CRISIS CLIMATE

By some measures we’ve never had it better, so why are so many Gen X women quietly in the throes of midlife angst? Author Ada Calhoun asks whether we’ve been set up to fail

- Ada Calhoun

SINCE TURNING 40 a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with women my age and their — our — struggles with money, relationships, work and existential despair. I called my friend Tara, a successful journalist a few years older than me. Divorced a decade ago, she has three mostly grown children and lives on a quiet, leafy street with her boyfriend. They recently adopted a rescue dog.

“Hey,” I said, happy to have caught her on a rare break from her demanding job. “Do you know anyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?”

The phone was silent. Finally, she said, “I’m trying to think of any woman I know who’s not.”

Today’s middle-aged women belong to Generation X and the end of the Baby Boom, which lasted from 1946 to 1964. The Gen X birth years are 1965 to 1980. The name — or anti-name — was popularised by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Prior to that, it was the name of an excellent 1970s British punk band featuring Billy Idol. The band was named after a 1964 book containing interviews with British teenagers — on the cover: “What’s behind the rebellious anger of Britain’s untamed youth?” The term ‘Generation X’ came to signify a hazy, as-yet-to-be-determined identity. Over time, that lack of a clear identity became the story. No one knew quite what was up with us, and so we were deemed unknowable. After some “Who is Generation X?” cover stories in the 1990s, the culture more or less shrugged and turned away.