Time Will Tell

While I’ve enjoyed a semester of considering Gen X meeting midlife, I’m ready to move on, but a little closure is in order first.

I think that the psychology of midlife will remain much as it has been for other generations who have experienced midlife . . . at least for GenXers who slow down enough to realize when midlife is upon us. 

I don’t think we can deny that there is a certain psychology of “middleness” throughout human experience. The fact is, midlife IS in the middle of the lifespan. It is a time when one starts rubbing shoulders with death and illness more than during younger years. It is a time when one’s own body starts to feel some aging. It is a time when, at some point, each person will probably seriously consider his/her own mortality and try to figure out how the certainty of mortality will affect him/her in the here and now as well as in the years to come. For such reasons, midlife will surely continue to be a time of liminality in some manner, when people must come to terms with who they’ve been, embrace who they are now, and head toward a limited mortal life in the future. I think the time is ripe for new experiences of God and spiritual growth.

I also expect midlife in the coming 10 years or so to gain a flavor of GenX. First of all, we Gen Xers have seen Boomers and the Silent Generation go through midlife and are quite aware that life, for most people, can continue to be rich well past 60. We have, in fact, already incorporated the reality of a long life-span into our lives as can be seen by our later marriages and later child-bearing years. Many of us are not sandwiched between parents and teenagers as previous generations have been. More of us are single and without children. More of us have toddlers. Those of us who were born to Baby Boomers may not even expect to have to tend to our parents for many years to come. Some of us, even in midlife, have living grandparents while we are at the age to be grandparents ourselves. Many of us have confused family trees due to up to two previous family generations plus our own marriages that have dissolved in divorce; the sense of family and caring for the older generation is much more complicated than it has been for previous generations. Homosexual couples with and without children struggle with how the partner/children will financially survive should one of couple die because their family is not recognized as legitimate by laws as are heterosexual families. More children with autism have been born to us than to previous generations, and midlife parents whose children have special needs will certainly be concerned with long-term care for their children. As Gen X studies show, we have been cynical throughout life, and many of us will enter midlife with relatively few economic resources as compared to our parents when they were at midlife. 

As my questionnaires show, we will not be surprised if we find ourselves struggling to have basic needs met as older adults, and such a concern may impact our midlife in some way, whether making us more cynical or spurring us to work harder in an attempt to save more, I don’t know. While many of us expect rich midlife full of adventure offered by the small world we now live in, many of us expect that retirement age will be raised before we get there and that we will need to work longer into our old age than previous generations.

In addition, I am intrigued by Strauss and Howe’s theory of generational cycles. If their observations that large crises happen during the fourth generational turn in each four-generation cycle are accurate, then it is quite possible that the ebb and flow of life as we know it may substantially change around the time most Gen Xers have moved into midlife. According to observations and research by Struass and Howe, the fourth generations in each cycle (Gen X in the current cycle) in the past, have hit their peak of life as midlifers because they rise to the need to become crisis managers, guiding younger generations. 

I would be interested to know how the psychology of midlife played out in the lives of the previous fourth-generation groups in each cycle as identified by Strauss and Howe. I suspect, if the previous generations such as us were busy managing society-altering crises, they likely lacked the energy to invest in their own midlife crises. I imagine they simply survived day-by-day, trying to maneuver successfully through the bigger crisis at hand. Gen X, I think, would easily fall into such paths should massive crisis strike. As a generation, we are well educated. We have survived raising ourselves and have become problem-solvers who avoid idealism in lieu of the practical, and we have invested much effort in raising our children for whom we would do everything in our power to help if they were the young adults on the front lines of massive crisis. 

I don’t internalize doomsday predictions, and I certainly hope Strauss and Howe’s observations from the past don’t come to pass in this particular 4-generation cycle.

I’m not much of a prophet, I confess. I simply cannot see into the future, nor do I want to. So, time will tell what will come to be, and that's sufficient for me. I’m glad to finally be understanding my Gen X-ness, have enjoyed the journey so far, and am looking forward to more living . . . today, tomorrow, midlife, older adulthood, whatever tomorrows come. 

Wishing you all more tales to be told, whatever your generation or stage of life!

God’s blessings!


This blog post is part of a series of writing (April 3-May 14, 2011) by Tammy Fletcher Bergland about Generation X facing midlife.   tbergland.blogspot.com