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

One of the main problems in making dreams come true? They cost money.

We’re the first women raised from birth hearing the tired cliché “having it all” — then discovering as adults that it is very hard to have even some of it.

Gen Xers are in 'the prime of their lives' at a particularly dangerous and divisive moment,' Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me. 'They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They're squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they're exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.

My expectations are way lower. I no longer believe that at this age I should have rock-hard abs, a perfectly calm disposition, or a million dollars in the bank. It helps to surround myself with women my age who speak honestly about their lives.

We kept hearing again and again that we could be anything we wanted to be. We had supportive mothers insisting we would accomplish more than they had. Title IX made sure our after-school classes were as good as the boys’. We saw women on television who had families and fun careers. So, if we happened to fail, why was that? The only thing left to blame was ourselves.

In my experience, 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 women, who as children lacked cell phones and helicopter parents, came up relying on our own wits. To keep ourselves safe, we took control. We worked hard and made lists and tried to do everything all at once for a very long time without much help. We took responsibility for ourselves--and later we also took responsibility for our work or partners or children or parents. We should be proud of ourselves.

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.

It should be plenty to raise children or to have a career- or, frankly, just not to become a serial killer. Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.

Taking your seat at the table doesn’t work out so well when no one wants you there and you are vastly outnumbered.

If our generation has been told for decades that we have so much freedom, so many choices, such opportunities, the question women with young children face is: how free are we to reach for the stars in midlife if we have someone else depending on us? Especially when our concept of good parenting involves so much more brain space and such higher costs than it did for our mothers and grandmothers? And when we expect ourselves to be excellent, highly engaged parents while also being excellent, highly engaged employees?

One of the goals she encourages women to pursue is what’s known as “radical acceptance”—finding a way to take life as it is, not as you thought it would be. “It’s one of the hardest things,” Chafin says, “to radically accept what’s in front of you.

Maybe the Generation X story need not be: We're broke. We're unstable. We're alone. Maybe it can be: We've had a hard row to hoe. We've been one big experiment. And yet, look at us: we've accomplished so much.

Gen X straddles the pre- and post-internet worlds. The youngest Gen Xers belonged to the last graduating class to finish college pre–social media.2 Facebook was invented in 2004. The iPhone came out in 2007. How fitting that many younger Gen Xers and older Millennials were introduced to computing by the bleak Oregon Trail—which frequently ended with you and all your friends dying from dysentery.3 Personally, I loved the game. Again, again! Maybe this time we’ll get cholera!

Johann Hari’s 2018 book Lost Connections argues that our culture has come to medicate depression first and ask questions later, without recognizing that some discomforts are not medical emergencies. He tells the story of how when he begged for antinausea medication in a jungle hospital in Vietnam, the doctors said, “You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.

Gen X women often try to exert control over their bodies at midlife only to find that the middle-aged body is remarkably resistant.

It’s a strange state of vacillating between having our shit together and feeling less and less like we give a damn about what the rest of the world thinks.

We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days while still saddled with traditional caregiving duties. We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising--in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.

Generation X women keep many lists: grocery lists, chore lists, deadline lists, schools-to-apply-to lists, holiday-card lists. Some are on paper and some on smartphones or sticky notes or whiteboards, but they can also seem to loop on a scroll behind the women’s eyes.

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.

In their 1991 book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe made some predictions about our generation, which they called 13ers, because we are the thirteenth generation since the founding of the United States—and also because, like the number thirteen, we seem unlucky. In the years 2004–2025, they wrote, the Gen X demographic would be “entering midlife in a crisis era.” Gen X would look at the graying Boomers in charge and “appreciate that whatever bad hand history dealt them, they at least grew up with clear heads.”410 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.

Maybe the Generation X story need not be: We’re broke. We’re unstable. We’re alone. Maybe it can be: We’ve had a hard row to hoe. We’ve been one big experiment. And yet, look at us: we’ve accomplished so much. Generation X women, who as children lacked cell phones and helicopter parents, came up relying on our own wits. To keep ourselves safe, we took control. We worked hard and made lists and tried to do everything all at once for a very long time and without much help. We took responsibility for ourselves—and later we also took responsibility for our work or partners or children or parents. We should be proud of ourselves. I keep thinking about the 1980s–90s TV show Double Dare,401 in which child contestants had to find orange flags among obstacles such as mountains of slime. That, I think, is an excellent analogy for our generation in midlife: we’ve been glopped with slime, but somewhere in the mess there’s that little orange flag.

You come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been. —Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

In my experience, there is only one thing worse for a woman’s mental health than trying to be a superhero, and that is being told to “chill”—especially since any efforts to do so incur swift blowback.

It should be plenty to raise children or to have a career—or, frankly, just not to become a serial killer. Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.

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. It takes our bodies longer to recover from a night of drinking and it takes our spirits longer to bounce back from rejection. We may wind up asking questions like the one my friend posed to me the other night: “Do you think my life is ever going to be good again?

A middle-aged woman’s midlife crisis does, I know, pose a dramaturgical problem. In my observation—and as many experts I’ve spoken with have affirmed—women’s crises tend to be quieter than men’s. Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular—a big affair, a new career, a “she shed” in the backyard—but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.

Readers told me that they now saw the book as a kind of prequel to the pandemic horror—an explanation not just of why midlife can be rough for us but also for why our generation was at once so logistically vulnerable to and yet also so psychologically prepared for the devastation.

When the tough things happen—parents get sick, relationships go sour, careers stall—we might ask ourselves if the situation is a prison or a school: a place to escape or one in which to learn.

On women and high ACE scores see, for example: Donna Jackson Nakazawa, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal (New York: Atria Books, 2015). You can check your own ACE score at AcesTooHigh.com.