by Ada Calhoun
Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, calls the rhetoric around pursuing work you love “aspirational labor”: “Aspirational labor is a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love.”⁵⁵ The problem: doing what you love often does not pay.
“The rise of independent work and freelancers has given us a lot of interesting narratives in entrepreneurship—the “mompreneur,” the “girl boss,” Duffy told me.⁵⁶ “Independent work is seen as empowering and democratic and freeing us from the traditional confines of the workplace … [But] independent work comes with incredible demands. You’re managing a business all by yourself, and you have all the stresses and uncertainties and anxieties that come from being your own boss.” Many women like the ones I met at that conference, having left corporate America for the gig economy, found themselves working twice as hard for a quarter of the money.
For those who like going to an office or having decent health insurance or who thought their hustling days were behind them, self-employment can feel like a demotion—and it can make a full-time position more elusive. One good thing, at least, about freelancing is that you don’t need to worry about losing free or subsidized benefits, because you already pay for them in full yourself.
As a freelancer for the past decade, I know this from personal experience. Some years are flush; some are meager. There’s no way to plan ahead. I hustle constantly. Each year, I cobble together work as an author, ghostwriter, magazine freelancer, and teacher. Every gig could be the last one. With no clear demarcation between work and home, I often end up both working all the time and continually being distracted. I have spells of envying others in my field who have proper desks rather than kitchen tables surrounded by toys, and the company of people who aren’t strangers at Starbucks.
My friend Tara called me while she packed to go to Miami to cover a hurricane for her news organization. On my cell phone as I walked to pick my son up from school, I told her that another freelance gig had evaporated for me that morning. I do love my work, but I must regularly cope with not getting something that I thought I was perfect for, or with the start of a job being delayed and delayed and then vanishing, or with being let go from a project that seemed to be going well.
“You were so smart to take an office job when you did,” I told my friend, who has a sure-enough place of work, actual business cards, and a 401(k). “To get out of freelancing and find some stability.”
She laughed loudly. “Did you hear the first part of our call?” she said. “My boss is sending me to Florida to die in a hurricane.”
I hadn’t spoken to Lori, the North Carolina contracts analyst who dreamed of starting a food truck, for a few months, so I called her.
“I got laid off,” Lori said. “I’m trying to find a new job and I’m also trying to figure out if maybe I should be looking to do something else. But you know, that’s not ideal, because there’s no cash to start my cheese truck or anything.
“I was interviewing with one company for almost as long as I’ve been unemployed. I had several interviews with them. Just last week we mutually decided that it wasn’t going to be a good fit, because this job would have been sixty or seventy hours a week”—leaving little time for her to spend with her three-year-old son.
Speaking of him: “A lot of people have assumed that since I’ve been staying home I’ve kept my son home with me. But I can’t, because you can’t get into a preschool on a moment’s notice. So while I’m unemployed we’re still shouldering the burden of his preschool tuition.”
If they pulled him out of school he’d go to the bottom of the waiting list to get back in once she found a job. So she’s paying for child care she doesn’t need. To cover it, she and her husband have started borrowing from their retirement savings.
“I definitely thought that I would be more financially stable than I am,” Lori told me when I asked how middle age is different from what she expected. “I thought potentially we could survive on one salary, or I could pursue a dream. Or we could take two vacations a year—someplace nice, where you have to get on a plane, you know?”
She did everything she could to make that possible. She picked a stable field. She earned a good degree. She married someone with a professional job. They waited to start a family until she was thirty-eight, so they’d be financially ready. At one point, they wanted to move to a bigger city but chose not to because it was more affordable to stay in Charlotte. And now, not only can’t they swing a vacation; she feels that they can’t afford to have the second child she always wanted.
“I’m grateful for what I have, but I definitely didn’t think that I would be struggling in many, many ways by the time I got to forty,” she said, then paused. “We did a lot of things right, you know? My husband and I. We did a lot of things right.”
5
Money Panic
“Money is weird, because it’s a primary source of stress, and nobody’s allowed to talk about it.”
Gen X women undergo a bone-deep, almost hallucinatory panic about money. The worst part: it’s a fear based on experience and complicated by a sense that we shouldn’t be having this problem. We are some of the best-educated human beings ever and among the first adults in recent American history in worse financial shape than our parents.
The American dream is no longer dreamable for many of us. The gap between the richest 1 percent and everyone else has been increasing for the past thirty years; it widened greatly in the 1990s, as we were entering the job market.¹
“Stagnant wages, diminishing job opportunities, and lost home values may be painting a vastly different future for Gen X and Gen Y,” reported the Urban Institute. “Today’s political discussions often focus on preserving the wealth and benefits of older Americans and the baby boomers. Often lost in this debate is attention to younger generations whose wealth losses, or lack of long-term gains, have been even greater … Despite their relative youth, [Gen X and Gen Y] may not be able to make up the lost ground.”²
“Since joining the workforce and starting to save, Generation X has endured the roller coaster of the financial markets,” wrote Catherine Collinson, president of the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies. “Gen Xers have enjoyed the irrational exuberance in the late ’90s followed by the dot-com bust and post–September 11 market declines. They rode the equity markets up in the recovery through 2007—and suffered steep declines as the markets spiraled [in 2008] into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Many lost their jobs; some lost their homes.”³
A major report called The Fading American Dream—the product of research conducted by Raj Chetty’s Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard—found that rising in the US class structure is less and less possible, with middle-class families seeing the sharpest decline in opportunity. Of American men born in 1940, 95 percent could expect to earn more than their fathers. For American men born in 1980, only 41 percent can.⁴
For Generation X women, the news is worse.
