What a midlife crisis looks like for Gen X women today

The new book, “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis,” looks at why Generation X women are struggling.

“A lot of women are really crushed by a combination of working full-time stressful jobs, taking care of aging parents, taking care of little kids, while having their phones blowing up with breaking news alerts and demands from their bosses 24 hours a day, and going through perimenopause all at the same time,” author Ada Calhoun tells Press Play.

She adds, “And that pile-on is new. In our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations, women were probably empty nesters by now because the age you had a kid was in your early 20s. If you worked a job, it is probably nine to five. And most women were not trying to do both at the same moment in time as nearly all Gen Xers are.”

Economic stresses

Calhoun interviewed hundreds of women, and she saw a contrast between expectations and realities when it came to financial success.

“We were told you can be anything -- even president -- and the American dream is real, and every generation does better than the one before. And that has just not been true for us. Women only have like a one in four chance of outearning our boomer fathers, for example,” she says. “The reality of trying to do all the things all at once has really hit us hard, especially given that the economy has not cooperated.”

Judged for everything

Women also judge themselves differently now, Calhoun points out.

“One woman I talked to, who studies generations, she said, ‘This is a generation that judges itself on everything. It used to be you could judge yourself just on your job, or just on your house or something like that. Now it's like women are very critical of themselves in their work, in their home and their looks, and everything. And that's just wearing a lot of people out,” she says.

How to make things better?

Calhoun says women are turning to self-care.

“That was something I heard over and over again -- that they were using some self-help book. They were doing the Keto Diet. They're doing yoga. They were taking Xanax. … There's this patchwork of solutions here and there,” she says.

Calhoun’s argument in the book, however, is that these challenges are systemic.

“These are forces beyond our control in a lot of ways. And the first thing we can do … is look at it as beyond just our failure to get the right job, or take the right supplement, or whatever it is that we think is going to solve this,” she says. “This is a time of life that's hard for women. Pretty much always. But then for us trying to do so much with such high expectations, it can be debilitating.”

What about the fun/romance part of women’s lives?

Calhoun says Gen X has always lacked a certain amount of pleasure.

“When we became sexually active was right around the time of AIDS. ... So we never had this illusion that free love was really something available to us. Drug epidemics were right around the time we were theoretically going to be experimenting with drugs. … We did not have the same kind of joyful, liberated teen dream that our parents did,” she says.

Read an excerpt:

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When Kelly was a little girl growing up in the 1970s, she believed that girls could do anything. The daughter of blue- collar parents in the northern New Jersey suburbs, Kelly was the first in her immediate family to finish college.

--Written by Amy Ta, produced by Rebecca Mooney and Sarah Sweeney