A fence is not a natural place to sit, whether chain link or picket. The metaphor of "fence-sitting" has long connoted something improper, or at least unfitting.
At times, the phrase has implied opportunism — sitting on the fence until you see which side will win, like Aaron Burr’s depiction in Hamilton. In the 21st century, fence-sitting invokes Prince Hamlet more than Burr. It’s about unending indecision and oscillation.
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Specifically, on the internet of the 2020s, “fence-sitting” connotes prolonged indecision about whether or not to have children. Throughout the web, the “Fence-Sitters” message boards are for those who cannot decide whether or not to have children.
A millennial self-described fence-sitter named Rachel M. Cohen laid out her angst and indecision about family formation in a recent Vox essay that made one very important thing clear: Being a millennial is an exhausting ordeal of constant choosing, deciding, and “living intentionally.” Set free from tradition, norms, expectations, roles, or guidance, they are charged with writing their whole life script on a blank page.
And it’s leaving them unmarried, childless, and yet more frazzled than a working mother of four.
“Today,” Cohen writes, “the question of whether to have kids generates anxiety far more intense than your garden-variety ambivalence. For too many, it inspires dread.”
This is part of a larger pathology, a fierce clinging to optionality, what Coehn describes as the “aversion many millennials feel about making any sort of commitment, so conditioned are we to leave our personal and professional options open.”
It’s the logic of capitalism extended to whom we are going to love. It’s also the political concept of self-determination applied to individual identities.
When we try to apply this logic to the question of “who am I?” we create a massive open question that fills us with anxiety and dread.
In the old tales told to millennials, choice was the precondition of happiness, and nobody was more frazzled than the benighted mother, who was thrust by societal expectations into that role.
Now, the millennials are beginning to suspect that choosing is more a yoke than a set of wings. Free will and free choice are the preconditions of virtue, but we’ve made the jump in this century from “you don’t have to follow society’s expectations of you” to “there are no expectations and ought not to be.”
Is it more uncomfortable to clash occasionally with cultural expectations you don’t like or to spend your 20s and 30s making up your own mind while sitting on a fence?