Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  Molly Ringwald as Samantha in Sixteen Candles (1984)—her birthday forgotten by her family, her panties exhibited in a boys’ bathroom—was the ultimate Gen X teen girl icon. When she wasn’t being sexually harassed she was being bored to death. She was over it.

  Ringwald recently wrote a New Yorker article revisiting the films she made with director John Hughes. She recalled an interview she did with him for Seventeen magazine in which he acknowledged that those movies were designed to legitimize the angst of the Gen X teen, something the wider culture wasn’t doing.

  Hughes said, “My generation had to be taken seriously because we were stopping things and burning things. We were able to initiate change, because we had such vast numbers. We were part of the Baby Boom, and when we moved, everything moved with us. But now, [with Generation X] there are fewer teens, and they aren’t taken as seriously as we were.”²

  Millennials are anything but ignored, and they seem to have received a sunnier message. The key Muppet for younger Millennials was the perpetually sunny Elmo. Ours were Kermit, his mouth warped by anxiety; Big Bird, who for fourteen years was accused of imagining Snuffleupagus; and Oscar the Grouch, a sociopath.

  Maybe Millennials seem optimistic because they’re young. But even when we were young, we seemed old. Younger generations may not be better off than Gen X—in certain ways, they may be worse off—but have a better attitude. After all, one of their earliest memories is September 11. I wonder if Millennials may benefit from witnessing our struggles and our snide remarks about the future. Could it lead them to lower their expectations for themselves? And could that make all the difference?

  “We always have transition periods,” says Elizabeth Earnshaw, a couples and family therapist in Philadelphia.³ “But midlife is a period of time where you might want to make transitions but you’re stuck by financial stuff. When you’re sixteen and you’re transitioning into adulthood, you can do whatever you want because [unless you’re poverty-stricken] money isn’t really holding you back or you don’t care about it. When you’re in your twenties, you don’t care about it as much either. But when you’re forty years old and you’ve decided you might want to go back to school or take fertility treatments or whatever, you are financially tied to so many things.”

  She sees Gen X women flailing in reaction, unsure what to do and missing who they were in a simpler time.

  “They might not go out and buy a convertible,” says Earnshaw. “But they might be buying purses behind the scenes or having affairs. They flirt, fantasizing about what it would be like to not have kids or to go live in Miami or to go back to school. They often revert to whatever life they were living before they started doing whatever’s making them feel stressed. If, prior to having a marriage and kids, you were in college going out with your girlfriends every single weekend and drinking and getting dressed up, now you go out every weekend to concerts with your friends. It could be traveling. It could be collecting something. It could be exercising the way you used to. I’ve had a couple of people who have said that they’re smoking in their bedroom out the window the way they did when they were sixteen.”

  “I feel like I’m dealing with the death of some dreams that I had,” said Erin, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who’d recently moved back home to Kansas City with her husband and children after giving up on making it as an actress in California. “I had that attitude of ‘I’m out of here, Midwest! I’m going to go to Hollywood!’ And now I’m back here.”

  She’s driving the same roads she drove as a teenager, although now she looks older and there are kid seats in the back. The radio’s playing the same music, although now the Gin Blossoms are on the oldies station.

  In a 2018 book called The Happiness Curve, Jonathan Rauch described research on a “U-curve” dip in well-being that occurs in midlife everywhere in the world, including among great apes.⁴ There have been academic challenges to the U-curve thesis,⁵ but according to research by economists Andrew Oswald and David Blanchflower, in the United States, women’s happiness bottoms out around forty; men’s, around fifty.⁶ (Maybe that’s another reason the female experience isn’t much discussed: By the time men start fretting, women might seem unaffected because they’ve been through it already.)

  Even if you have no negative turning point in your life—a bad illness, the death of someone close to you, or an addiction crisis can induce the more extreme “V-curve”—Rauch reports that midlife is at odds with happiness. The curve doesn’t mean that it is impossible “to be very satisfied with your life in middle age,” Rauch writes, “but it is harder … The happiness curve is like an undertow that pulls against you in middle age. That doesn’t mean you can’t row against it.”⁷

  Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has said in a study and a TED talk that the increase in the human life span is good news, because stress, worry, and anger all decrease with age. This is known as the “paradox of aging,” because, technically, being older is more difficult—health and energy usually decline, for starters—but people tend to be happier toward the end of life than they are in their forties.⁸

  That said, the U-curve, having been observed in the past, isn’t necessarily a guarantee of future performance. What if ours is history’s first curveless generation, surfing a diagonal line straight to the graph’s lower right-hand corner? Midlife markers sure seem to be more complicated for us. There is no clear timeline in Gen X adulthood.

  The other day at the library, I watched an educational film called Midlife Crisis?

