6
Decision Fatigue
“I have always looked forward to my forties, thinking that’s when I’m going to feel like a real woman. I think I may have felt like that for two months. And then I said, ‘Oh my God, this feels horrible!’”
I first met my friend Nikita a decade ago in a New York City park when we were new mothers in our thirties and our infant sons became friends. I was not surprised to learn, given her athletic build and long, straight brown hair, that she’d been a teenage model—a Brooke Shields type from a logging community in the Pacific Northwest. In her twenties, she’d traded modeling for working as a dancer and then for teaching yoga. In her thirties, she had become a doula. Some days she’d show up to the park exhausted but relieved, having stayed up all night helping one of her clients through a birth. Then she had a second baby—a girl—herself.
Throughout those early years of baby rearing, she and I fetched each other coffee and watched each other’s kids. We polished off boxes of Wheat Thins sitting on the playground bench, breaking up fights, holding dripping ice-cream cones, helping small bodies into and out of onesies and then, suddenly, 4T swim trunks and then, what seemed like a second later, size 8 snow pants. We talked and talked: about our kids’ schools, about what to make for dinner, about—wait, what did the baby just put in her mouth?
Then, right when the whole early childhood thing was wrapping up for us and Nikita started to talk about going back to school, she became pregnant again. Soon after that baby—another son—was born, she found living in the city next to impossible. The costs were too high. Wrangling a stroller on the subway was no longer a delightful challenge. Her family rented out their New York place and moved back to the Northwest, though to Portland, Oregon, a more urban part of the state than where she’d lived in as a girl. They bought a house, which she renovated. Her first son is in middle school, her daughter is in elementary school, and her baby is toddling. Her husband, who’s from Kansas, helps manage his family’s farm and has recently joined a community of fellow comic book artists. The kids are happy. Still, when we spoke on the phone last fall, I heard an edge in Nikita’s voice that hadn’t been there before.
“I have nothing to complain about,” she said. “But at the same time, you just feel miserable. Before now, I never had real depression, where you just don’t want to get out of bed, you don’t want to speak to anybody, you don’t want to take a shower. It’s a dark sensation.”
The other day her ten-year-old daughter found a photo from when Nikita was younger and said: “That was you? You used to be so pretty!” Nikita recalled recently being mistaken for her baby’s grandmother.
She feels in limbo, disconnected from her life. Her days are filled with responsibilities, chores, and errands. There’s no narrative through line. She wonders what the point is of any of it.
“I guess that’s the really sad part,” she said. “I keep thinking, ‘Who cares?’ Obviously, I’m not talking about the kids. But all of the time and money and energy we spend working on these houses and building stuff up together and creating this complicated joint existence. I don’t actually feel attached to any of it.”
Middle-aged women I spoke with often second-guessed their life choices.
“I sometimes secretly wish I’d worked for Goldman Sachs right after Yale,” a forty-nine-year-old executive told me. “I feel like I could have retired by now. Or at least be secure about retirement. Sometimes I’m angry about marrying someone with no assets and a mountain of debt. But I think I’m happier having a loving partner. I think. What do I worry about most? Not having money when I’m old. I’m scared about that. I spend a lot of time wishing I could be more at peace with my choices and with the life I have.”
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.
“When all your choices have led you here to this place,” another woman told me, “how can you trust yourself to make a right choice now?”
Adulthood exerts a steady pressure on us to make decisions: which car insurance to get, where to send the kids to school, whom to marry, what job to have, whether or not to switch careers. Gen X women internalized a fatalism that one friend described to me as: “You have so many choices! Go for the most difficult one or whatever guarantees misery and hardship!” No wonder women in midlife may feel tempted to delay decisions, to hang out a little longer in an in-between state.
Personally, I have had a tortured, not entirely coherent approach to decision making and labels dating back to the 1990s. It was manifested in reluctance to commit or to join in, especially when it came to rites of passage.
In 1993, when I was a junior in high school, one of my best friends, a senior, came over to my house instead of attending his prom. We stayed up all night watching a stack of high-school-massacre horror movies on VHS—Carrie, Prom Night 4, Massacre at Central High.
The next year, I went to my own senior prom with a friend I’d recently started sleeping with but refused to call my boyfriend—because who needs labels? (He was totally my boyfriend.) I bought a very pink dress at a secondhand store. In a parody of what we thought the prom was about, we dyed my heels, his cummerbund, even his socks pink to match.
Resistance to commitment, to picking a path, has long been a Gen X hallmark. The 1990 Time magazine cover story about Gen X, “Proceeding with Caution,” said: “A prime characteristic of today’s young adults is their desire to avoid risk, pain and rapid change.”¹ A twenty-two-year-old in the article—a man now fifty, assuming he’s still out there—said he didn’t want a serious relationship, because “not getting hurt is a big priority with me.”
Our generation had few shared heroes. The 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, hosted by Dana Carvey, demonstrated that Boomers were still in charge. Among the stars performing were Eric Clapton, Def Leppard, and Elton John. A big winner of the night, thanks to the song “Right Now,” was Van Halen, a band whose members were born in the 1940s and ’50s.
Gen X “got no war to name us,” to quote the Replacements’ song “Bastards of Young.” So much of our pop culture—The Breakfast Club (1985), Heathers (1988), Pump Up the Volume (1990), My So-Called Life (1994–95), Twin Peaks (1990–91)—reflected an existential, what’s-the-point ambivalence.
Entertainment set in sunny California—Beverly Hills, 90210 comes to mind—provided some escapism. One of the only purely delightful movies I recall from my teenage years was 1995’s Clueless. The enthusiasm, the money, the non-neurotic reaction to mistakes—upon sideswiping a parked car during her driving test: “Ooh! Should I write them a note?”—it all felt more exotic to me than a foreign film. It still did not counteract the gross tonnage of despair to which we were subjected.
As a tween, I had a poster of River Phoenix on my wall. As far as I was concerned, he was the handsomest man in the world, particularly in the 1988 drama Running on Empty. He would be dead of a drug overdose before I was out of high school. Kurt Cobain, singer of the Gen X anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” would also die that school year—in April 1994, right around the time my prom date and I were dyeing things pink. (Appropriately enough, the song itself was ironic, named after the deodorant Teen Spirit, mocking generational anthems.)