“Build back stronger” became an invitation not just for governments, but for each of us. This book lays out a case that the old American dream—the fantasy of eternal upward mobility and of “having it all” effortlessly—was never truly on the table for our generation. The pandemic has erased any lingering doubts about that. Maybe now that the traditional dream of picket fences and endless prosperity is over, we will find a way to dream new and even better dreams.
1 There are many opinions about what counts as Generation X. The Harvard Center’s years are 1965–1984. So, from the year Doctor Zhivago came out to the year Ghostbusters did. George Masnick Fellow, “Defining the Generations,” Housing Perspectives, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, November 28, 2012. I’ve also heard 1961 as a starting year—though in my experience people born in the early 1960s tend to identify more strongly with the Baby Boom—and either 1981 or 1985 as the Gen X end year. I tend to put most stock in the Pew Research Center: Silent Generation 1928–1945, Boomers 1946–1964, Gen X 1965–1980, Millennials 1981–1996, Generation Z 1997–2012. Michael Dimock, “Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation X Begins,” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019. I’m also well aware of the fact that plenty of people think the whole business of describing a generational experience or ethos is a fool’s errand. For this argument see, for example: David Costanza, “Can We Please Stop Talking About Generations as If They Are a Thing?” Slate.com, April 13, 2018. No, we can’t. Next question.
2 Neil Howe and William Strauss, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (New York: Vintage, 1993). And in their 1991 book Generations, the same authors called us “Gen 13ers.”
3 Paul Taylor and George Gao, “Generation X: America’s Neglected ‘Middle Child,’” Pew Research Center, June 5, 2014.
4 You can run these numbers a few different ways. By another measure, the breakdown is: Generation X at 66 million, Boomers at 74 million, and Millennials at 71 million. Kimberly Lankford, “Generation X: Time Is on Your Side for Retirement,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, January 3, 2019.
5 Richard Fry, “Millennials Projected to Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation,” Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018. (Also, note: some people count Gen X as just 1965–1977, in which case we’re 45 million versus 75 million Millennials and 78 million Boomers.) Some demographers push for another category: Generation Y, which is generally thought to overlap a bit with both Gen X and Millennials. When people go with the Gen X years 1965 to 1979, the Gen Y birth years are typically given as 1980 to 1994. This category has always felt extra forced to me, though, so in this book I just stick with the bigger umbrellas of Boomer, Gen X, and Millennial.
6 Ed Mazza, “Generation Xers Have the Most Gen X Response to Being Left Off the List,” Huffington Post, January 21, 2019.
7 Faith Popcorn, interview with the author, August 30, 2017.
8 Jennifer Szalai, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,” New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2015.
9 It’s worth noting that Helen Gurley Brown, who popularized the term with her 1982 bestseller, did not have children. Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money—Even If You’re Starting with Nothing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
10 Generation Unbound author Isabel V. Sawhill sees three issues that could make a real difference in the lives of women: birth control, so women can decide “if, when, and with whom to have children”; wage equality; and measures in aid of work-family balance (child care, flexible hours, paid family leave). Isabel V. Sawhill, “Improving Women’s Lives: Purposeful Parenthood, Decent Wages, and Paid Family Leave,” Talk for Bucks County Women’s Advocacy Coalition, May 23, 2018. Provided to the author via email May 30, 2018.
11 Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1, no. 2 (August 2009): 190–225.
12 In December 2017, Gallup reported that eight in ten Americans say they frequently or sometimes encounter stress in their daily lives, with women and people between the ages of thirty and forty-nine more likely than men or people of other ages to report frequent stress. The poll showed 49 percent of women reporting frequent stress, compared with 40 percent of men; and 56 percent of those aged fifty to sixty-four claimed frequent stress compared with, for example, 24 percent of those sixty-five and older. “Eight in 10 Americans Afflicted by Stress,” Gallup.com, December 20, 2017.
13 Roni Caryn Rabin, “A Glut of Antidepressants,” New York Times, August 12, 2013. Also: Daniel Smith, “It’s Still the ‘Age of Anxiety.’ Or Is It?” New York Times, January 14, 2012.
14 AARP Snapshots: Generation X Health. Retrieved August 5, 2018.
15 “Gen X Women: Flirting with Forty,” J. Walter Thompson Intelligence, Slideshare.net, May 19, 2010. Retrieved August 5, 2018.
16 Margie E. Lachman, “Mind the Gap in the Middle: A Call to Study Midlife,” Research in Human Development 12 (2015): 327–34.
17 There are some books about women going through crises in midlife. The cover of A Woman’s Worth (1993) by Marianne Williamson (the presidential candidate) shows a sepia-tone, topless woman hunched over. I opened to a random page and read: “Most women today are borderline hysterical.”
18 One interesting history of the concept of a midlife crisis is Susanne Schmidt’s “The Anti-Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA,” Gender and History 30, no. 1 (March 2018): 153–76. She argues that the usual way the “midlife crisis” idea is understood—as discovered by male social scientists and then popularized by Gail Sheehy’s bestseller Passages (New York: Ballantine, 2006)—is wrong. She says, “the midlife crisis has historical roots in debate about gender roles and work and family values, and the shape these took in the United States in the 1970s.” In other words, it was a conversation people were having; Sheehy reported on it; then a bunch of male social scientists whose work she had discussed along with her reporting and feminist critique said she had “popularized” their “discoveries.”
19 Elliott Jaques, “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” in Creativity and Work (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1990), 306.