Highest Rated Comments


Darn_21031 karma

Thanks for all of your writing. I have been wondering how burnout and disillusionment are related for millennial women. Seems like me and a striking number of my friends all dropped out of our jobs to take breaks, move in w parents, travel around age 32 when we realized there was no getting past the glass ceiling and that careerism was a carrot dangled in front of us but that the promotions never came. We all took jobs we were not passionate about, stopped working for free on weekends, and made much less money after realizing there’s no winning. How do you find sexism is related to burning out?

Darn_21016 karma

Thanks for your response. I’m excited to read your book to reflect more on this experience. I think my friends and I all bought the lie of meritocracy, we got the degrees, we accommodated absurd double standards as young women newly out of college working for and with mostly boomers, we hustled and ignored our health, we did all the extra work with a smile, thinking the rewards were coming. Only to find that it was a sham. I was looking around at the boomer women above me and thinking “they all need therapy,” and then realized I was going to have both their career and their issues if I didn’t stop chasing success as they defined it.

Darn_2103 karma

Absolutely true. My critique of success as defined by white boomer women that raised me and mentored me is that they believed feminism was a means to an end for each of them to individually compete with white men for power. Once I got in to the working world it just felt hollow to do that, and it precludes any kind of solidarity with others, and leaves the system in place and even reinforces white supremacy by buying into the myth that power is distributed based on merit. Because I was raised believing that, the disillusionment was news. Many other folks don’t have that lie to unlearn.

Darn_2102 karma

I think many were shaped by experiences that pitted them against each other, and they often treated one another as a threat. I don’t have an interest in having children myself, and most of the women I’m referring to do have kids. But I guess my very predictable 30s wake up call was that I could work really hard to achieve something individually but that the reward would be a particular life I didn’t want to live. Because I don’t have kids And I’m queer I feel like I have a whole different set of expectations about my adulthood than my mother, for example.