Where do we put our ambition now?
The girlboss era is over, and that’s a good thing. But instead of rejecting ambition, what if we reoriented it?
One of the most vivid memories from my youth is the day I got my SAT scores. I had taken them as a junior, so I’d have time to repeat them if I wasn’t happy with the result. But as I stood in front of the mailbox and ripped open the envelope, that worry evaporated. My scores were even higher than I’d hoped.
Most importantly, they were higher than my brother’s.
My older brother was an excellent student. He was in every advanced class, won all the scholarships, was easily his class valedictorian. And I knew all of this, in precise detail, because I had spent my entire childhood tallying his achievements—and then making sure I matched each and every one by the time I was his age.
I rushed through the door beaming, my scores fluttering in my hand, to tell my dad how I’d done.
“That’s pretty good!” he said to me. “Almost as good as your brother.”
That’s when I knew: I was done trying to compete with my brother. What was the point?
So instead of trying to hit all his marks, I started opting out. He was great at math, so I stopped taking math. He was majoring in chemistry, so I avoided the physical sciences entirely. He went straight to grad school, so I decided to just get a job. You can’t lose if you don’t play, I figured.
Twenty years later, I no longer believe the SATs should even exist, and I can see that my dad’s comparison wasn’t just factually incorrect, but a pretty harmful parenting choice. But more than anything, I feel sad for that teenage version of myself. She really loved math. She just couldn’t see any other way out — it was all or nothing. Compete or quit.
So she quit.
I think about this memory every time I read another article about women losing their ambition.
In the past two years, we’ve gone from breathless praise for the girlboss — always an impeccably dressed (and typically white, cis, straight, thin) woman at the helm of an impeccably branded company — to a slew of articles celebrating her demise and labeling this the age of anti-ambition.
I’m not mourning the end of the girlboss era—there was a lot of truth to the “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” trend. But I do find myself wondering: what’s beyond that rejection?
Where do we put our ambition now?
That’s been a hard question to answer lately, while so many of us are stuck in a bone-deep burnout — spurred not just by demanding jobs or an unending pandemic, but also by unrelenting and unequal parenting responsibilities, the rollback of reproductive rights, and a pervasive sense of global doom. It’s no surprise that women who’ve spent years hustling and networking and striving—only to feel abandoned by society during a global crisis—have hit their limit.
But as much as I celebrate people using this moment to reset their work boundaries, find meaning outside of their careers, and disconnect their identities from their companies, I’m also worried by some of what I see — and more than a little sad. Because what I notice isn’t just people opting out of hustle culture and hyper-capitalist values.
I see a lot of my peers stuck in cynicism, feeling like they’re not supposed to strive for anything anymore.
I see teenage me, so desperate to break free of the status quo that she rejected the very things that brought her joy.
Who made the girlboss something bigger and worse than what she really was, and who made it feminism’s fault?
— Moira Donegan, “What Was the Girlboss?”
I was halfway through writing this when Moira Donegan published her take on the girlboss backlash this week. Like me, she found herself uncomfortable with all these pieces celebrating the fall of the girlboss:
At its worst, the rejection of the girlboss looked like a plain, rather uninventive form of misogyny, dressed in a flimsy costume of anticapitalism. Did the incessant critique of the girlboss represent a meaningful critique of power itself, or was it merely a thinly-veiled discomfort with the fact that some of that power was held by women?
In Donegan’s view, the real problem with the girlboss wasn’t her ambition. It was the framing of paid work “as a matter of personal fulfillment, rather than of material security.” She continues:
Much of paid work, for women and men alike, is tedious, devoid of ethical expression, and underpaid. Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky or already very rich, your paid work probably won’t give your life full meaning.
Full meaning, no. But I disagree that finding meaning in your work is so rare. The reality is that for many, many people — particularly, though not exclusively, those of us in the professional class — the work we choose does contribute substantially to our personal fulfillment.
In my work, I talk to people daily who find great joy in watching their code bring something to life, or who feel deeply fulfilled by advocating for users in their design practice. People who became content designers because they both enjoy writing and feel good about turning jargon and business-speak into plain language. These people, who are predominantly women, do care about their material conditions — and are often deeply aware of the inequities they face. But that’s far from the only thing getting them out of bed in the morning.
I am sure this is also true for Donegan herself: no one becomes a feminist writer for the money. If she got nothing from her work but a paycheck, I suspect she’d choose an easier path than being screamed at by strangers on the internet.
I don’t have any interest in teaching more women that their highest selves can only be found at the top of the career ladder. More CEOs who wear perfect sheath dresses and no-makeup makeup while following the same toxic and exploitative playbooks as the men who came before them won’t fix anything. The girlboss can stay dead.
But what I am interested in is exploring a more nuanced look at ambition and meaning. Because I don’t believe that work has to be either an all-consuming passion or no more than a paycheck.
There’s nothing feminist about asking women to choose between two shitty options. There’s nothing feminist about convincing women that the work they put into the world doesn’t mean anything.
In fact, I’d argue that it’s actually harmful to our mental and emotional health. If everything at work is pointless, making decisions is impossible and exhausting. How do you choose? How can you decide where to focus or which opportunities to take when you have no goals, no sense of how you’d like to grow?
Feeling rudderless day after day is incredibly draining. Even worse, that exhaustion will leave you open to simply adopting other people’s priorities. Instead of people-pleasing like a girlboss—currying favor so you can get ahead—you end up people-pleasing because that makes it easier to avoid thinking about what you really want.
When the only ambition we recognize is that which increases our material security, we also end up making decisions without taking our values into account, as long as the price is right. Trust me, I’ve worked with a lot of women who tried that approach — and then woke up numb and full of self-hatred a few years later.
Work culture is rife with structural problems, and individual interventions to find meaning won’t change that. But this is also your life we’re talking about. You might as well figure out how to feel alive in the place you spend most of your days.
We don’t tend to find much meaning through what we reject, though. We find it through what we choose.
We find it when we allow ourselves to ask what we most want to move toward, not just what we’re getting away from.
And yes, that probably includes re-orienting our priorities toward things outside of work: families, communities, causes. But there are so many meaningful places to orient ourselves while we’re at work, too. Like toward becoming a better collaborator or manager. Or following our curiosity about a new topic or technique. Or building a sense of mastery in our craft.
Each of these things can bring us meaning, can make our days less draining and leave us with more energy for our non-work lives.
Even when they’re performed in a flawed system.
I stopped competing with my brother because I wanted freedom. But simply rejecting his path didn’t give me that. Actually, it gave me the opposite: I lived in chronic doubt that what I was doing instead was good enough. I craved affirmation that my choices were valid.
I had thrown away someone else’s yardstick for life. But it took me years to figure out my own. That’s why I’ve now oriented so much of my work toward helping other people figure out their own relationships to ambition. We all deserve to feel more agency over our lives.
The last math class I took was Calculus 3, in the fall of my senior year of high school. It was hard as hell. I’d love to take it again someday.
This time, for me.
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