Calling All Gen X Women: Is the "New Mid-Life Crisis" Ringing a Bell?

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If you're a woman born anytime between the late '60s and early '80s, this Oprah.com article, "The New Mid-Life Crisis," is a must-read.

According to a thoroughly unscientific estimate, 100 percent of the women we know relate to somewhere between 50 percent and 95 percent of the angst described in this scorchingly timely piece by St. Marks Is Dead author Ada Calhoun. Granted, the article came out this past fall, but we were busy and distracted and somehow missed it.

Missed it too? Read it now, whether or not you embrace or loathe the term Gen X. And whether you're married or single, with or without kids, living in a city or a suburb or a village or wherever. Working way too hard or not hard enough, happily married or happily single or unhappily married or unhappily single. A lot of what's in Calhoun's essay will resonate, enormously. 

Choice quotes:

  • "'[Middle-aged women] are smoking in their bedrooms out the window the way they did when they were 16,' says Elizabeth Earnshaw, a marriage and family therapist in Philadelphia."
  • "And 24/7 they're on their smartphones (which, remember, have only been around for 10 years)... watching breaking news alerts of nuclear threat escalations, end-times weather catastrophes, terrifying mass violence. They're waking up to see what else has gone wrong and wondering how to help. They're fielding long 10 p.m. emails from bosses that end with 'Thoughts?' The cumulative effect is the feeling that they will never catch up, on any level, ever."
  • "Deborah Luepnitz, PhD, a psychotherapist in Philadelphia, a boomer and author of Schopenhauer's Porcupines. 'In midlife, 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.'"
  • "Possibilities. We still have them in midlife, but they can start to seem so abstract. Yes, I could go get a doctorate, but where would I find the graduate school tuition? I could switch careers—therapist? Zamboni driver?—but at this stage of life, do I really want to start from the bottom, surrounded by 20-year-olds? If I went on an Eat, Pray, Love walkabout, who would pick up the kid from school?"

To put this all in perspective, Calhoun adds: "The complaints of well-educated, middle- and upper-middle class women are easy to dismiss as temporary, or not really a crisis, or #FirstWorldProblems. America, in the grand scheme of things, is still a rich, relatively safe country. (Syrian refugees do not have the luxury of waking up in the middle of the night worried about credit card bills.)..Insert your Reason Why We Don't Deserve to Feel Lousy here." 

Still, the challenges and anxieties are real, and an increasing number of women do. Feel lousy, that is. 

But! The essay ends on an up-note. It's a sobering read but it's also, oddly, reassuring and even inspiring in its way. Let us know what you think of the article, and if you relate, and what you're doing, or not doing, to face down the crisis...

And meanwhile, remember: The future is female.

Photo by Nirzar Pangarkar via Unsplash.