Why We Can't Sleep. Ada Calhoun

       Introduction

      You come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.

      —Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

      One woman I know had everything she’d ever wanted—a loving partner, two children, a career she cared about, even the freedom to make her own schedule—but she still couldn’t shake a feeling of profound despair. She spent months getting a babysitter for her toddler daughter in the middle of the day, using the time to go alone to noon movies, where she sat in the dark and cried.

      A former coworker told me that her impressive LinkedIn profile was misleading. In truth, she was underemployed and for years since her last layoff had been taking one low-paying gig after another. She’s unmarried, never had kids, and while that part is okay with her, she has started dreading her upcoming fiftieth birthday, having realized that she will probably never own her own home and has saved nowhere near enough for retirement.

      A neighbor with a small army of adorable young children was doing part-time work she enjoyed. Her kids’ father was a friendly, hardworking man. She was baffled by the rage she had come to feel toward him. She’d begun to imagine that divorced she might have a better shot at happiness. “I’d leave,” she said to me one day when I asked how things were going, “if I had more money.”

      Another woman told me she had started to fear that she would die alone. Just like her married friends, she’d gotten a good education and had a good job, had made a nice home and was staying in shape. But somehow she’d never found a partner or had children. She woke up in the middle of the night wondering if she should have married her college boyfriend, if she should freeze her eggs, if she should have a baby alone, if she should do more or less online dating, and just how much more she could take of her friends’ sons and daughters smiling on social media before she threw her laptop out the window.

      An acquaintance told me she’d been having a rough time, working at three jobs as a single mother since her husband left her. Determined to cheer up her family, she planned a weekend trip. After a long week, she started packing at 10:00 p.m., figuring she could catch a few hours of sleep before their 5:00 a.m. departure. She asked her eleven-year-old son to start gathering his stuff. He didn’t move. She asked again. Nothing.

      “If you don’t help,” she told him, “I’m going to smash your iPad.”

      He still didn’t move.

      As if possessed, she grabbed a hammer and whacked the iPad to pieces.

      When she told me this, I thought of how many parents I know who have fantasized or threatened this very thing, and here she had actually done it. I laughed.

      “Yeah, my friends think it’s a hilarious story, too,” she said. “But in reality, it was dark and awful.” Her first thought as she stood over the broken glass: “I have to find a good therapist . . . right now.”

      Since turning forty a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with women my age and their—our—struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential despair.

      Looking for more women to talk to for this book, I called my friend Tara, a successful reporter a few years older than me who grew up in Kansas City. Divorced about a decade ago, she has three mostly grown children and lives on a quiet, leafy street in Washington, DC, 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.”

Generation X (born 1965 to 1980) make up the bulk of the midlife demographic, though those born at the earlier end of the Millennial birth years (1981-96) and younger members of the Baby Boom (1946-64) are also among the middle-aged.1 The name—or anti-name—Generation X was popularized 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 itself 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? Here—in their own words— is how they really feel about Drugs, Drink, God, Sex, Class, Color and Kicks.”

Over time, the term “Generation X” came to signify a hazy, as-yet-to-be-determined identity. No one knew quite what was up with us, and so we were deemed unknowable. For a while, some experts tried dubbing us “13th Gen,” because we were the thirteenth generation post–founding fathers.2 But after some “Who Is Generation X?” cover