In
the 1993 movie “Falling Down,” Michael Douglas plays an angry white man
whose midlife crisis has him nearly foaming at the mouth. Appalled by a
brutal traffic jam and disorienting changes in his world, he flips out
in a Korean liquor store, tangles with the homeless and construction
workers, amassing an arsenal as he tries to make his way across town.
His breakdown leaves casualties, makes the news — everyone notices. An
eloquent latter-day equivalent, Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” shows a
meltdown going differently: The protagonist’s moment of crisis: Shrouded
in an oversize ski vest, he wanders alone, quiet and pathetic,
existentially lost on the edges of a party. Even his best friends don’t
notice.
Created nearly 20 years apart, the films illustrate two
different generations hitting middle age. People heard it loud and clear
when the baby boomers crossed over to midlife – you couldn’t avoid it.
Radio talk show hosts probed into the transition, newspapers described
boomer women coping with crow’s feet and men reclaiming their vitality
in tribal drum circles. For the generation born after – in the ‘60s and
‘70s, raised by television like no previous generation and with the
divorce rate skyrocketing during their childhood years — there is no
media watch broadcasting their new trajectory. Few have even noticed
that this small, notoriously rebellious clan – those born roughly
between 1965 and 1980, which means about 46 million Xers versus 80
million boomers — has entered middle age. It’s a transition that, until
now, has been captured, mulled over and ridiculed for each generation
for more than a half-century. But not this time.
The problem is,
with adulthoods repeatedly shipwrecked by economic disasters, Xers might
have neglected to track the crossing over. Susan Gregory Thomas, author
of the resonant memoir ”In Spite of Everything,” says that many Xers
“are always living in a state of triage, always in a survivalist mode.
We’re not thinking long-term.”
How is Generation X dealing with
middle age? Celebration, turmoil, regret? Which issues are keeping Xers
up at night? What happens when they wake up?
There’s
plenty to joke about when it comes to midlife – there’s the
stereotypical folly of the aging man grabbing his red Porsche and buxom
young thing in order to stave off the fear of death. Crises are
inherently filmic – and most of those films play midlife for laughs or
shock value. Think of the musical-bed high jinks in “Bob & Carol
& Ted & Alice” or Peter Sellers getting high with nubile hippies
in “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!”
But
whether the rest of the world notices or not, it’s time for Xers –
which, admittedly, is a broad, diverse bunch — to start assessing in a
way that goes beyond punch lines.
Whether you believe, as Gail
Sheehy stated in “Passages,” the ‘70s pop-culture classic on human life
stages, that middle age is psychologically hard-wired or, as Patricia
Cohen recently asserted in the book “In Our Prime: The Invention of
Middle Age,” mostly a social and scientific construct, the pull of doing
a full life assessment and inventory somewhere in your 40s has been
historically difficult to resist.
This is true even when the
inventory involves saying goodbye to youthful hopes. As Miranda July
said about the inspiration for her film “The Future” in a 2011 New York
Times Magazine profile, “It’s kind of about letting go of that feeling
of my 20s, that feeling that I will do absolutely everything, I will
have sex with everyone, I will go to every country,” she says. “In your
30s, it’s obvious that a finite amount of things will happen.”
And then 40 – well, it’s all downhill from there. Right?
* * *
Around
the time Richard Linklater’s film “Slacker” came out in 1991,
journalists and critics put a finger on what they thought was different
about the young generation of emerging adults – they were reluctant to
grow up, disdainful of earnest action. The stereotype stuck – and it
stuck hard. Business school management books define our generation as
adaptable but reluctant to make decisions; and boomer managers call on
Xers to finally take on leadership roles.
Wake up and step up, X! the culture seems to be saying.
Richard
Lerner, a psychologist and teen specialist at Tufts University, notes
the many Xer entrepreneurs who have wrought substantial changes. But
there might be something, he says, to the idea that Xers are distrustful
of authority figures. Acrimonious divorces – and there were plenty
during the ‘70s, during which American divorces nearly doubled — are
clearly bad for kids, but it’s probably more about the steady media
stream they were fed early on. “I think it may be a historical effect,
given the immediacy of news,” Lerner says. “There’s the separation, the
distance between what authority figures say and what they do, the
scandals that come out, that presumably makes some people skeptical
about authority figures. It creates cynicism in people.”
