during the past two decades. â Every fresh generation is a new people ,â Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America . In his work on the Great Depression, Glen Elder discovered just how much a different historical context could affect two contiguous generations. Future visitors to the tableland of middle age are likely to diverge in both their views and experience from todayâs inhabitants. Members of the baby boom were uniquely shaped by their times. They came of age during an unusual period of extended affluence, social upheaval, civil rights breakthroughs, and an unpopular war. Born before the 1965 immigration law ushered in millions of Africans, Asians, Indians, and Latinos, they are the last band of middle-aged Americans who are so ethnically homogenous. Eighty percent of them are white. As a group, they grew up watching the same television programs and listening to the same records and radio stations. They share an unusually strong generational identity. Their unprecedented numbers have exerted an irresistible gravitational pull on the culture, whether they were watching Bozo the Clown, buying their first home, or helping their own children fill out college applications.
They moved into middle age during an extraordinary transformation of the global economic system, a digital revolution, and a political realignmentthat shuffled foreign alliances and sharpened domestic partisan politics. They made scads of money, more than any of their predecessors, and spent it with wanton abandon. Girls who saw their mothers burdened by the feminine mystique grabbed at the thrilling surfeit of opportunities when their turn came and delayed marriage and motherhood, sometimes discovering belatedly that they had permanently deferred them. Boys whose fathers hid behind a newspaper have become expert diaper changers and class parents.
The next generation of midlifers will be molded by disparate circumstances. They have grown up in a faster and more connected world, where one in five Americans speaks a foreign language at home, television channels number in the hundreds, and texting is preferred to phoning. Young women who want children are more conscious of their biological clocks and more willing to remain single. College graduates, chastened by the harsh recession, bypass exhortations to âfollow your passion,â and look for vocational jobs with benefits. Despite enormous medical breakthroughs, if the epidemic of obesity persists, physical problems may make them feel middle-aged sooner even if they live longer. Their midlife is likely to be overshadowed by the seismic growth of the elderly population.
If there is one lesson that the history of middle age offers, it is just how malleable this cultural fiction can be. The definition has been stretched and massaged over the last century and a half, and bears the fingerprints of every generation through which it has passed. Today, longer life spans provide additional opportunities to switch directions and to shape the world our children and parents occupy. The passage of years bestows the experience and skills to ride out unexpected, even crushing setbacks, and to accomplish goals previously considered out of reach. Middle age can bring undiscovered passions, profound satisfactions, and newfound creativity. It is a time of extravagant possibilities.
Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank, but three deserve special mention: my friend Susan Lehman, my agent Scott Moyers, and my husband, Eddie Sutton. Susan helped me come up with the idea for the book and gave advice and assistance all the way through. Scott wrote me a fan letter after reading my work to say I had a book in me, and then he made it happen. He guided and encouraged me, and introduced me to one of the truly great editors. Eddie offered unstinting love, childcare, and ice cream.
I am extraordinarily lucky to work at the New York Times, where the reporters and editors inspire and amaze me