  Amid stock images of middle-aged people reading pamphlets, playing solitaire, and walking in nature, the film propounded that men of this age are prone to depression and find it hard to talk about their lives. Once the male-focused books Life Begins at 40, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, and Men in Midlife Crisis had been thoroughly discussed, women were granted a moment when this text appeared on the screen: “In the average woman’s 35th year: Last child goes off to school. Risk of infidelity begins. She reenters the workforce. Divorced women remarry. Some women ‘Run Away.’ Childbearing option decreases.”⁹

  The film was made in 2000, and it shows. A woman of that age may have children in school, or she may be trying to get pregnant for the first time. She has almost certainly been working since her teens. And she is likely to be facing a host of other obligations—while possibly beginning to confront perimenopause. Though one thing does hold: the “Run Away” option may be tempting, especially for women married to partners having their own midlife crises.

  As Nikita was out running errands one day, her phone pinged. It was Amazon saying: “Thank you for shopping with us. You ordered More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory. We’ll send a confirmation when your item ships.”

  Nikita looked at her phone. The family Amazon account was connected to her email address, but she had not ordered the book. That meant her husband had. “He’d told me before that he was interested in the idea,” she said. “But seeing that book order gave me an out-of-body experience.”

  There’s something so Gen X about that moment. Not only does the woman of the house have to decide what’s for dinner and which sink to buy for the rental property—now she must also make the call on whether or not her husband is allowed to sleep around.

  To a man who doesn’t want to be a cheater, it can make a kind of sense. He loves his wife and decided he would act on his lust for other women only with her explicit approval. In this case, she denied permission: “I’m not going to make you feel okay about it,” she told him. “On top of everything else, I don’t have to soothe your guilt.”

  Generation X has put everything on the table, up to and including traditional boundaries around relationships. The open-marriage discussions, which went around in circles for months, made Nikita nostalgic for a time when husbands had flings on business trips. At least back then wives were spared lachrymose conversations about monogamy when they’d rather be watching television.

  “There are days where I can kn
ock it all out of the park, right?” said Nicole, a woman in Northern California with six-year-old twins. “I volunteer at the kids’ school. I do my part-time work. I clean the house. I walk the dog. Five million things. And then there are days where, after doing a couple of those things, I think, I’m just going to read my magazine. Or I don’t bother to clean the floor or I leave stuff on the counter. That’s just the way it goes.

  “Well, this past weekend, my husband looked around, and said, ‘So, what do you do all day?’ I lost it. It wasn’t a polite conversation. I got really upset. I literally thought I was having a mental breakdown. I went into a room and cried so much it hurt.

  “We took a break and when we talked later he apologized. I told him, ‘All I heard from you is: “You don’t do what you need to do and you are failing.”’ I am failing. I couldn’t go to sleep because I just went over it, over it, over it again in my head.”

  If Gen X women are haunted by a vague feeling that things are terrible and might not get better, it could be the U-curve. It could be perimenopausal depression. It could be temporary, situational stress. It could be a feeling left over from childhood that the other shoe is about to drop. And it could well be the pressure of decision making.

  One woman told me that it felt as though nearly everything in her life was always pending. For the past year, she’d been in counseling with her boyfriend of three years, trying to decide whether or not to break up. For at least as long, she’d been trying to decide how to grow her real estate photography business. Meanwhile, to put it bluntly, she’s been waiting for her pets to die.

  “I got cats when I was twenty-eight,” she said. “One of them was diagnosed with diabetes in 2007. The other one was recently diagnosed with hyperthyroid and kidney disease. I feel like I have an honorary graduate degree in cat nursing. I don’t want to lose my cats, but also maybe it’s time for them to … yeah.”

  Women with children may face additional pressures once they start trying to be more serious about their work. One CEO told me that the number one thing that she sees holding women back in their careers is maternal guilt.

  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. The result of the myth was a brainwashing campaign designed to make women feel bad. The most chilling parts of the documentary are the clips of daytime talk shows and nighttime news programs that pit working women and stay-at-home mothers against one another. Then the anchors or hosts, so many of them men, turn somberly to the camera to ask if a woman should choose her job or her children.

  Has the same “your career or your life” question ever been asked of men? Despite research showing that a father’s attention is one of the key factors in a child’s emotional health? Not to mention, again: a working mother in 2000 spent just as much time interacting with her children as did a stay-at-home mother in 1975.

  In the documentary, sociologist Amy Hsin points out that as far as how a child turns out, the amount of time spent interacting with a mother is a drop in the bucket compared with other factors like the child’s parents having a good education, the child’s school’s quality, and growing up in a safe neighborhood. Those are all things that a woman with a career can help make possible.

