Not because they installed speakers blasting artificial birdsong playlists to drown out the constant hum of the neighborhood data centers, but because the city itself has become a habitat again.

I open the windows of my apartment and breathe in crisp morning air that smells like a mix of wildflowers and freshly baked bread from the cooperative bakery downstairs. Children are already giggling and frolicking in the car-free streets below while their parents drink flat whites together under vibrant fruit trees we’ve planted years before.

No one tells the children to be extra careful every five seconds. No one spends their life rushing somewhere they don't want to be anymore. All because ten years ago, we finally started designing cities around the flourishing of humans and nature. We finally decided to stop obsessively asking how cities could generate more economic growth and started working towards how they could help people live better lives.

I leave my home without my phone in my hand. Crazy idea? Not so much. There isn't any reason to. Technology finally learned its place as a submissive servant of humanity. It handles the things that should be effortless, then disappears into the background, which is all thanks to the collapse of Meta following the landmark lawsuit in the early 2030s. Yeah, a lot of influencers started creating fundraisers, but it didn't collapse the economy. For the first time, governments agreed that human attention wasn't an unlimited natural resource to be extracted. By doing so, the attention economy was regulated much like pollution had been decades earlier.

We still have the technology we love, but we've built a circular economy where yesterday's electronics become tomorrow's devices, making child labor in mining obsolete. These devices also no longer behave like parasites on our lives, as we really only use them to coordinate neighborhood projects, access a variety of knowledge, stay connected with the people we love and brag about our compost. Oh, and somehow Hinge is still around. Don't ask me why.

The habit of taking my phone has been happily replaced by the habit of always carrying a bunch of books with me. After the literacy crisis in 2026 was finally labeled as a threat to democracy, exchanging literature has become somewhat of a cultural obsession. You’d occasionally see a man pushing ounces of bell hooks literature in a pram - which, to be fair, is a bit weird, but this has become somewhat the equivalent of flexing the newest iPhone.

I hop on my bicycle and pedal through streets lined with edible gardens, community workshops, buildings draped in vines and neighbors vividly chatting with each other. It's practically impossible to step outside without ending up in a conversation. I still remember that we used to think loneliness was a mental health crisis, but after a council of indigenous women took on this topic, they found it was actually an urban planning crisis. The biggest surprise however was the so-called male loneliness epidemic. Despite fierce backlash from feminists insisting it was entirely self-inflicted, the council argued that no society benefits from abandoning people to isolation. Men suffering under a weird sense of superiority are now offered rehabilitation instead of podcast appearances. Talking about podcasts, male podcast were also labelled as a threat to women’s rights years ago, and therefore only allowed under strict supervision.

As I pedal on, I gaze at rooftops that now generate more energy than the entire neighborhood consumes. Every building gives back more than it takes. Rainwater disappears into gardens instead of sewers. Vines crawl up former office blocks, cooling the streets by several degrees. Air conditioning has become something people vaguely remember their parents arguing about. The loudest sound is the live music of artists who made it their mission to turn each corner of the city into a scene of LaLaLand.

At the local market, I recognize most of the people selling the food because we all helped grow it. I take a bunch of strawberries that actually taste like strawberries and tomatoes that didn’t travel across continents to reach my plate. Around noon, I walk across the street to the public kitchen where lunch is prepared collectively every Sunday. Domestic labor being a private issue, disproportionally carried by women, feels so 2026. Nobody has to cook alone unless they genuinely enjoy it and sure as hell nobody calls it “women’s work” anymore.

On the way home I pass a memorial dedicated not to male colonizers (which is a crime now), but to caregivers - mothers, grandparents, nurses, teachers, neighbors, midwifes and community organizers whose invisible labor held societies together long before governments learned how to value it.

I giggle a little at the memory of a time, just twenty years ago, when I started writing a newsletter called Futurelicious about designing a better future. Back then, people called me naïve for believing humanity deserved better than what we had. They told me politics would never change. That our body isn’t made up of 60% water, but 60% hyper-individualism, 30% convenience and 10% anxiety. That that’s just how it is. I still remember how lonely that felt sometimes, and how, on the other side, I pulled so much strength from the exact thing they were trying to take away from us - our humanity.

