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........

© Pearls and Irritations