  The “Mommy Wars” uproar did drive home one truth: pretty much everyone in America would like to have more support. This wasn’t much of a revelation. 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

  Economist Heather Boushey writes in Finding Time¹² that when women started working, America lost its “silent partner”—the traditional American wife: “She took care of all the big and small daily emergencies that might distract the American Worker from focusing 100 percent on his job while he was at work. Little Johnny got in a fight on the playground? The American Wife will be right there to talk to the school. Aunt Bea fell and broke her hip? The American Wife can spend the afternoon bringing her groceries and making her dinner. The boss is coming over for dinner? The American Wife already has the pot roast in the oven.”

  What I, personally, wouldn’t give for my very own American Wife. She would cook my meals and clean my bathtub and make my appointments and enforce my son’s screen-time limits and drop by to visit my 101-year-old grandmother at the retirement home every week. I would get so much work done. My home would be spotless. I would sleep eight hours a night—heck, maybe nine.

  You can buy that sort of support, of course. But then there’s a question of whether or not you’re earning enough to warrant the cost. When my son was a baby, I spent an entire stage play with tears streaming down my face—not because the show was sad or because I particularly missed my child, but because the play was awful and I felt physical pain that to see it I was spending $17 an hour, plus takeout and cab fare, for the sitter.

  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.

  A decade or so ago, we were told that educated women were leaving the workforce in droves to be with their children, and pundits debated the value of mothers’ working versus not working. Then Heather Boushey pointed out that data wasn’t actually there to suggest that women with children were opting out of the labor market in growing numbers. According to her, “The main reason for declining labor force participation rates among women over the last four years appears to be the weakness of the labor market.”¹³

  In other words, they didn’t “opt out” so much as “surrender.” If you say, “Would you prefer the fish or the chicken,” but the chicken is on top of a mountain and it’s raining, while the fish is right in front of you under a tent, can that meaningfully be described as a choice? Do you really get to say that the woman choosing fish opted out of chicken consumption—that she must be biologically hardwired to prefer fish?

  Think pieces about Generation X teem with lists of qualities we supposedly display. For example: “Superficial, easily distracted, rootless, inscrutable, self-centered, unfocused, pathetic.”¹⁴ Or: “With caution—and on little cat feet—wary, worn before wear, fearful, and suspicious.”¹⁵ Or as Newsweek put it in a 1993 editorial called “The Whiny Generation”: “pusillanimous purveyors of pseudo-angst.”¹⁶

  Generation X’s “endemic, possibly pathological, sarcasm,” as music critic Carl Wilson put it,¹⁷ was immortalized in films like Slacker (1990), Singles (1992), and the Ethan Hawke canon, epitomized by his Reality Bites (1994) rendition of the song “I’m Nuthin” and when he tells Winona that all they need to be happy are cigarettes, coffee, and conversation. Such characters reflect a generational jadedness and sarcasm—a pose barely covering a deep vulnerability.¹⁸

  Gen X men’s fictional avatars made not caring look sexy. “It was this cool new Gen X model of masculinity,” said a friend. These were guys who didn’t sell out or settle or do anything they didn’t want to do. They were free. “But then a lot of us in this generation actually went out and married guys like that,” said my friend. “And it’s cute at twenty but at forty it is incredibly irritating.”¹⁹

  Another friend of mine said 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

  The hero of the 1986 John Hughes classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off takes nine sick days in his senior year, because, as he says, “Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” He doesn’t want to waste time in a classroom; he craves adventure.

  As a teenager, I found Ferris’s approach, up to and including his disregard for “isms,” attractive. As a grown-up wom
an with dreams of her own and enthusiasm for several isms, I am no longer drawn to men who find responsibility and authority comical. Can you imagine coparenting with Ferris Bueller?

  It would be worse still to have married Tom Cruise’s character from Risky Business, one of the biggest hits of 1983. “More clearly than any other film of its period,” writes Ginia Bellafante,²¹ “Risky Business hinges the privileging of male mediocrity on the exploitation of female disadvantage.” That film, like so many of the era, taught us that men would be rewarded with wealth and advancement if they behaved badly or were lazy.

  One forty-year-old woman in the Midwest told me she married a dead ringer for Eddie Vedder: “I’m not joking,” she said. “He is so passive. He’s my trophy husband. He’s this musician who’s really laid-back and sort of a dreamer and definitely of the generation where adulting smacked him in the face. 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.”

  According to research on decision fatigue: “An excess of choices often leads us to be less, not more, satisfied once we actually decide,” as one New York Times story puts it.²² “There’s often that nagging feeling we could have done better.” Choosing where to live and where to work and how to spend your money is daunting enough, but making such high-stakes choices at your weariest—it’s like trying to have an intimate conversation in a sports bar during the Super Bowl.