I feel a delicious breeze while gazing over the city one last time before closing the windows for the evening.

The rooftops are glowing softly beneath the setting sun. Somewhere, laughter echoes through the streets. A tram glides by almost silently, covered in climbing plants. A group of children race each other home through the park, their voices carried on the warm summer air.

I cuddle up beneath the soft cotton sheets of my bed, my body wrapped in their warmth and my mind wrapped in the comfort by the knowledge that we are here because countless people around the world chose to plant trees whose shade they knew they might never sit under.

According to Solarpunk Magazine, Solarpunk is ‘a prefigurative, utopian artistic movement that envisions what the future might look like if humanity solved major modern challenges like climate change and created more sustainable and balanced societies. As a genre and cultural aesthetic, it encompasses literature, visual art, fashion, video games, architecture, and more. Solarpunk carries many aspects of punk ideologies such as counterculture, humanitarianism, egalitarianism, animal rights, decolonization, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, and anti-consumerism. The greatest difference between solarpunk and its sister genre, cyberpunk, is that solarpunk observes harmony between nature and technology.’

I believe a lot of us have retreated into nihilism for the same reason a lot of us are in year-long situationships: a crippling fear of commitment combined with an astronomical fear of rejection. And while we can surely blame online dating for serving us the perfect product to ignore our fears for even a tiny fraction of a second while swiping through a perpetual seemingly potential of potential-less people, we can surely blame media outlets and Zuckerberg’s algorithm for feeding us stories and news that further confirm our nihilism. And so it happens, that as we swap from dating app, to news app and back and forth and back and forth until our fingers become numb or our freshly microwaved food becomes cold - whichever comes first - the one thought penetrating our minds is how EVERYTHING just really fucking SUCKS.

A generation raised on endless analysis is now suffering from a shortage of vision.

If you’re an activist, you’re pretentious. If you aren’t an activist, you’re ignorant. If you're ambitious, you're capitalist. If you're not ambitious, you're wasting your potential. If you're a mother, you're setting women back. If you're childfree, you're selfish. If you're political, you're exhausting. If you're apolitical, you're complicit. If you're online, you're performative. If you're offline, you're uninformed. If you're optimistic, you're naive. If you're pessimistic, you're toxic. Give each other a break already.

We're cuddled up in the (dis)comfort of a cultural decision paralysis because every identity comes with its own public prosecution. So we might as well do... nothing? Girl!!! The fuck not.

Something I keep circling back to when I’m being called a dumb leftist slut by right-wing men and a performative feminist by my fellow - morally superior - leftist sluts in the same minute is: the future. ‘Oh, you still believe in that? A future?’ Well, yes. Not only do I believe that the rise of patriarchy and everything it brought us (capitalism, climate change, medical bills, chlamydia) is a perversion of nature, but I also believe that better times are upon us if we collectively lock the fuck in. On top of that, I also believe that this political imagination should not be so lightly placed in the hands of tech bro boomers who will leave this planet in the next decade anyways, but by the generation who actually has to live inside the consequences of their questionable actions.

Do you think that maybe for once, we’d survive putting aside our fetish for proving who's the most politically correct in the room and start aggressively imagining a future worth living in?

I can already hear the question: “Why would I care about the future of humanity if I’ll be dead in fifty years anyway?” The interesting aspect about radically imagining a better future isn’t that you’re nobly doing your part to save humanity from extinction, but that your own life becomes more livable in the process. A wise person (me) once said that the opposite of cynicism isn’t optimism. It’s active participation. Wild concept, I know.

See, the good news is the moment we start believing things could be better, we stop keeping our fingers busy swiping from one echo chamber to the next and start paying attention to the version of life that exists just 200 meters beyond our screens. We become more curious. More connected. More willing to invest in people and ideas that may outlive us. Side effects may include an increased sense of hope, unexpected affection for strangers, a renewed interest in collective action, less Hinge matches with straight men. Agency is terrific.

So personally, even if I never live to see it, I’d rather get pregnant from flirting too hard with a volatile future, than have my soul die everyday a little bit more from this collective epidemic of powerlessness.

