Many in Generation X have reached midlife carrying mortgages, insecure work, dependent children and ageing parents. The growing anger across middle Australia did not come from nowhere.
By the time you reach your 50s, you discover that you are travelling down two roads at once, and that neither of them is entirely of your own choosing. This journey, in my opinion, does in some way explain why we are witnessing a political rebellion by many middle-aged Australians.
The first road is the one where you pretend that nothing has changed, where you are still 35 in your own mind and determined to prove it to everyone else. You train harder at the gym than you did a decade ago, you keep up with the music and the technology and the language of people 20 years younger, and you tell yourself that 50 is the new 40, that age is just a number, and that there is still plenty of time for everything you have not yet done. This road is well lit and well travelled, and whole industries exist for no other purpose than to keep you on it.
The second road is quieter, and nobody advertises it. It is the road of serious contemplation, realisation, the one where you begin to understand that life is no longer waiting for you, that it is moving on with or without your permission, and that parts of it are already leaving without you.
You know you are on this road when the phone calls change. In your 30s the calls were about weddings and babies, about new jobs and new houses, about beginnings. Now they are about diagnoses, about the mate from school gone at 52, about the colleague who simply did not wake up one morning, about parents slipping away one by one and taking with them the last people on earth who remembered you as a child. For some, unthinkably, the call is about a spouse. You attend more funerals than weddings now, and every one of them feels like a rehearsal you never asked to be part of.
This is mourning, but it is not only mourning for people. It is mourning for a version of the future you once carried around without even noticing its weight. Somewhere in your 40s, the light at the end of the tunnel changes its character, because it stops being the glow of possibility, of the promotion or the big move or the life still waiting to be built, and becomes something far more modest. You would simply be glad to pay off the house before your working life ends. You would be glad to see your kids grow up and prosper, to arrive at the finish line with something to show for the journey and someone beside you to share it with.
That is not ambition. That is survival dressed up as a plan, and for a great many people in this generation, even that modest plan is no longer within reach.
Bruce Springsteen understood all of this decades before we lived it. The River is not really a song about a river at all, but a song about a life that narrows before it ever gets the chance to open, about a young man and a girl and a pregnancy and a union card at 19, and then about the work drying up along with everything else that was supposed to hold their world together. The river where they once swam as kids becomes the place he keeps returning to long after it has run dry, chasing the memory of the people they were going to be, and buried in the middle of the song is the question that sits at the very heart of the second road: what becomes of a dream that never arrives? Is it merely a lie you told yourself when you were young, or is it something far worse, something that goes on living inside you, haunting you for the rest of your days?
Every one of us on the second road knows that question intimately, even if we never had the words for it. We keep driving past our own dry rivers, past the career that was supposed to happen, the house that was supposed to be paid off, the retirement that was supposed to exist, and in the quiet hours we still go down there, even though we know perfectly well that the water is gone.
None of this is new, in one sense. Researchers have long described the midlife U-curve, the well-documented dip in life satisfaction that bottoms out somewhere in the late 40s before slowly climbing again, and every generation before us has passed through that same valley. Our parents did, and their parents did before them, because the valley itself is as old as the human lifespan.
What is new is what we found waiting for us at the bottom of it.
For Generation X, the midlife reckoning has collided with a set of realities that our parents, for all the hardship they endured, never had to face. Their lives were hard, in many ways far harder than ours, but the deal underneath those lives was fundamentally different. If you worked, you could buy a house, and by the time you turned 50 that house was usually paid off or close to it. Your job, however punishing, was generally secure from one decade to the next. Your kids left home at 20 or 21 because they could actually afford to, because a rental was within reach and a first home was a realistic goal rather than a fantasy to be scrolled past on a real estate app.
We reached the same point in life and found that every one of those anchors had been quietly pulled up.
We are carrying mortgages into our 60s, and some of us will carry them beyond that. The house that was meant to be paid off by now will follow many of us all the way into retirement, and a growing number of us will retire renting, something that would have been almost unheard of a generation ago. Our kids are not launching, and it is not because they are lazy. They are 24, 27, 30 and still in their childhood bedrooms because the maths of moving out simply does not work. We watch them do everything right, study, work, save, and still fall further behind the housing market with every passing year. The quiet dream of seeing your children prosper has been replaced, for many of us, by the quiet fear of watching them go backwards.
Our careers, meanwhile, have been restructured, offshored, casualised and disrupted more times than we can count, and the story of our working lives is really the story of an economy being hollowed out around us while we stood in the middle of it.
