{"id":5505,"date":"2013-08-12T11:13:26","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T03:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/?p=5505"},"modified":"2013-08-12T11:13:26","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T03:13:26","slug":"repostgeneration-x-gets-really-old-how-do-slackers-have-a-midlife-crisis-salon-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2013\/08\/12\/repostgeneration-x-gets-really-old-how-do-slackers-have-a-midlife-crisis-salon-com\/","title":{"rendered":"rePost::Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis? – Salon.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

saving this because this really speaks to me.
\n 
\nGeneration X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis?
\nGutted by the economy, shipwrecked by nostalgia, Gen X stares down a midlife crisis. Winona Ryder can’t save it
\nBY SARA SCRIBNER
\nIn the 1993 movie \u201cFalling Down,\u201d 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 \u2014 everyone notices. An eloquent latter-day equivalent, Noah Baumbach\u2019s \u201cGreenberg,\u201d shows a meltdown going differently: The protagonist\u2019s 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\u2019t notice.
\nCreated 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 \u2013 you couldn\u2019t avoid it. Radio talk show hosts probed into the transition, newspapers described boomer women coping with crow\u2019s feet and men reclaiming their vitality in tribal drum circles. For the generation born after \u2013 in the \u201860s and \u201870s, raised by television like no previous generation and with the divorce rate skyrocketing during their childhood years \u2014 there is no media watch broadcasting their new trajectory. Few have even noticed that this small, notoriously rebellious clan \u2013 those born roughly between 1965 and 1980, which means about 46 million Xers versus 80 million boomers \u2014 has entered middle age. It\u2019s 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.
\nThe 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\u00a0\u201dIn Spite of Everything,\u201d says that many Xers \u201care always living in a state of triage, always in a survivalist mode. We\u2019re not thinking long-term.\u201d
\nHow is Generation X dealing with middle age? Celebration, turmoil, regret? Which issues are keeping Xers up at night? What happens when they wake up?
\n* * *
\nThere\u2019s plenty to joke about when it comes to midlife \u2013 there\u2019s 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 \u2013 and most of those films play midlife for laughs or shock value. Think of the musical-bed high jinks in \u201cBob & Carol & Ted & Alice\u201d or Peter Sellers getting high with nubile hippies in \u201cI Love You, Alice B. Toklas!\u201d
\n 
\n 
\nBut whether the rest of the world notices or not, it\u2019s time for Xers \u2013 which, admittedly, is a broad, diverse bunch \u2014 to start assessing in a way that goes beyond punch lines.
\nWhether you believe, as Gail Sheehy stated in \u201cPassages,\u201d the \u201870s pop-culture classic on human life stages, that middle age is psychologically hard-wired or, as Patricia Cohen recently asserted in the book \u201cIn Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age,\u201d 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.
\nThis is true even when the inventory involves saying goodbye to youthful hopes. As Miranda July said about the inspiration for her film \u201cThe Future\u201d in a 2011 New York Times Magazine profile, \u201cIt\u2019s 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,\u201d she says. \u201cIn your 30s, it\u2019s obvious that a finite amount of things will happen.\u201d
\nAnd then 40 \u2013 well, it\u2019s all downhill from there. Right?
\n* * *
\nAround the time Richard Linklater\u2019s film \u201cSlacker\u201d came out in 1991, journalists and critics put a finger on what they thought was different about the young generation of emerging adults \u2013 they were reluctant to grow up, disdainful of earnest action. The stereotype stuck \u2013 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.\u00a0Wake up and step up, X!<\/em>\u00a0the culture seems to be saying.
\nRichard 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 \u00a0\u2013 and there were plenty during the \u201870s, during which American divorces nearly doubled \u2014 are clearly bad for kids, but it\u2019s probably more about the steady media stream they were fed early on. \u201cI think it may be a historical effect, given the immediacy of news,\u201d Lerner says. \u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d
\nThere is a reason, says historian and generational expert Neil Howe, why members of Generation X have been cast as perpetual adolescents. Their parents \u2013 \u201cthe Silent Generation\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s Rabbit books \u2013 they gave up their freedom early, for what they expected to be decades of stability.