But how do we flirt the future into existence?

South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han brilliantly said: ‘Without ideas (…) life is reduced to survival or to the immanence of consumption. Consumers have no hopes, only desires and needs.’

Read.that.again.

I may not be a philosopher and I may not be from Korea, but I believe what’s really hurting us is our inability to hold two truths at once. We can and should be astronomically enraged at all the atrocities unfolding in the world, but thinking rage alone is a political strategy is just as illusory as thinking an alarm system is a blueprint for a new house. My generation became incredibly skilled at identifying everything that's broken and remarkably hesitant to articulate what we'd build instead. And oh boy, do I get it! Imagining a better future feels embarrassingly vulnerable these days.

I can almost guarantee that the moment anyone even dares to propose an alternative, someone will yell at us how it’s unrealistic, problematic, naive, privileged, utopian or not radical enough. It’s much safer to be cynical. Much safer to point at the fire than to sketch the evacuation route. But honey, while you’re participating in the wokeness Olympics, don’t forget that identifying the problem is the easy part. Critique is safe because it keeps your hands clean. Vision is hazardous because it forces you to get them dirty.

Additionally - and I hate to be that type of person to point out the obvious - not a single movement in history has ever survived on outrage alone. During the height of the AIDS crisis, activists were furious, yes. And on top of that, they were busy building mutual aid networks, healthcare organizations, political institutions and care systems. For decades, queer people have had to imagine new family structures because traditional ones excluded them. Instead of saying, “Well, I guess family just isn’t in the cards for me,” they built lavender marriages, chosen families, community networks and entirely new ways of caring for one another. That’s the gist.

The stories we tell about our generation are almost exclusively framed around what we’ve lost. Stable careers. Affordable housing. Financial security. Romantic relationships. Affordable olive oil???

And while we’re graduating into an economy where homeownership feels mythical and even buying groceries feels like a financial decision to agonize over, we’re also becoming experts in adaptation. Every survival mechanism we're developing right now - resource sharing, community care, mutual aid, alternative living arrangements, unconventional careers - is becoming the blueprint for whatever comes next. A better future won’t emerge despite these conditions. It will emerge from them.

What really sucks is that every generation inherits a world it didn’t choose and yes, that sucks. Everything sucks. But if everything already sucks so much, we eventually reached a point where adapting to the old world becomes less useful than designing a new one.

So if we zoom out, the systems that feel unconventional today may one day become the norms future generations inherit without a second thought. How can I be so sure? Well, every institution we now consider normal - from weekends and public education to maternity leave and paid sick leave - began as someone’s impossible idea. Chances are, they were called a radical leftist.

Here are some strategies I’ve established that keep me from losing my fucking mind:

1: Counteract negative news with positive ones: If we look at classic news outlets, I’d guess 98% are negative and can easily put us in a state of anxiety and hostility. But babe, if you’re already staying informed, don’t forget to educate yourself on the whole story. Just as there’s bunch of atrocities unfolding in the world, there’s also a bunch of good things happening at the same time. From a neurological point of view, it is imperative to hear both sides of the story.

2: Nothing will make you feel more hopeful about the future, than taking matter into your own hands: This could look like writing a fictional story of characters living the future, being the person to innate new projects in your neighborhood, educating the kids in your life, building businesses or organizations that actually make a difference. Even if it's something as small as growing vegetables on your balcony, the care required to nurture something into existence signals to your brain that you believe in a future where it can flourish.

3: Surround yourself with people who are on the same path: Since I didn’t have it in my own life, I’ve created a Matriarchal study club where women from all around the world come together to learn about matriarchal theory and apply that knowledge to build future-forward thought. We’re currently 60 women from over 20 different countries and our bi-weekly meet-ups are always my highlight and give me so much hope! Feel free to join us or build your own study club, but either way trust me: magic happens when people come together to envision something different.

4: Start building trust in humanity: I believe a lot of our nihilism and hostility towards the future comes from an inherent distrust towards humanity. It’s impossible to not want to protect the future when you’ve seen the good in people. If you hate humans and have no proof of humanity, go out and build it. People in the real world are a lot cooler than they’re given credit for by ABC news.