We entered the workforce during ‘the recession we had to have’, and then we watched, decade after decade, as the industries that had anchored entire regions were dismantled one by one. The timber towns lost their mills and then their reason to exist. The paper mills wound down and closed their gates. The textile and clothing factories that once employed tens of thousands of women like my mum packed up and went offshore. The car industry, which had sustained whole cities along with everything that fed into it, the component makers, the tool shops, the transport firms, was allowed to die entirely, while steel shrank, refineries shut and power stations were switched off.
With every closure went not just the jobs but the apprenticeships, the security and the identity of the communities that had been built around them, and the one thing that made our parents’ hard lives bearable, the certainty of the work itself, was traded away before we ever got the chance to enjoy it.
We were told, every single time, that the change was inevitable and that we should adapt, retrain and move on. Some did. Many never truly recovered, drifting from the certainty of a trade into the churn of labour hire, casual shifts and short contracts, earning less in real terms at 50 than they did at 35 and wondering how that was even possible in a country this rich.
You have to reach back a very long way to find a generation hit by economic change of this scale and this speed, all the way back, arguably, to the industrial revolution. But even that comparison flatters the present, because the industrial revolution, for all its brutality, was dragging people towards something, pulling them off the land and into the mills and factories of a new economy that would eventually deliver rising wages and better lives for the generations that followed. Our revolution ran in reverse. It pulled the mills and factories away from the people and offered nothing in their place beyond the instruction to be flexible, and unlike the workers of that earlier upheaval, we cannot even console ourselves with the belief that our children will inherit something better, because every piece of evidence in front of us says they will not.
And then there are our parents themselves.
The national story insists that everyone over 65 is a wealthy boomer, sitting on a fortune in property, cruising the Kimberley while the franking credits roll in, and for some that story is true. But it is not the story of our parents. My mum fled a politically volatile world at 18, arriving in this country with little more than hope, and she spent the years that followed working 12-hour shifts in factories, raising her kids on the wages those shifts paid, believing all the while that the hard work would eventually deliver what this country promised it would. To this day, after a lifetime of that work and everything she gave to her family, she still rents.
She is not alone. For many of us, our parents worked with their hands and their backs, on factory floors and building sites, in kitchens and cleaning shifts and small shops that consumed their lives, and they arrived at old age with worn-out bodies and not much else to show for it. Many of them are on the pension now, counting every dollar, deciding between the heating bill and the chemist.
So there is no inheritance coming to rescue us, no ‘bank of mum and dad’ waiting in the wings. What there is instead is a growing obligation, because those same parents now need us at exactly the moment our adult children still need us too, and we find ourselves the filling in the sandwich, holding up the generation above and the generation below while nobody, as far as we can tell, is holding up us.
This is the perfect storm. The ordinary grief of midlife, the funerals and the mirror and the shrinking horizon, has arrived at precisely the same moment as an economic settlement that quietly cancelled every consolation previous generations could count on. The U-curve promised that after the valley comes the climb, but for us the climb is uphill into a headwind, with a mortgage on our backs and dependents hanging on at both ends of the rope.
So we walk the two roads at once. On one of them we dye the grey, run the extra kilometre and insist to anyone who asks that we are fine. On the other we lie awake at 3am doing sums that never quite add up, mourning the people we have lost and the futures that were promised to us but never delivered.
Most of us will not say any of this out loud, because Gen X was raised not to complain. We were the latchkey kids, the ones who let ourselves in after school and got on with it, and we have been getting on with it ever since. But you can only ask a generation to absorb so much before something gives, and anyone paying attention to where this country’s politics is heading would do well to understand that the anger and disillusionment now surfacing across middle Australia is not coming from nowhere.
It is coming from the second road. There are millions of us on it, still driving down to the river, staring at the dry bed, asking Springsteen’s question and getting no answer.
I should be honest about where I stand in all of this. I am in my 50s, and I belong to the fortunate minority of this generation, perhaps one in five of us, who are not lying awake doing those sums, who are insulated from the financial stress that has become the background hum of so many lives. I would like to say that this was the product of foresight or discipline, but the truth is closer to luck, the luck of a few life choices that happened to land the right way at the right time, in an economy that punished many others for choices that were no worse than mine.
Kos Samaras
Kos Samaras is a director at RedBridge Group, a research and strategy firm specialising in public opinion, social trends, and behavioural insights. He works across industry, government, and media to help organisations understand community attitudes and navigate complex social and political environments.