This Sunday’s New York Times featured an article on the subject of Generation X’s collective midlife crisis. Is that what this is? This feeling when I wake up in the morning and realize that nothing is the way I thought it was going to be and a certain Talking Heads song is playing in my head as the soundtrack to my panic attack.

Through the lens of Sam Lipsyte’s book “The Ask” and a few other pop culture depictions of Gen X male midlife angst, A.O. Scott’s article nevertheless manages to capture enough that is reflective of my own experience that I’m willing to accept that, at least on some level, he is speaking for our entire generation. “Mr. Lipsyte, through the shambling, highly articulate and pathetic persona of Milo Burke, has announced the onset of the Generation X midlife crisis.”

This is my favorite passage from the article (mostly because it made me laugh):

The Gen X what? I wish I could inflect those paired pop-sociological clichés with the requisite irony, but my air-quote fingers are afflicted with incipient arthritis. The ridiculousness of the phrase is telling, though, since it registers the sense of absurdity, the innate nonseriousness, that has been this generation’s burden ever since the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland christened us in his 1991 novel, “Generation X,” the title of which was inspired by the second-rate punk band that gave the world Billy Idol.

I see you rolling your eyes. That’s right, you: the one in the fake-vintage rock ’n’ roll T-shirt and thick-framed glasses reading this on an iPhone at the sidelines of your daughter’s soccer game. But you know exactly what I’m talking about, pal. (And by the way: stop trying to be a hip alterna-sports dad. Just cheer, for God’s sake.)

Self-nurtured irony notwithstanding, it’s quite true that almost no one I know is entirely content.

My married friends, whose days and evenings are a constant merry-go-round of childcare negotiations and arguments whose bases are so deeply mired in the peculiarities of married life that I have no comprehension, envy the freedom of my single life, while I, in turn, just want to wake up next to someone every morning who will tell me that it’s my turn to take out the dog and bring back coffee and the paper.

I look covetously at homes owned by my apparently more responsible friends and think about all the money that has come in and out of my bank accounts over the years. Surely there would have been enough of it collectively to save a downpayment. But then I hear moaning about condo assessments and under water mortgages and I look at my closet full of beautiful shoes and think maybe I have the better deal. At least I can just walk away, well shod, at the end of my lease and escape to Paris. Except that I never do.

A friend who left a high-paying advertising job to move to New York to take a stab at acting misses the life that a serious salary in San Francisco provided. The idea of the starving artist is romantic and cool when you’re in your twenties and have yet to know the comfort and enjoyment that the trappings a six-figure salary can provide. Restaurants, furniture, travel, oh my. Does that sound shallow? Yes. But could I go back to living in a studio apartment smaller than walk-in closets I’ve had and to relying on ramen noodles and the occasional dinner date to supply my nutrition? Not on your life. And neither, it seems, could my friend. Last I heard he’s gone back to corporate life and has a new grown-up apartment.

A.O. Scott says: “The biggest contradiction may be: How can a generation whose cultural trademark is a refusal to grow up have a midlife crisis?”

Is that what we’ve been doing? Refusing to grow up? Drifting from a place of privilege from one good thing to the next without ever really arriving anywhere of consequence? Are we waiting for the next thing – be it a job, a relationship, a city – to be THE one? And what does that even mean? How hard can it be to muster a little determinism – people do it every day, right? I’m too old for this – I need reading glasses for crying out loud. Shouldn’t my shit be more together at this stage in my life? And if I interrupt this rant to interject for one moment the idea that the journey is more important than the destination, why do I still feel so feckless and guilty?

When mere existential ennui starts to morph into something that can’t be erased after a really great night out with the BFFs or a relaxing vacation on the beach, Mr. Scott’s clever deductions notwithstanding, is it melodramatic to say that a midlife crisis has set in? And even if it is melodramatic, what can we do about it?

Scott offers the recent Ben Stiller character Roger Greenberg as another iconic example of this phenomenon:

The sense that his life has been wasted – stalled by mysterious external forces rather than his own failure of will – makes Roger a representative figure, an epitome of loserdom instead of just another run-of-the-mill loser. It should go without saying that a generation is a demographic fiction, and that a stage of life is something of a literary conceit. But certain characters and narratives nonetheless draw together confused and disparate experiences in a way that feels almost instantly emblematic.

If a woman’s approach is to examine a problem and dissect it endlessly, the manly approach is to find a way to fix it. But if even the men in throe to this Gen X midlife crisis can’t seem to find a way to fix it, then I guess we’re all in trouble. Do we accept failure – of will or whatever else – and settle into some perversion of the Buddhist lack of desire? Or do we suck it up and find some latent ambition, digging for it like a crazed archeologist determined to find a heretofore undiscovered mythological treasure?

Either way, given that we belong to Generation X, expectations will be low. Since its publication in March, The Ask has sold around 7,000 copies. Disappointing? Of course. Our generation wouldn’t have it any other way.