There is a
reason, says historian and generational expert Neil Howe, why members
of Generation X have been cast as perpetual adolescents. Their parents –
“the Silent Generation” – originated the stereotypical midlife
breakdown, and they came of age, and fell apart, in a very different
world. Generally stable and solvent, they headed confidently into adult
lives about the time they were handed their high school diplomas, and
married not long after that. You see it in Updike’s Rabbit books – they
gave up their freedom early, for what they expected to be decades of
stability.
“The Xer in midlife is facing the opposite midlife than
the Silent Generation,” Howe says. “The Silent experienced
claustrophobia. Xers experience agoraphobia — everything is possible.”
That’s
where this generation gets its reputation as reluctant to grow up.
“It’s very hard to mature,” he says. “In order to mature and become an
adult, you have to shut off options. The way Xers were raised, there
were always options — their parents told them to keep options open.”
But Xers started to see that their options were not as limitless as their parents had led them to believe.
* * *
While
the past midlife crisis model focused on breaking down confining bonds,
chipping away at that adult façade to return to the fountain of youth,
Xers are still in full construction mode. “I’ve made a list – it’s the
‘do-better’ list,” Leslie Mann’s character tells her husband in Judd
Apatow’s flawed but occasionally insightful “This Is 40.” Her list, of
course, is exhausting: A far cry from Peter Sellers’ laced-up, nearly
calcified lawyer, chronically encased in his business suit, fighting to
break out of convention, Debbie seems like a woman without a past,
chronically intent on self-reinvention. She’s not looking back at what
she lost – she’s barely gotten started.
The 40-somethings in
Apatow’s film might have to downscale their lavish lifestyle, perhaps
losing their luxury Westside manse and cutting back on the private
trainer. The economic reality for most Xers is much harsher. According
to this year’s Pew study, Xers lost 45 percent of their wealth during
the Great Recession. More than a few experts suggest that Xers – finally
buying their starter homes in their 30s — unwittingly helped inflate
the real estate bubble. They certainly bore the brunt of the collapse.
So
just around the time that we were on schedule to settle down, our
midlife economic peak became the worst market failure since 1929. “Our
entire life has been punctuated by economic disasters from the time we
were born,” says Gregory Thomas. “At every major milestone there’s been
an economic collapse. There is no rest for Generation X. There’s no time
to sit back and think ‘Am I happy or not?’”
For many of us, who waited to prepare things
just so
before we started a family, the idea of waking up to family-and-career
complacency and wondering how we lost track of our youthful dreams
sounds like the luxury of a more secure generation. David Byrne’s
suburban lament “How did I get here?” has become the more practical “How
can I pay my rent?” John Lennon’s love-struck refrain “It’s just like
starting over” is, for many of us, not a romantic lark. It’s real life.
And it’s a lot less fun.
“If anything,” says Wendy Fonarow, a
social anthropologist and the author of the indie-rock chronicle ”Empire
of Dirt,” “our generation is characterized by not hitting a wall of
midlife crisis but having crises throughout.”
If you think this is typical Gen X whining, you are probably a boomer.
Many
Xers have responded by battening down the hatches, carving out a
different path. The writer Emily Matchar has written a book called
“Homeward Bound” about homespun, sustainable culture – a cozier, less
punkish offspring of the original do-it-yourself indie culture of the
‘80s and ‘90s — as a rejection of what Xers and Millennials see as the
false promise of career and marketplace. After 9/11 and then the
economic collapse, some Xers even took things to the extreme, digging
into their sustainable urban farms as a way of girding for a
post-apocalyptic world.
Other generations say that we lucked out
because there was no major war that took legions overseas, no
presidential assassinations, no civil rights battles rocking our home
turf. Not true, says Gregory Thomas. “Our war was at home and it was
divorce. They were some of the worst divorces in American history.”
Because
of this, she says, we are deeply neurotic parents – afraid to even take
a shower while the baby sleeps in the bassinet. “Alice Miller says that
people who sustain these wounds in childhood — they are called
‘narcissistic wounds — they still behave as if that wound is going on,
like Japanese soldiers guarding the forts twenty years later.”
So
Xers tend to create sanctuaries that cannot be pierced by fluctuations
in the marketplace. Sheryl Connelly, a global trends and future
forecaster for Ford Motor Co., says that Xers tend to seek out
experiences rather than status symbols. Acquiring flashy cars is for
older generations.
Writer Neal Pollack has immersed himself in
yoga in order to cope with financial stress and develop perspective on
life. “Money is the one thing that keeps me up at night,” he says.
