The choices you make at 30 find you at 60.
They told you the corner office would be enough. They did not mention that corner offices don't call you on Christmas morning, and they absolutely cannot be listed as your emergency contact. Welcome to the other side of the 'having it all' equation — cats sold separately.
The longitudinal data is in, and it turns out 'living for yourself' has some fine print nobody mentioned at the women's empowerment seminars. We sat down with the numbers — and the women behind them — to find out what a career-first life actually looks like from the other side of sixty.
Gen X women were handed a glittering promise: chase the career, skip the chaos of motherhood, and arrive at your sixties as a sophisticated, self-actualized goddess. Now that the invoice has arrived, some are signing it cheerfully — and some are staring at it in the hallway at midnight, surrounded by cats named after Supreme Court justices.
For decades, pop culture handed us a flashing neon cautionary tale dressed in a cardigan covered in fur. We looked at it, called it sexist, and went back to watching Bridget Jones while eating cereal for dinner alone. Funny how that worked out.
For decades, women were handed a shiny brochure promising that a corner office and a passport full of stamps would be more than enough. Now, a growing number of those same women are sitting in beautifully decorated homes, surrounded by career trophies and zero grandchildren, wondering why the brochure left out the part about eating dinner alone. Barbara Jean Whitfield takes an honest — and yes, slightly cat-forward — look at the loneliness epidemic quietly swallowing a generation of high-achieving women.