“Having It All” Is a Toxic Myth

We need to change the narrative

I am a member of Generation X. (Just. I mean, if I’d been born 7 months later, I’d have technically been a millennial, and this article would probably have been about avocado toast instead). Born between 1965 and 1980, our generation came of age just as technology really took off and changed the world.

It’s a hard-knock life for the women of Generation X. No, it really is. Unlike our boomer parents, we weren’t able to buy a house in our 20s for approximately the cost of a small car and watch its value soar to give us a juicily well-funded retirement with no effort on our part. Unlike the millennials coming up behind us, we’re not entering the workplace in an era that’s beginning to recognize the value of home working and of maintaining a semblance of a work-life balance for both men and women.

We’re squeezed right in the middle with more debt than our mothers but less overall life satisfaction than our daughters. And we’re so tired.

I blame many things for this exhaustion. I blame social media, with its constant surreptitious whispers of “you’re not enough; must do better.” I blame a world (still overwhelmingly shaped by white men) that claims to value the caregiving roles women inevitably take on — caring for our kids, and then our parents — but gives those things no money or social status. But I also blame the fact that from the moment we were born, we were told we could have it all.

Our Boomer mothers blazed trails for us. They smashed glass ceilings and got our working rights and equality enshrined in law and shrugged off the sort of casual misogyny and prejudice that most of us couldn’t even imagine. We genuinely are so very lucky that the successive waves of feminism before ours washed a path clear for us so that from our school desks, we could realistically dream of being anything we wanted to be. We really are lucky in this way.

The problem is that we stopped believing that we could have it all and started to feel that we should. Or even that we must. We needed to bust balls in courtrooms or boardrooms but still be home in time to serve home-cooked well-balanced meals to our clutch of angelic offspring; to bathe them and read with them and then to spend quality time with our spouse.

Oh, and we needed also to keep up with the latest fiction and films, maintain a social life, exercise for at least thirty minutes three times a week, drink 8 glasses of water a day and get 6–8 hours of sleep a night. And to maintain a tan and a pedicure. Did I mention hobbies? Hobbies are good, too.

It’s no wonder that now we’re entering middle age, Generation X women are feeling exhausted. And more than that, we’re feeling betrayed. Because we had so many more options available to us than our mothers ever had, but — as a seminal study in 2009 showed us — we are somehow less satisfied and less happy than we've ever been.

This doesn’t mean that our mothers did us a disservice. They didn’t; they broke a million barriers for us and we are so lucky that they did. It doesn’t mean we should have all donned aprons straight from school and become good little housewives in pastel kitchens. I am so grateful to live in a world where my horizons are as wide as they are. But still, something has to give.

What has to give, I think, is our understanding of what “all” means.

Yes, I could choose to be a high-flying investment banker. But I could not work from 7 am until 9 pm in a bustling city office and still be a present, available mother to a toddler.

I could create glorious vistas on canvas and travel from coast to coast to find sunsets to paint. But I could not be an artist, travelling the world with all my possessions in one rucksack, and also provide the sort of care an elderly parent might need.

I could decide to step outside corporate life and live off the land in a sustainable way. But I could not spend my day making sourdough loaves and photographing them for Instagram and still expect a regular monthly paycheque with a pension, a company car, and benefits in kind.

We are, in a way, spoilt by choice.

I think, too, that we Generation X women kinda forgot that we’d one day run out of time altogether. We told ourselves that there would be act after act, and now we’re being forced biologically and chronologically to accept that if we didn’t have children, we might never have them; if we didn’t clamber up those corporate rungs, we might not have enough years left still to do so. Little wonder so many women have midlife crises.

This sounds gloomy, but it isn’t. It is not defeatist to accept that we cannot have it all. It is freeing. Freed of the expectation that we should be all things to all people, we can be one or two precious things to ourselves and to the people we love. We can focus. The thing that needs to change, I think, is the fear of judgment for our choices, or for finding fulfillment in whatever our precious thing might turn out to be.

What I would say to my daughter’s generation is that yes, in today’s Western world, women do have a huge array of choices. In that sense, we have “it all” to choose from. But we cannot eat every dish at the buffet.

We might elect to pick a morsel from each plate, and that’s fine. We might stick just to the cheeseboard; also fine. What we mustn’t do is judge the other buffet guests, or fear their judgment back on us. All of our choices should feel equally valid.

In a world where this becomes the norm — and in a world where male-dominated structures such as inflexible working, a lack of support for shared parental childcare, and poor recognition of the importance of care work are gradually dismantled and overturned — I hope that far fewer millennials or members of Generation Y will feel the midlife despair that so many women in my generation do.

(Although I’m fairly sure social media will still wield a pervasive wand for a while yet).