“Downward mobility is a hallmark of this generation. I just feel like
we’re not going to pull ourselves out of the hole. But what can you do?
You have to be grown up about it. You can’t be dissatisfied and unhappy
about it all the time. We don’t have that security – the illusion of
knowing that everything was going to be all right. But Gen X always had
that feeling that everything wasn’t going to be all right.”
One of
the benefits, though, of not being locked down too early in the
traditional American career-family cycle is that we had a lot more
freedom early on. “I’ve achieved in some way all the goals that I set
down for myself at a young age,” says Pollack. “I’ve toured with a rock
band, sat in the press box at Dodger Stadium. I’ve accomplished a lot,
but I’m sitting here wondering how to pay the rent next month. So maybe
midlife is about figuring out how to accept the limitations.”
For
singer, songwriter and playwright Stew, technically on the generational
cusp but in some ways a classic Gen X artist, midlife questioning
arrived when he realized he couldn’t stay in the van forever. “Midlife
crisis is the definition of being in a rock band after 30,” he says,
talking about the move to create the lounge show that became a hit
Broadway musical ”Passing Strange” and the ensuing Spike Lee movie.
“’Crisis’ is a great word, it just means, ‘now you’ve got to do
something.’”
Howe agrees: It’s about time, he says, for Xers to
acknowledge limits and step up to the plate. “These Xers spending their
lives with this sardonic view, never taking anything that’s happening in
public at face value, but always to find the failing, that expresses a
bigger problem with X — they are always outsiders,” he says. “These
boomer CEOs say that they are maturing to the extent that they should be
heading into leadership roles, but they simply don’t want to accept
responsibility to the bigger community.“
The Xers’ parents
operated differently, he says. “The problem with the Silents was to get
out of being identified with the institution. You look at [Daniel]
Ellsberg, he was this flunky for the Pentagon. He just backed up LBJ and
all the lies, and then he had to break free.” By contrast, “How many
Xers have unwittingly been a sucker all their lives?”
Fonarow says
that judging Xers by boomer standards is unfair. “It’s like this huge
black cloud going, ‘Hey, Sun, underneath us – why aren’t you shining
brighter?’”
* * *
“There’s this
incredible denial of middle age going on,” Patricia Cohen says. “It’s
part of this extended adolescence now going into your 40s and 50s.
People want to hang onto their youth, so in that sense you’re
young-young-young ‘til you’re old.”
The ongoing avalanche of
information about how to retain that nubile body and that youthful glow
puts pressure on people – especially women – to do everything that we
can to stay fit. (It’s why we get a nostalgic thrill from watching the
characters in “Mad Men” drink, smoke and stay up all night – the mere
freedom of bald ignorance, of living in a time when you
just didn’t know.)
Cultural representations of middle-aged women have been unkind in the
past, but it’s gotten more unforgiving for boomers and Xers alike. “I
think we’re laboring under a different oppressive media image,” says
Cohen. “Before, it was the frigid, asexual, overweight, boring
housewife. And now we’ve gone to ‘you have to look like Jennifer
Aniston.’ If we’re not a size-2 figure and have smooth skin from all of
this work, then we think we’re a failure. We look horrible.”
In
this way, Xers are a lot like boomers. There are additional pressures
for most Xers, though. Many of us – busy building careers, wounded by
family divorce, or just wanting to lay down the perfect foundation for
marriage and family life — waited to have children. Studies reveal that a
disproportionate number of us are sandwiched between dependent children
and aging parents – fending off economic stressers while juggling a
heavy load of family responsibilities.
Connelly, the Ford
futurist, says that some of the postponing of the traditional midlife
period may come down to a pushing back of all the major life milestones:
“Some of that [midlife questioning] would be fueled by empty nesters –
the kids are grown,” she says, explaining a feeling of “now what?”
“Demographics have shifted such that with each passing generation,
people are postponing marriage.” With dependent kids at home, everything
has been pushed back. “There’s nothing midlife about my situation right
now. I think that’s why you don’t hear this conversation.”
“Xers
are deep into family formation,” says Connelly. The flashy car isn’t
important, but building that calm, peaceful fort is. “Xers are keeping
stores like Pottery Barn and Architectural Hardware solvent. I think
they will continue to spend at home, on the home.”
Many Xers seem
nostalgic for the serene ‘50s childhood that they never had and they
have been pretty focused on creating a solid home life for their
children, whether it’s from re-creating the idyllic family-oriented
tableaux depicted in an Ikea catalog or jarring their own preserves.
