The Latchkey Generation and the “Autopilot Life”
Many of us were parentified long before we even knew the word for it.
We came home to empty houses, cooked our own dinners, let ourselves in with a key on a shoelace, and learned early that no one was coming to save us. We were the generation where both parents worked, or worked too much, or were simply too distracted to notice how much we were carrying.
That’s the thing about Gen X: we grew up self-reliant not because it was empowering… but because we didn’t have any other choice.
We handled things.
We didn’t complain.
We figured it out.
And somewhere in all of that figuring, many of us learned to stop checking in with ourselves altogether.
We became the no-nonsense kids squished between two louder generations — the millennials with their voices and the boomers with their rules. We were raised in the last analog childhood before the world went digital. We remember making mixed tapes, waiting all night for a song on the radio just to hit record at the right moment. We remember payphones and Walkmans and TV screens that couldn’t pause.
We learned patience.
We learned survival.
We learned to keep going even when something inside us needed attention.
So it makes sense that so many Gen X adults wake up one day, look around the life they built, and quietly ask:
“How did I get here?”
Not in a dramatic, movie-script way — but in a subtle, aching way.
Everything looks fine.
Nothing is “wrong.”
We have responsibilities we care about.
People count on us.
Bills don’t pay themselves.
And yet, something feels… off.
Not broken — just misaligned.
Like we built a life that made sense at the time, without stopping to ask whether it was actually ours.
When you grow up hyper-independent, your autopilot becomes your default. You go where you’re needed. You do what makes sense. You choose what’s safe. You follow the path that will protect you, not necessarily the one that will excite or nourish you.
And somewhere along the way, your actual desires — the deeper ones — get quieter and quieter.
That’s the cost of being “the capable one.”
People applaud your resilience but rarely ask how you are.
You get praised for handling everything, but no one notices what handling everything is doing to you.
What I’ve learned — in my own life and in the lives of so many clients — is this:
Autopilot isn’t a personality trait.
It’s a survival strategy.
A brilliant one, honestly.
It kept us moving.
It kept us together.
It kept us functional.
But autopilot is not how you build the second half of your life.
The second half — your second calling — needs presence.
It needs honesty.
It needs you to slow down just enough to ask the questions you never knew you were allowed to ask:
“What do I want now?”
“What actually matters to me?”
“Is this path still mine… or is it who I thought I had to be?”
“What part of me have I been ignoring to keep everything else running?”
And here’s the beautiful thing:
When Gen X reconnects with themselves — really reconnects — something extraordinary happens.
The independence that once isolated us becomes self-trust.
The resilience that once hardened us becomes wisdom.
The sensitivity we hid becomes intuition.
And the childhood spark we lost returns — older, wiser, and ready to lead.
We aren’t behind.
We aren’t late bloomers.
We aren’t stuck.
We’re just waking up from decades of being efficient at the wrong things.
And once we do wake up, the shift is fast.
Remarkably fast.
When the capable one finally turns their attention inward, they don’t crumble — they rise.
They make bold decisions.
They create lives that actually feel like them.
They discover gifts they forgot they had.
And they stop settling for a version of themselves they outgrew years ago.
Second Callings is the place where that awakening becomes a path.
Where you stop surviving your life and start shaping it.
Where all the years of being responsible become the foundation for something deeply fulfilling.
Because you’re not starting over.
You’re coming home —
not in a cliché spiritual sense,
but in a grounded, Gen-X, “I’m finally listening to myself” kind of way.
And it changes everything.
