My mentor and I talk often about what’s happening to my generation. What he wanted to know recently was how this economic downturn has affected Generation X. I wasn’t sure of anything beyond my own myopic experience. Now I know.
The biggest obstacle facing Gen X is Fertility Fears, which is the overwhelming concern that we won’t find our soul mate in time to have children. Our second biggest obstacle is an ailing economy that’s laying off high tech talent and fast-track management in droves. We aren’t getting work. We aren’t getting wed. We aren’t having children. No, we just aren’t growing up.
Most people make the mistake of attributing Generation X to perpetual youth, though they are in their mid-twenties to late thirties. The new youth are the Millennials, now in their late teens and early twenties. In truth, Generation X is defined by an aging youth culture that has prolonged their adolescence well into their thirties.
Reluctance to leave the nest is evidenced by many Gen Xers who continue live with their parents rather than live with numerous roommates or buy their own home. One’s youth spent living in a residential commune of fellow renters delays the onset of marriage and thus, of having children. Serial, short-term dating relationships exist solely for the enrichment of social excess. Exhibiting signs of maturity like home ownership and matrimony risks alienation from one’s peers. Better instead to shack up and play house than to make a home of one’s own.
Marriage due to divorce is a drag on the fun of marrying. Children due to expense are a drag on the fun of coupling. Fun is anything that costs a lot and expires quickly. A drag is what jangles like an anchor on tenuous threads of commitment attached to an ill-conceived sense of freedom. As though suffering through two decades being single, living without love among other lonely-hearts, isn’t a big enough drag on fun.
I want in my life to get married, to stay married, and to have children. Being single and turning thirty, I already have a career. A career is what you get when you have a job while not married as a decade rolls into another. What young women in their twenties don’t know while yearning for a professional credibility is that age is the only qualifier, not ambition. Experience is earned by default.
My own Fertility Fears came to light when I quit a rewarding, low paying job for a frenetic, better paying job. I traded working normal hours at little pay for working obscene hours at greater pay. Making more money, I enhanced my image and became more attractive, but had so much less time to market my mating-suitability. In Texas, they say “Big hat, no cattle.”
When I lost my better paying job, my own Fertility Fears got worse. Added to the stress of financial insolvency is a diminishing libido harkening the end of all sexual escapades. To meet a mate you need a certain salary to attain an attractive image. Steady income sustains the effort to promote one’s appealing image. The end of income precedes the death of one’s sex drive, coupling only with financial ruin.
In a sordid inverse equation, I struck a Faustian deal when I quit one job for another, which I did to advance myself socially. I sold my soul to be regarded as a more desirable mate only to have no time to be desired by anyone but my married coworkers. This is a zero-sum gain in Single Sex Math whereby any number multiplied by zero yields zero. The numbers represent money – positive (high salary) or negative (huge debt), and zero represents no time to spend the money looking good to get laid.
Mating by way of dating is a numbers game I call Single Sex Math. The equations are positive and negative integers represented by time and money that yields an outcome that’s socially positive or emotionally negative. Weighing job opportunities employs the same risk-benefit analysis as does sizing up romantic possibilities. Do you hold out for a better opportunity later or take the best deal offered to you now? More time spent at work making more money to finance a better social life means there’s less time to spend the money socializing. More time spent with one suitor now comes at the expense of being with another, better suitor in the same time frame.
Working out Single Sex Math is a simple string of equations. When computing the math of a single person without work, consider it negative algebra. No job means no money. No money means no social life. No social life means no mate. No mate means no fate. No fate means your future goes unfulfilled and you live a solitary life paying high rent with no mate to share the expense and no kids to inspire a house with a yard.
Contrary to popular reports, both men and women have biological clocks. Women are limited to the number of reproductive years they are able to conceive and care for a child. Men are limited to the proximate age of women they are able to attract who can still conceive. Women prefer to marry men slightly older than themselves, but not significantly older, despite his wealth. Both men and women want to marry someone not only able to have children but also to live long enough to attend weddings and witness the births of grandchildren.
In order to have children, single folks have to compromise their ideal for the real in a mate in order to get married and start a family. Holding out for perfection or deluding oneself into believing a soul mate exists wastes years of fertile time. Compromising late in one’s single years on the perfectibility of a mate may compromise having children at all. That is the greatest Fertility Fear of them all.
Married folks must compromise not on acquiring their mates but on either maintaining their standard of living or lowering it to afford a family. Two income professionals with jumbo mortgages, leased luxury cars, and credit card debt must figure out if their image allows for converting an office into a nursery, leaving a corporate job, and changing diapers in a series of miserable moments. In the former good times of our booming economy, married folks waited to start a family in order to make as much money as they could now to better afford having kids later. In the wake of boom lay a bust of burst wishes to afford a family at all. Now marrieds are waiting to have kids when they get a job this year and not when they get their bonus next year and again the next.