Making things “from scratch” – stepping away from the marketplace — is
the new status symbol. Domestic success for the college-educated Xer is
gauged by how many processed food packages you have in your pantry. Neil
Howe describes a recent survey in which a sample group of Xers were
asked to pick their model mother. Among many options, they chose June
Cleaver.
* * *
Many of the
voices of our generation have fizzled out with time – think Liz Phair
and Winona Ryder – or simply not been able to make it through – like
Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Eazy-E and Kurt Cobain.
If
they are still with us, many of the great artists and thinkers of our
generation have withdrawn. We barely hear from them. If they are active,
like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Meshell
Ndegeocello or Dave Eggers, they have carved out their own, highly
individualistic places, but in many ways all but retreated from the
public sphere. Naomi Wolf is writing about her vagina. (In contrast,
other generations’ public intellectuals – Mailer, Scorsese, Bruce
Springsteen, Susan Sontag, William Buckley, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem –
helped question assumptions, steer tastes and cultural beliefs.) The
most accomplished Xers stay out of the way. But to interpret personal
experience, it helps to have generational role models to shine a light.
Similarly,
Xers have continued a post-1970s abandonment of politics and the public
sphere. It could trace back to the fact that many of our fathers –
traditional symbols of rule-making and the state — left home early on.
It may have something to do with watching Nixon’s spellbinding wave
goodbye while we were still fiddling with our loose baby teeth. This was
leadership? This was disgrace.
If you were taking in some of your
first lessons about American history as Reagan was running his “morning
in America” ad, if you misinterpreted Springsteen’s “Born in the
U.S.A.” as a patriotic clarion call, if your adolescent sense of self
was aligning to the right — as Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan’s
were – becoming a politician might have seemed possible. That is, as
long as your sense of politics was built around hating politics. Is
there anything possible besides their cartoonish mix of Reagan and Ayn
Rand?
Where are the thoughtful Gen X politicians? Obama – born in
the generational borderland of 1961 — campaigned on getting beyond
boomer conflicts. But that hasn’t quite happened. Now the Republicans
are figuring out how to keep from imploding and Democrats are trying to
choose between Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Anthropologist
Fonarow sees her generation as “tremendously out of step. Where are our
voices?” Xers, she says, just think differently about their place in the
world.
“When you believe in change introspectively, you believe
in galvanizing one person at a time,” she says of the way indie culture
has typically been passed down. “It’s about changing yourself from
within and interacting with people face to face. It’s not about telling
other people what to do. ‘You need to do this. You have to do things my
way. If you are not a part of my solution, you’re part of the problem.’
In that sense, it might not be a very effective political strategy. I’m
hoping that we, combined with the Millennials, can be a sort of sleeping
lion.”
How long will we keep sleeping? A running joke in “This Is
40″ is the line “We’re going to blink and be 90!” Gen Xers can’t afford
to let that happen to ourselves. We’ve been knocked down a few times,
that’s for sure. Howe laments the fearfulness of our generation. In his
book “X Saves the World,” journalist Jeff Gordinier blames a kind of
existential paralysis: He ends the book with a rallying cry to “dare”
and dream big. For many Xers, daring might mean digging in and thinking
collectively for a change. It might mean paring down the options and
figuring out what really matters.
And one thing that’s clear: No
one else is going to care that we’re moving into red-Ferrari territory.
Sure we’ve been screwed. And there may be no Ellsberg in our bunch, but
we drank plenty of American Dream Kool-Aid: the idea of real estate
being a good investment, the platitude about working hard and getting a
good education to secure a solid footing, and the assurance that you
need to follow your dreams and not compromise. We are now the most
educated American generation – and the first one not doing better than
its parents.
There is a chance that being repeatedly burned by the
marketplace may actually help us; our natural skepticism may be
something American society needs to hear. Most of our trouble – from the
Bush 1 recession to the dot-com bust and the more recent economic pit
of despair – has stemmed from unchecked optimism. The Xers have paid for
that trickle-down optimism repeatedly.
If we’re going to make the
country a better place, more suited to our values, we need to do it
ourselves. Middle age is, if nothing else, time to shift out of second
gear. If we can’t take a break from the urban farms, put down the
knitting and home brewing equipment, and step into politics, business
and other kinds of leadership, we’ll deserve our reputation as the
generation that never quite showed up. Rather than the sound of silence,
we should be hearing our voices – and they should be loud and angry.
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