“We still see that this trend holds,” said Robert Fluegge, a researcher on Chetty’s team.⁵ “If you’re looking at the income in a woman’s entire family—her income and her partner’s or just hers, if she has no partner—those numbers are the same.” Whereas our parents together had a 90 percent chance of outearning their parents, we have, with our partners, just a 50 percent chance of doing the same.
And if you look at just the woman’s individual income against her father’s? That’s where it gets strange.
“Women have been entering the workforce in large numbers,” said Fluegge. “More women are working white-collars jobs. They’re better educated. You might expect that this [downwardly mobile] trend wouldn’t hold [for them], but it does. When you’re looking at the comparison between daughters’ and fathers’ income in the same time period, for daughters born in 1940, forty to forty-five percent will outearn their fathers. For daughters
born in the 1980s, that number is down to about twenty-five percent.”
One in four. That’s our chance of outearning our fathers. Is that what I’m hearing?
Fluegge said yes: “Daughters are much less likely to earn more than their fathers. We’ve still seen a decline in the chances that daughters have despite all those other changes that women have gone through, and changes that have been made in the way that women interact with the workplace. It paints a pretty stark picture.”
He went further: “It’s one of the defining problems of our time, both economically and more broadly than that. Economic inequality and its effects are real and strong and something we need to understand better and address. To me, the main takeaway of this study is that changes in inequality over the past forty years have had really, really substantial effects on people’s livelihoods and their conception of the American dream.”
Generation X women raised by feminist Boomer mothers may feel extra shame at failing to thrive financially. When I was growing up, my mother often told me: “Always make your own money.” It was not bad advice. She didn’t want me to be dependent on a man. For her, money was freedom and power, and she wanted me to have as much of both as possible. The advice had an unintended side effect, though: I work hard, all the time, but when I fail to make an adequate amount of money, I feel terror. I become convinced that not only have I put my credit score or my family’s budget in jeopardy, I’ve set back the cause of feminism and endangered my freedom. I don’t just feel broke; I feel doomed.
“I call my midlife crisis Betty,” said a forty-three-year-old filmmaker in Brooklyn, New York. “Betty is on me about being single and broke. Not having money reaches deep into you.”
It hurts our emotional well-being, our confidence, and our sense of what’s possible.
One friend of mine gave birth to her only child in her early forties. When her son was two she started to suspect something was wrong. Getting him treatment would consume much of her energy and paycheck for the better part of a decade. “It’s been a lonely, weird road,” she told me, “chasing the train of the special ed world. I can barely keep up. His ‘case’ is so time-consuming and expensive I feel like I’ve missed a few years of his life. I’m a bit crushed. But working hard to recover. Now he has the best doctors, staff, people dealing with him. I’ve kicked a lot of ass. But it’s taken its toll.” She recently started a new career as a real estate agent and is working hard to establish herself in that world. “It’s a big stress ball,” she says. “And I teach yoga! Sometimes I want to pack it all in, sell off my life, and go live in the woods. But oh—money.”
In their forties, our parents’ generation could expect to own a house and to have savings. In our forties, we are often still scrambling the way we did at twenty-five. According to a 2017 national survey by CareerBuilder, 78 percent of US workers live paycheck-to-paycheck; nearly three in four say they are in debt.⁶
The reasons we’re in this spot are many, but I keep coming back to Generation X’s almost comically bad timing. As reporter Lisa Chamberlain put it in her book about Generation X, Slackonomics: “The Great Middle Class Squeeze got under way just as we were becoming the middle demographic of the middle class.”⁷
In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel H. Pink discusses research on Stanford MBAs that showed how the state of the stock market when they graduated influenced the career path they took.⁸ In a bull market, with share prices rising and the future looking bright, students were more likely to work on Wall Street. In a bear market, when share prices were tumbling, many graduates opted instead to work for nonprofits or to consult.