\n\u201cThe Xer in midlife is facing the opposite midlife than the Silent Generation,\u201d Howe says. \u201cThe Silent experienced claustrophobia. Xers experience agoraphobia \u2014 everything is possible.\u201d
\nThat\u2019s where this generation gets its reputation as reluctant to grow up. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to mature,\u201d he says. \u201cIn order to mature and become an adult, you have to shut off options. The way Xers were raised, there were always options \u2014 their parents told them to keep options open.\u201d
\nBut Xers started to see that their options were not as limitless as their parents had led them to believe.
\n* * *
\nWhile the past midlife crisis model focused on breaking down confining bonds, chipping away at that adult fa\u00e7ade to return to the fountain of youth, Xers are still in full construction mode. \u201cI\u2019ve made a list \u2013 it\u2019s the \u2018do-better\u2019 list,\u201d Leslie Mann\u2019s character tells her husband in Judd Apatow\u2019s flawed but occasionally insightful \u201cThis Is 40.\u201d Her list, of course, is exhausting: A far cry from Peter Sellers\u2019 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\u2019s not looking back at what she lost \u2013 she\u2019s barely gotten started.
\nThe 40-somethings in Apatow\u2019s 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\u2019s Pew study, Xers lost 45 percent of their wealth during the Great Recession. More than a few experts suggest that Xers \u2013 finally buying their starter homes in their 30s \u2014 unwittingly helped inflate the real estate bubble. They certainly bore the brunt of the collapse.
\nSo just around the time that we were on schedule to settle down, our midlife economic peak became the worst market failure since 1929. \u201cOur entire life has been punctuated by economic disasters from the time we were born,\u201d says Gregory Thomas. \u201cAt every major milestone there\u2019s been an economic collapse. There is no rest for Generation X. There\u2019s no time to sit back and think \u2018Am I happy or not?\u2019\u201d
\nFor many of us, who waited to prepare things\u00a0just so<\/em>\u00a0before 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. \u00a0David Byrne\u2019s suburban lament \u201cHow did I get here?\u201d has become the more practical \u201cHow can I pay my rent?\u201d John Lennon\u2019s love-struck refrain \u201cIt\u2019s just like starting over\u201d is, for many of us, not a romantic lark. It\u2019s real life. And it\u2019s a lot less fun.
\n\u201cIf anything,\u201d says Wendy Fonarow, a social anthropologist and the author of the indie-rock chronicle\u00a0\u201dEmpire of Dirt,\u201d \u201cour generation is characterized by not hitting a wall of midlife crisis but having crises throughout.\u201d
\nIf you think this is typical Gen X whining, you are probably a boomer.
\nMany Xers have responded by battening down the hatches, carving out a different path. The writer Emily Matchar has written a book called \u201cHomeward Bound\u201d about homespun, sustainable culture \u2013 a cozier, less punkish offspring of the original do-it-yourself indie culture of the \u201880s and \u201890s \u2014 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.
\nOther 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. \u201cOur war was at home and it was divorce. They were some of the worst divorces in American history.\u201d
\nBecause of this, she says, we are deeply neurotic parents \u2013 afraid to even take a shower while the baby sleeps in the bassinet. \u201cAlice Miller says that people who sustain these wounds in childhood \u2014 they are called \u2018narcissistic wounds \u2014 they still behave as if that wound is going on, like Japanese soldiers guarding the forts twenty years later.\u201d
\nSo 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.
