I started reading The New Midlife Crisis: Why (and How) It’s Hitting Gen X Women mostly because I was curious about what sort of articles were on Oprah.com. I don’t think of myself as GenX but I’m at the tail end of it (1984 is the cutoff this article uses). I’m going to be 38 in a couple months. And the anxieties described within are, in fact, my anxieties.
Anxieties about money :
Women not only earn less than men but also invest less—and then they live longer. That, writes investment expert Sallie Krawcheck, is “the gender gap that’s really hurting us.” Meanwhile, the safety net is vanishing; in 2040, the Social Security trust fund is due to run out—right as many of us hit retirement age.
Anxieties about your career:
Midlife is when we need to take care of everyone else while we are our most tired, to trust ourselves when we’re most filled with doubt. What makes it worse is that many of our midlife fears are well founded. We may, in fact, die alone. Our marriages may never improve. We may never get the number of kids we hoped for. We may never save enough money to make the retirement calculators stop screaming. We may never do a fraction of what we thought we would do in our career.