And lastly, don’t forget that it’s okay - fuck, even necessary - to feast on optimism. Once you’re nourished, build a buffet and feed your people.

At this point, unless a man positions himself loudly and proudly against rape culture, I have to interpret his silence as agreement. The men who say “not all men” are exactly a drop of oil on the wheels of the rape culture machine. The men who laugh off sexist jokes from their friends, but “would never harm anyone” - another drop of oil. The men who only seem to not view women as objects once you force them to imagine it’s their sister or their daughter being abused - a whole barrel of oil.

To me, there’s no difference between an active predator and someone who indulges in the privileges of keeping the systems that breed active predators alive.

And while women have been taught to fear the strange man lurking in a dark alley at 3am - when statistic have been proving over and over again that the most unsafe place for women and children is their own home - a significant amount of men have dropped $175 on a bottle of tasteless and odorless liquid. ‘Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.’

The CNN investigation sheds the thousandth light on something we’ve been knowing for years: a patriarchal society breeds violent men, while telling women being in proximity to one violent man will protect them from the violence of other violent men. How much more light needs to be shed before everyone finally sees it clearly?

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But the erotic offers a well of replenishing

and provocative force to the woman who does

not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the

belief that sensation is enough.

- Audre Lorde, 1978

Nothing feels fergalicious anymore and by god, we can’t let the beigification of the world take over. We simply can’t. I don’t want to wear knee long skirts in pastel tones. I don’t want to enjoy my sexy cappuccino in a café that doubles down as a dentist office, and I sure as hell don’t want to see another reformer pilates studio opening up in my city. Water with protein - take that shit off the shelves. I don’t want to paint my nails in neutral tones. I don’t want to ‘grab a matcha’. You know what, I don’t want to drink water at all. No, you can’t bring your boyfriend.

The easiest way to be governed as a woman is by being frail and agreeable, working 5-9 to erase our flaws on a journey to becoming the hottest version of ourselves. Lookmaxxing until we burn out from this chosen version of our 5-9 faster than we do from our 9-5. Go ahead and burn me at the stake already.

Here’s my hot take: we optimize appearance, because we’ve lost erotics. When we lose access to that aliveness, we work over-hours trying to manufacture some distorted version of desirability instead.

In a patriarchal society, anything associated with erotic becomes a forbidden fruit women are only allowed to nibble on in servitude of men. It’s an energy exclusively allowed to be exuded behind closed doors, where it doesn’t risk luring in unwanted guests. The tragedy is we’ve collectively agreed to experience one of the most vital forces within us only in fragments - and even then, in private. Most of us were never taught to associate the erotic with anything beyond sex. Luckily, you have me, taking you by the hand and yelling at you to better start creating a life that turns you on!

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Like many of you, I spent a good 1.5 hours voluntarily getting rage-baited in front of my TV this week. And for everyone who isn’t as chronically online as I am: Louis Theroux, a British documentarian, went into the depths of the manosphere to understand what in the actual fuck is going on in the world of, allow me to quote, '“extreme online influencers who are actively redefining modern masculinity”.

You can say what you want about the documentary, whether it should have focused more on the impact on women, children, or the broader societal consequences, but the point is this: it arrives at an incredibly important moment in history. Most people have heard the term “manosphere,” but very few understand just how downright deadly this corner of the internet really is. After watching it, it essentially becomes impossible to dismiss. While yes, the documentary doesn’t capture every dimension of the issue (which work of art ever did?), Theroux succeeds in making this reality visible and accessible to a wider public, while maintaining a kind of deliberate neutrality that allows their worldview to speak for themselves.

Now, we can all agree that the manosphere is problematic in a myriad of ways, but if you know me, you know I might be a raging bitch, but I love humanity way too much not to channel that rage into a more productive conversation. I stand against everything these men stand for, and I wanted to punch the TV several times just to make it stop. At one point, I even caught myself thinking, “wow, I wish I could unsee this.” Ignorance is bliss, after all. Yet, despite all the violence against women and the extremely dark, deeply disturbing opinions in this corner of the internet, I decided to watch this documentary with the intention of finding common ground.