\nWriter Neal Pollack has immersed himself in yoga in order to cope with financial stress and develop perspective on life. \u201cMoney is the one thing that keeps me up at night,\u201d he says. \u201cDownward mobility is a hallmark of this generation. I just feel like we\u2019re not going to pull ourselves out of the hole. But what can you do? You have to be grown up about it. You can\u2019t be dissatisfied and unhappy about it all the time. We don\u2019t have that security \u2013 the illusion of knowing that everything was going to be all right. But Gen X always had that feeling that everything wasn\u2019t going to be all right.\u201d
\nOne 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. \u201cI\u2019ve achieved in some way all the goals that I set down for myself at a young age,\u201d says Pollack. \u201cI\u2019ve toured with a rock band, sat in the press box at Dodger Stadium. I\u2019ve accomplished a lot, but I\u2019m sitting here wondering how to pay the rent next month. So maybe midlife is about figuring out how to accept the limitations.\u201d
\nFor 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\u2019t stay in the van forever. \u201cMidlife crisis is the definition of being in a rock band after 30,\u201d he says, talking about the move to create the lounge show that became a hit Broadway musical\u00a0\u201dPassing Strange\u201d and the ensuing Spike Lee movie. \u201c\u2019Crisis\u2019 is a great word, it just means, \u2018now you\u2019ve got to do something.\u2019\u201d
\nHowe agrees: It\u2019s about time, he says, for Xers to acknowledge limits and step up to the plate. \u201cThese Xers spending their lives with this sardonic view, never taking anything that\u2019s happening in public at face value, but always to find the failing, that expresses a bigger problem with X \u2014 they are always outsiders,\u201d he says. \u201cThese boomer CEOs say that they are maturing to the extent that they should be heading into leadership roles, but they simply don\u2019t want to accept responsibility to the bigger community.\u201c
\nThe Xers\u2019 parents operated differently, he says. \u201cThe 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.\u201d By contrast, \u201cHow many Xers have unwittingly been a sucker all their lives?\u201d
\nFonarow says that judging Xers by boomer standards is unfair. \u201cIt\u2019s like this huge black cloud going, \u2018Hey, Sun, underneath us \u2013 why aren\u2019t you shining brighter?\u2019\u201d
\n* * *
\n\u201cThere\u2019s this incredible denial of middle age going on,\u201d Patricia Cohen says. \u201cIt\u2019s part of this extended adolescence now going into your 40s and 50s. People want to hang onto their youth, so in that sense you\u2019re young-young-young \u2018til you\u2019re old.\u201d
\nThe ongoing avalanche of information about how to retain that nubile body and that youthful glow puts pressure on people \u2013 especially women \u2013 to do everything that we can to stay fit. (It\u2019s why we get a nostalgic thrill from watching the characters in \u201cMad Men\u201d drink, smoke and stay up all night \u2013 the mere freedom of bald ignorance, of living in a time when you\u00a0just didn\u2019t know<\/em>.) Cultural representations of middle-aged women have been unkind in the past, but it\u2019s gotten more unforgiving for boomers and Xers alike. \u201cI think we\u2019re laboring under a different oppressive media image,\u201d says Cohen. \u201cBefore, it was the frigid, asexual, overweight, boring housewife. And now we\u2019ve gone to \u2018you have to look like Jennifer Aniston.\u2019 If we\u2019re not a size-2 figure and have smooth skin from all of this work, then we think we\u2019re a failure. We look horrible.\u201d
\nIn this way, Xers are a lot like boomers. There are additional pressures for most Xers, though. Many of us \u2013 busy building careers, wounded by family divorce, or just wanting to lay down the perfect foundation for marriage and family life \u2014 waited to have children. Studies reveal that a disproportionate number of us are sandwiched between dependent children and aging parents \u2013 fending off economic stressers while juggling a heavy load of family responsibilities.