The sudden loss of income and the immanent threat of financial ruin make having a family a long deferred dream. Desire as dreams at night becomes a wish in every waking hour. Perhaps not a beating mental mantra, but a lingering pain in the emptiness of one’s loins. A woman’s diminishing store of eggs in synchrony with a man’s advancing years depletes in tandem with the cash in one’s bank account. This is a study of Fertility Fears 101.
Losing one’s job and searching for love at the same time generates considerable stress, which subsequently causes a physiological depression. Anxiety experienced over a long period of time absolutely kills one’s libido, interest in living, and faith in humanity by altering brain chemistry. Stress effects on women wrecks menstruation and emotional equilibrium. The effects of enduring stress on men spikes testosterone and lowers sperm count.
The adrenal responses to threats are to fight or take flight. The third unspoken response is to mate, the other f-word. Though the impulse to mate may be great, when a body triages in response to threats, reproductive systems shut down. So do digestive systems. Men and women respond similarly to the body’s adrenal response for survival by stopping reproduction, though each gender expresses the response differently.
Facing threats of infertility, men and women respond in underhanded ways befitting their gender. Panic may create in men an impulse to rape as the basest way to reproduce offspring. Women experiencing similar panic secretly may begin to desire an “accidental” pregnancy, which helps her to secure resources.
If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the seed of creativity and perhaps even criminality. Reproductive subterfuge is a means for ensuring genetic or financial longevity. As men use rape as an aggressive means to an end, women employ “accidents” in a passive attack. Acquiring sex and money are what humans fight for and die for, and lie for.
So what can we say about the state of Generation X today? Can we ever repeat the "die young, leave a beautiful corpse" lemming exercise that so many of us enjoyed before the economy tanked? Probably not. Instead I see a steady maturation process that suffering a series of setbacks does to improve a whole generation.
Single people, once preferring the hubris of independence to the hardship that lies in the rewards of matrimony, will turn to marriage for comfort and contentment. Married people, unwilling to pay for the glory and expense of a gilded existence, will prefer instead the humility and cost of child rearing. In our next social evolution, more singles will get married and more marrieds will have children. When we emerge from this economic slump, Generation X will create a mini “baby boom” much like the Baby Boomers did in the heralded Reagan 80’s after suffering through Carter’s stagflation as their depression-era parents from “The Greatest Generation” did upon returning from a world war.
It’s no coincidence that when finally employed after so long, I returned to the singles social scene. At my dating debut, I secured for myself a number of future suitors. That’s because the equations for Single Sex Math remain the same – this time computing for positive algebra. Have job means have money. Have money means have social life. Have social life means have mate. Have mate means have family. Having a family means my destiny is fulfilled and Fate is made happy.
The biggest obstacle facing Gen X is Fertility Fears, which is the overwhelming concern that we won’t find our soul mate in time to have children. Our second biggest obstacle is an ailing economy that’s laying off high tech talent and fast-track management in droves. We aren’t getting work. We aren’t getting wed. We aren’t having children. No, we just aren’t growing up.
Most people make the mistake of attributing Generation X to perpetual youth, though they are in their mid-twenties to late thirties. The new youth are the Millennials, now in their late teens and early twenties. In truth, Generation X is defined by an aging youth culture that has prolonged their adolescence well into their thirties.
Reluctance to leave the nest is evidenced by many Gen Xers who continue live with their parents rather than live with numerous roommates or buy their own home. One’s youth spent living in a residential commune of fellow renters delays the onset of marriage and thus, of having children. Serial, short-term dating relationships exist solely for the enrichment of social excess. Exhibiting signs of maturity like home ownership and matrimony risks alienation from one’s peers. Better instead to shack up and play house than to make a home of one’s own.
Marriage due to divorce is a drag on the fun of marrying. Children due to expense are a drag on the fun of coupling. Fun is anything that costs a lot and expires quickly. A drag is what jangles like an anchor on tenuous threads of commitment attached to an ill-conceived sense of freedom. As though suffering through two decades being single, living without love among other lonely-hearts, isn’t a big enough drag on fun.
I want in my life to get married, to stay married, and to have children. Being single and turning thirty, I already have a career. A career is what you get when you have a job while not married as a decade rolls into another. What young women in their twenties don’t know while yearning for a professional credibility is that age is the only qualifier, not ambition. Experience is earned by default.
My own Fertility Fears came to light when I quit a rewarding, low paying job for a frenetic, better paying job. I traded working normal hours at little pay for working obscene hours at greater pay. Making more money, I enhanced my image and became more attractive, but had so much less time to market my mating-suitability. In Texas, they say “Big hat, no cattle.”
When I lost my better paying job, my own Fertility Fears got worse. Added to the stress of financial insolvency is a diminishing libido harkening the end of all sexual escapades. To meet a mate you need a certain salary to attain an attractive image. Steady income sustains the effort to promote one’s appealing image. The end of income precedes the death of one’s sex drive, coupling only with financial ruin.
