burnout feminism?
on leaning out but not leaning over.
Bloomberg News wrote about my book last week. It’s a story that tracks how we got from the 2010s Lean In/Girlboss feminism to the current state of (as they called it) “burnout feminism.” The author of the story, Alice Robb, cites Ambition Monster along with recent books from a number of female authors (including my friend — and human delight — Emma Gannon) to make the case that perhaps we should be concerned about waning female ambition. Robb seems to feel nostalgic for the Lean In days, intimates that we might all be leaning out a little too much, “But admirable work-life balance goals can tip over into a kind of regressive defeatism — and the noxious message that hard-working women are suckers or dupes,” she writes.
The themes in Robb’s story, which I was sent more than a dozen times by strangers and friends alike, are not quite new for me. I heard this same argument teased again and again while I was promoting Ambition Monster back in 2024. Interviewers who seemed panicked that I might be anti-ambition. Others who were worried that, in sharing my own experience with workaholism, I was inadvertently telling young women not to follow their dreams. In interview after interview, I tried to shift the conversation to where I thought it needed to be, miles from this false “ambition bad/good” dichotomy, away from broad generalizations and any kind of one-size-fits-all definition of success.
I’m not here to write more about the merits or pitfalls of ambition, nor to talk about how myopic and reductive the idea that women can only be one thing (GRINDING BOSS BITCH) or another (CAREER-REPELLING MOM/WIFE/NON-GO-GETTING LOSER) really is. Like most women my age, I’ve learned not to prescribe the “right” way to do much of anything anymore. My years on the planet have shown me that the ye olde life map is wider and more circuitous than any of us possibly imagines and that the challenge, more often than not, is to find (and stay on) a path that feels individual and true.
I will say that judging/blaming anyone for not feeling especially hot for work in 2026 seems to me a far more noxious sentiment than questioning and/or rejecting a system that continues to exploit our ambitions at every turn.
While I was writing Ambition Monster, I was also reporting/writing/hosting a nine-hour documentary podcast about a 70’s feminist porn magazine called VIVA (I was additionally working three extra for-money jobs — so much for my anti-ambition agenda or, as the Bloomberg story called it, “the pleasures of giving up”).
For two years, I talked to (mostly) boomer women about feminist porn and desire, what they’d really wanted, how the sexual revolution had impacted their lives. Time and again, I got the same answer: These women’s deepest desire was not for the pages and pages of funny-looking schlongs splashed across their unprecedented magazine, but for the creative freedom the work afforded them, for the ability to make what they wanted the way they wanted to, and for being compensated well enough for that work to afford an independent life.
Though I’d set out to make a podcast about fucking, it turned out to be show about not getting fucked over. The freedom and ability to make their own choices, in all aspects of their lives, was what turned these women on most. I think about this a lot now as more and more of our freedoms are being eroded (body autonomy included), as traditional career ladders collapse, and jobs — and the foundational value proposition of jobs (putting in the time = earning enough money to live) — seem, in so many professions, to be disappearing before our eyes.
Most all of my closest friends are currently living through some degree of work scarcity/job precarity/money terror. Near everyone I know is one bad year/medical emergency away from financial collapse. This is not an AMBITION problem, it’s a the rent is too damn high problem — and the healthcare (…and childcare…and…) too. We’re not failing to SHOUT OUR DREAMS loud enough, we’re just waking up to the fact that in the U.S., in late-stage capitalism, these dreams are often living nightmares, or, at the very least, empty scams. More and more, for the non-rich, the world of work in this country feels like a real-time standup routine where every single joke is on us.
As my friend Kimberly Harrington wrote last week:
So many of us are posting chipper little posts and writing chipper little emails and putting appropriately placed exclamation points and smile emojis on things when what we (I) really want to do is scream: MAKE THIS ALL EASIER NOW, PLEASE. ARREST THE FUCKERS. HARD REBOOT THIS COUNTRY. BRING BACK NORMAL PEOPLE JOBS. DYNAMITE BILLIONAIRES. I’M SO SICK OF THIS SHIT.
I, too, am sick of this shit. I lived through (and have written extensively about) the girlboss era Robb is eulogizing. I even worked under Marissa Mayer, the hard-charging billionaire CEO Robb quotes in her piece. When we worked together, Mayer was paid more than $200 million to not only implement a series of doomed-to-fail corporate strategies but also torment an entire global team with mandated draconian HR practices, the cruelest I’ve ever seen. Have men done the same and worse? Sure! The point here is not to emulate mediocre white dudes nor toxic girl bosses, but a secret third thing, a fair and equitable and humane thing, one that, incidentally, smart/ambitious/visionary/progressive women (like Amanda Litman) are already on the frontlines dreaming up.
Because it seems to me that if we want to solve burnout feminism, get women excited about their career prospects again and have anyone in this hellscape feel the least bit eager to dream big, we need to not only get them out of survival mode but show them a professional future worth dreaming about. Instead of nostalgia for the hideous hustle culture of the 2010s or (even mildly) positively reframing it, a better use of our time could be to re-imagine a post-girlboss world that’s worthy of our hustle in the first place.
This landed in my inbox right when I'm trying to muster the energy to write my extremely tedious annual report to justify the minuscule raise I will get that won't account for any of the research I did last year nor adequately keep up with the rate inflation. BUT if I DON'T turn it in by Monday I won't get said tiny raise which we still need to pay for aftercare, summer camp, and life. I don't want to complain too much because I'm one of the lucky ones, but it's hard to get worked up about "women's waning ambition" when your workplace doesn't reward the fruits of your labor because they don't consider it "research forward" since it doesn't bring in big shiny grants from evil billionaires. So, rant over, and THANK YOU.
Absolutely. Thirty years ago, so many of us chased “having it all” like a finish line. We built careers that fed us and families that saved us and paid for both in currency we didn’t name: sleep, intimacy, pride.
My 30-year-old daughter? After having her first child last year, she called bullshit on that myth. The math is old, the demands are new, and women fall into the gap. Housing, healthcare, education—this isn’t a society built for one income, or for the mental load to be carried by one person without consequence. As a highly successful professional, she's had to make some hard choices.
I asked if I could have inoculated her against burnout or self-doubt. She wouldn’t indulge me. “Most of it’s societal,” she said. “You taught me: You can do anything, not everything.”
What many people don't realize is making those choices—where to put your energy—isn't not about abandoning ambition. It's about realizing you're trying to contort yourself into a story that was never built to hold you, and rewriting the rules on your terms. Not easy, but absolutely necessary.