\nConnelly, 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: \u201cSome of that [midlife questioning] would be fueled by empty nesters \u2013 the kids are grown,\u201d she says, explaining a feeling of \u201cnow what?\u201d \u201cDemographics have shifted such that with each passing generation, people are postponing marriage.\u201d With dependent kids at home, everything has been pushed back. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing midlife about my situation right now.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s why you don\u2019t hear this conversation.\u201d
\n\u201cXers are deep into family formation,\u201d says Connelly. The flashy car isn\u2019t important, but building that calm, peaceful fort is. \u201cXers are keeping stores like Pottery Barn and Architectural Hardware solvent. I think they will continue to spend at home, on the home.\u201d
\nMany Xers seem nostalgic for the serene \u201850s childhood that they never had and they have been pretty focused on creating a solid home life for their children, whether it\u2019s from re-creating the idyllic family-oriented tableaux depicted in an Ikea catalog or jarring their own preserves. Making things \u201cfrom scratch\u201d \u2013 stepping away from the marketplace \u2014 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.
\n* * *
\nMany of the voices of our generation have fizzled out with time \u2013 think Liz Phair and Winona Ryder \u2013 or simply not been able to make it through \u2013 like Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Eazy-E and Kurt Cobain.
\nIf 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\u2019 public intellectuals \u2013 Mailer, Scorsese, Bruce Springsteen, Susan Sontag, William Buckley, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem \u2013 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.
\nSimilarly, 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 \u2013 traditional symbols of rule-making and the state \u2014 left home early on. It may have something to do with watching Nixon\u2019s spellbinding wave goodbye while we were still fiddling with our loose baby teeth. This was leadership? This was disgrace.
\nIf you were taking in some of your first lessons about American history as Reagan was running his \u201cmorning in America\u201d ad, if you misinterpreted Springsteen\u2019s \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.\u201d as a patriotic clarion call, if your adolescent sense of self was aligning to the right \u2014 as Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan\u2019s were \u2013 becoming a politician might have seemed possible. \u00a0That 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?
\nWhere are the thoughtful Gen X politicians? Obama \u2013 born in the generational borderland of 1961 \u2014 campaigned on getting beyond boomer conflicts. But that hasn\u2019t 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.
\nAnthropologist Fonarow sees her generation as \u201ctremendously out of step. Where are our voices?\u201d Xers, she says, just think differently about their place in the world.
\n\u201cWhen you believe in change introspectively, you believe in galvanizing one person at a time,\u201d she says of the way indie culture has typically been passed down. \u201cIt\u2019s about changing yourself from within and interacting with people face to face. It\u2019s not about telling other people what to do. \u2018You need to do this. You have to do things my way. If you are not a part of my solution, you\u2019re part of the problem.\u2019 In that sense, it might not be a very effective political strategy. I\u2019m hoping that we, combined with the Millennials, can be a sort of sleeping lion.\u201d
\nHow long will we keep sleeping? A running joke in \u201cThis Is 40\u2033 is the line \u201cWe\u2019re going to blink and be 90!\u201d Gen Xers can\u2019t afford to let that happen to ourselves. We\u2019ve been knocked down a few times, that\u2019s for sure. Howe laments the fearfulness of our generation. In his book \u201cX Saves the World,\u201d journalist Jeff Gordinier blames a kind of existential paralysis: He ends the book with a rallying cry to \u201cdare\u201d 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.
\nAnd one thing that\u2019s clear: No one else is going to care that we\u2019re moving into red-Ferrari territory. Sure we\u2019ve 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 \u2013 and the first one not doing better than its parents.
\nThere 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 \u2013 from the Bush 1 recession to the dot-com bust and the more recent economic pit of despair \u2013 has stemmed from unchecked optimism. The Xers have paid for that trickle-down optimism repeatedly.
\nIf we\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2019ll deserve our reputation as the generation that never quite showed up. Rather than the sound of silence, we should be hearing our voices \u2013 and they should be loud and angry.
\nvia Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis? – Salon.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

saving this because this really speaks to me.   Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis? Gutted by the economy, shipwrecked by nostalgia, Gen X stares down a midlife crisis. Winona Ryder can’t save it BY SARA SCRIBNER In the 1993 movie \u201cFalling Down,\u201d Michael Douglas plays an angry white … <\/p>\n

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