In a sordid inverse equation, I struck a Faustian deal when I quit one job for another, which I did to advance myself socially. I sold my soul to be regarded as a more desirable mate only to have no time to be desired by anyone but my married coworkers. This is a zero-sum gain in Single Sex Math whereby any number multiplied by zero yields zero. The numbers represent money – positive (high salary) or negative (huge debt), and zero represents no time to spend the money looking good to get laid.
Mating by way of dating is a numbers game I call Single Sex Math. The equations are positive and negative integers represented by time and money that yields an outcome that’s socially positive or emotionally negative. Weighing job opportunities employs the same risk-benefit analysis as does sizing up romantic possibilities. Do you hold out for a better opportunity later or take the best deal offered to you now? More time spent at work making more money to finance a better social life means there’s less time to spend the money socializing. More time spent with one suitor now comes at the expense of being with another, better suitor in the same time frame.
Working out Single Sex Math is a simple string of equations. When computing the math of a single person without work, consider it negative algebra. No job means no money. No money means no social life. No social life means no mate. No mate means no fate. No fate means your future goes unfulfilled and you live a solitary life paying high rent with no mate to share the expense and no kids to inspire a house with a yard.
Contrary to popular reports, both men and women have biological clocks. Women are limited to the number of reproductive years they are able to conceive and care for a child. Men are limited to the proximate age of women they are able to attract who can still conceive. Women prefer to marry men slightly older than themselves, but not significantly older, despite his wealth. Both men and women want to marry someone not only able to have children but also to live long enough to attend weddings and witness the births of grandchildren.
In order to have children, single folks have to compromise their ideal for the real in a mate in order to get married and start a family. Holding out for perfection or deluding oneself into believing a soul mate exists wastes years of fertile time. Compromising late in one’s single years on the perfectibility of a mate may compromise having children at all. That is the greatest Fertility Fear of them all.
Married folks must compromise not on acquiring their mates but on either maintaining their standard of living or lowering it to afford a family. Two income professionals with jumbo mortgages, leased luxury cars, and credit card debt must figure out if their image allows for converting an office into a nursery, leaving a corporate job, and changing diapers in a series of miserable moments. In the former good times of our booming economy, married folks waited to start a family in order to make as much money as they could now to better afford having kids later. In the wake of boom lay a bust of burst wishes to afford a family at all. Now marrieds are waiting to have kids when they get a job this year and not when they get their bonus next year and again the next.
The sudden loss of income and the immanent threat of financial ruin make having a family a long deferred dream. Desire as dreams at night becomes a wish in every waking hour. Perhaps not a beating mental mantra, but a lingering pain in the emptiness of one’s loins. A woman’s diminishing store of eggs in synchrony with a man’s advancing years depletes in tandem with the cash in one’s bank account. This is a study of Fertility Fears 101.
Losing one’s job and searching for love at the same time generates considerable stress, which subsequently causes a physiological depression. Anxiety experienced over a long period of time absolutely kills one’s libido, interest in living, and faith in humanity by altering brain chemistry. Stress effects on women wrecks menstruation and emotional equilibrium. The effects of enduring stress on men spikes testosterone and lowers sperm count.
The adrenal responses to threats are to fight or take flight. The third unspoken response is to mate, the other f-word. Though the impulse to mate may be great, when a body triages in response to threats, reproductive systems shut down. So do digestive systems. Men and women respond similarly to the body’s adrenal response for survival by stopping reproduction, though each gender expresses the response differently.
Facing threats of infertility, men and women respond in underhanded ways befitting their gender. Panic may create in men an impulse to rape as the basest way to reproduce offspring. Women experiencing similar panic secretly may begin to desire an “accidental” pregnancy, which helps her to secure resources.
If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the seed of creativity and perhaps even criminality. Reproductive subterfuge is a means for ensuring genetic or financial longevity. As men use rape as an aggressive means to an end, women employ “accidents” in a passive attack. Acquiring sex and money are what humans fight for and die for, and lie for.
So what can we say about the state of Generation X today? Can we ever repeat the "die young, leave a beautiful corpse" lemming exercise that so many of us enjoyed before the economy tanked? Probably not. Instead I see a steady maturation process that suffering a series of setbacks does to improve a whole generation.
Single people, once preferring the hubris of independence to the hardship that lies in the rewards of matrimony, will turn to marriage for comfort and contentment. Married people, unwilling to pay for the glory and expense of a gilded existence, will prefer instead the humility and cost of child rearing. In our next social evolution, more singles will get married and more marrieds will have children. When we emerge from this economic slump, Generation X will create a mini “baby boom” much like the Baby Boomers did in the heralded Reagan 80’s after suffering through Carter’s stagflation as their depression-era parents from “The Greatest Generation” did upon returning from a world war.
It’s no coincidence that when finally employed after so long, I returned to the singles social scene. At my dating debut, I secured for myself a number of future suitors. That’s because the equations for Single Sex Math remain the same – this time computing for positive algebra. Have job means have money. Have money means have social life. Have social life means have mate. Have mate means have family. Having a family means my destiny is fulfilled and Fate is made happy.
posted by Alessandra at
1:41 PM