Much of Gen X graduated into a weak job market. Headlines included: SCRAMBLE FOR JOBS: GRADUATING INTO A RECESSION—A SPECIAL REPORT: DEGREES AND STACKS OF RÉSUMÉS YIELD FEW JOBS FOR CLASS OF ’91,⁹ BLEAK JOB MARKET AWAITS CLASS OF ’92,¹⁰ and FOR ’93 GRADUATES, JOB HUNTING 101 WON’T BE A BREEZE.¹¹ A summary of graduation-year job markets in the book Late Bloomers by Alexander Abrams and David Lipsky reads: “1980: okay, 1981: soft, 1982: lousy, 1983: awful, 1984: soft, 1985: okay, 1986: good, 1987: good, 1988: good, 1989: soft, 1990: awful, 1991: lousy again, 1992: lousier, 1993: worse again.”¹²
The Economic Policy Institute reports that the average hourly wages paid to young college graduates hit a new low in the mid-1990s.¹³ Graduating into a strong economy versus a weak one could amount to as much as a 20 percent difference in wages over time.¹⁴
The US economy strengthened in the 1990s—but not for Gen X. While the GDP grew 91 percent, taking inflation into account, between 1981 and 2001, Gen X was hit hard by the 1987 market crash, the 1991–92 economic slowdown, and the bursting of the dot-com bubble, setting off a recession—followed six months later by the terrorist attacks of September 11.¹⁵ According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country lost more than 2.7 million jobs from March 2001 to March 2002, right when many younger Gen Xers were trying to gain a foothold.¹⁶
“Gen X has had quite a tough time,” says Hugo Scott-Gall, of Goldman Sachs Research, who remarked that the 2001 and 2008 downturns¹⁷ were “scarring and very important events, and they have changed the attitude towards how they save and how they invest.” In plenty of cases, they do neither. More than half of Gen Xers plan to work past age sixty-five or expect not to retire at all.¹⁸
The lucky ones who have managed to put money away don’t always leave it untouched until retirement. Forty-five percent of our generation have already withdrawn money from retirement savings, despite negative tax implications and early withdrawal penalties.¹⁹ Across the country, fortysomethings—especially women—aren’t saving anywhere near enough for a comfortable retirement.²⁰
“I have a million dollars in my retirement account,” a forty-nine-year-old biotech executive told me. “And I’m still worried. Our kids are going to have to take out loans for school. Then, there are the retirement calculators on the internet. All of the information is: ‘Lady, you’d better save money because no one else will take charge of your financial future!’ I was incredibly frugal my whole life. I’ve been working my ass off since I was ten years old, babysitting. And still I am stressed out about money.”
A forty-five-year-old woman who runs her own dogwalking business said: “I have five, six hundred thousand dollars in retirement accounts and savings. And I have no children and I’m divorced. I own my own small business. And I feel like I’m going to be in a cardboard box when I’m seventy, on the street. I feel like any amount of money isn’t enough. I know I probably, for my age, have so much more than my friends, but I still fear that every single day.”
These two women are outliers in having so much saved, but average in their shared conviction that no amount will provide true security. Listening to women talk about their finances, I keep thinking of the money-obsessed mother in the 1926 D. H. Lawrence short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” which many of us read in high school: “The house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it out loud.”²¹
It doesn’t help that we’re in the second-longest economic expansion since 1854 and poised for a “correction” soon.²² Everywhere are reminders that the market could crash at any time.²³ As I’m writing this, an emailed news summary, popping up in my inbox, features the headline, “What Will Cause the Next Recession? A Look at the 3 Most Likely Possibilities.”²⁴
For several years after a layoff in 2009, I’d managed to reach six figures or close as a freelancer. But I went into one year expecting to make roughly that and instead, thanks to a run of bad luck, took in just $36,000. My husband didn’t have a good year, either. We had a little kid. What were we supposed to do? We closed out my IRA. It wasn’t much, but it seemed like enough to tide us over until work picked up again. Then digging out of that hole took years.
A middle-class, midlife existence is just so expensive. According to the US Departme
nt of Labor chart entitled “Generational Spending Habits,”²⁵ Gen X spends more per household on housing, clothing, eating out, food at home, and “all other spending,” and only a tiny bit less than Boomers on the one other category: entertainment. We lay out a lot, especially on our children.
Nearly half of Gen Xers carry a credit card balance month to month.²⁶ A 2009 law, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, put restrictions on credit card companies’ efforts to sign up those under twenty-one—peddling cards from college campus tents and offering freebies for signing up, for example—that left so many Gen Xers with consumer debt by the time they were out of college.²⁷
According to research compiled in 2019 by MarketWatch under the headline “All the Ways Gen X Is Financially Wrecked,” compared with Millennials and Boomers, Gen X is in the worst financial shape overall.²⁸ According to the credit-reporting firm Experian, we have the highest average credit card debt ($7,750), average mortgage debt ($231,774), and average non-mortgage debt ($30,334).²⁹ Our generational average FICO score is a far from excellent 655.³⁰
According to Pew, Gen Xers lost almost half of their wealth between 2007 and 2010.³¹ Despite their bouncing back on that front,³² high debt lingers, and so does a sense of fragility. National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey reports that, most times, people forty-five to fifty-four are more likely than other age groups to say they are “pretty well satisfied” with their finances. But it’s not so for Gen Xers reaching this age. Coming to what were supposed to be our top-earning years, we discovered that they no longer brought top earnings. A 2017 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research reports that “the stagnation of lifetime incomes is unlikely to reverse.”³³
