So why are the well-employed, ambitious 30-year-olds of my acquaintance feeling so adrift, as discontented as the balding midlife sad sacks whose cliché dissatisfactions made Updike rich? The women complain of the enervating psychic effects of the professional treadmill as white-collar piecework and describe their dread as they contemplate bleak futures — decade after decade, they imagine, unfulfilled. After a lifetime of saying ‘yes’ to their professional hunger — these are the opportunity-seizers, the list-makers, the ascendant females, weaned on Lean In — they’ve lost it, like a child losing grasp of a helium balloon. Grief-stricken, they are baffled too, for they have always been propelled by their drive. They were the ones who were supposed to run stuff — who as girls imagined themselves leaving the airport in stylish trench coats, hailing a taxi with one hand while holding their cell in the other.
Now, “there’s no vision,” one woman said to me. “Nothing solid,” said another. Limp, desperate, they fantasize about quitting their good jobs and moving home to Michigan. They murmur about purpose, about the concrete satisfactions of baking a loaf of bread or watching a garden grow. One young woman I know dreams about leaving her consulting job, which takes her to Dubai and Prague, to move back home and raise a bunch of kids. Another, an accountant with corner-office aspirations, has decided to “phone it in” for a few years while she figures out what she wants to do. Mostly, though, these women don’t bail out. They are too responsible, and too devoted to their wavering dreams. They stay put, diligently working, ordering Seamless and waiting for something — anything — to reignite them, to convince them that their wanting hasn’t abandoned them for good. Any goal would do, one woman told me: a child, a dog — “even a refrigerator.” People have been motivated by less.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/what-happens-to-ambition-in-your-30s.html
Now, “there’s no vision,” one woman said to me. “Nothing solid,” said another. Limp, desperate, they fantasize about quitting their good jobs and moving home to Michigan. They murmur about purpose, about the concrete satisfactions of baking a loaf of bread or watching a garden grow. One young woman I know dreams about leaving her consulting job, which takes her to Dubai and Prague, to move back home and raise a bunch of kids. Another, an accountant with corner-office aspirations, has decided to “phone it in” for a few years while she figures out what she wants to do. Mostly, though, these women don’t bail out. They are too responsible, and too devoted to their wavering dreams. They stay put, diligently working, ordering Seamless and waiting for something — anything — to reignite them, to convince them that their wanting hasn’t abandoned them for good. Any goal would do, one woman told me: a child, a dog — “even a refrigerator.” People have been motivated by less.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/what-happens-to-ambition-in-your-30s.html