What surprised me most wasn’t the misogynistic slurs, the violence, or the hate and not even the nagging sense that all of it feels like an exaggerated attempt to come out of the closet, but the fact that these men actually had a point. A distorted one, lacking nuance and education, but a point nonetheless. If you really listen to what they’re saying, it becomes clear that they’re pointing to real problems in modern society, ranging from a deep deprivation of community to feeling trapped in a 9–5 workweek, frustrated that this form of capitalist enslavement doesn’t even reward them with any real sense of ownership. Even the ones who have collected more capitalist accomplishments and therefore see themselves higher up in the patriarchal ladder, feel deeply frustrated by the realization that no matter how much effort they put into climbing higher, the final step remains inaccessible.

Where they take a wrong turn, of course, is in identifying the cause. Contrary to their belief, women unfortunately aren’t remotely responsible for any of the problems they’re pointing to. If anything, I’d argue that most men who label themselves as anti-feminist are, in reality, reacting to class inequality —they’ve simply been taught to misidentify it. Men complaining about getting drafted into the army, because of feminism. Men complaining about having it harder in the workforce, because of feminism. Men complaining about not being able to afford a family, a house, a life that feels stable, because of feminism. Honey, you’re not being sent to war because of women who want equal rights, you’re being sent by other men. More precisely, men who are richer and more powerful than you are. You’re not having a harder time finding your place in the workforce, because of feminism, but because wealth is concentrating at the top. Oh, and because we’re living in a world where a single man called Elon Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. And lastly, you can’t afford a family, a house, or anything that feels stable—not because women gained rights, but because the same men who send you to war would rather tax the shit out of you than people like Elon Musk and his squad of billionaire tech bros.

Feminism isn’t any sort of root cause, but merely an easy scapegoat for their frustration with the fact that the version of masculinity they were promised (provider, protector, head of the household, alpha bro) was always contingent on access to resources that are now increasingly out of reach. Instead of putting one and one together and questioning the system that made those promises in the first place, it’s certainly easier to blame feminism for “taking something away” than to confront the possibility that what they were offered was never guaranteed to begin with. The ladder they’ve been encouraged to climb to dizzying heights was already broken before they even set foot on it. So yes, it sure as hell fells easier to direct the anger sideways instead of upwards, but as long as that’s where it goes, the solutions will remain just as misdirected.

So what role do women and children actually play in all of this?

Women and children play an essential role in the architecture of the manosphere. Of course not as participants with agency (I mean, come on, that would be asking for too much) but as symbols that give the entire system meaning. Women function as both reward and threat, something to be either obtained, or blamed. Vagina present = man’s status validated. Vagina absent = man’s victimhood validated. Either way, Vagina = validation. Case closed.

Children, on the other hand, operate as justification. They are invoked to moralize decisions that would otherwise be indefensible. The promise of “doing it for my future family” becomes a way to rationalize exploitation, misogyny, racism, homophobia, physical violence and an ongoing list of other atrocities. A common sentiment is: yeah, I know what I’m doing is fucked up, but at least MY children will never have to be OnlyFans models. Now this is convenient because it surely helps reframe pure self-interest as some sort of virtuous responsibility. Look at me!!! I may be radicalizing and ripping off an entire generation of young men by selling them crypto shit and promoting hatred toward half the world’s population, but I’m doing it for my unborn children!!! Thank God we still have men thinking about the future with such depth.

It’s probably unethical of me to even admit this, but I even found an inch of inspiration in their sheer self absorption, because I started to wonder what the world would look like if women were to walk around life with even a scratch of their audacity. It’s lowkey a shame the closest equivalent to the manosphere we have is women in aprons tending to their chicken. Anyways, apart from their obsession with giving their (yet to be born) children a good life, there is one more essential driving force and that is, of fucking course: IMPRESSING OTHER MEN. Male friends, male strangers, male neighbors, male followers, and a tale as old as time, their own fathers whose absence is somewhat of the core driver behind all of their shenanigans.

People think the irony is that they crave women while promoting violence against them, but that’s not even the peak contradiction. In this world, women are barely even a pit stop. They’re a cute little accessory, a bag charm, picked up along the way in a much longer marathon for male approval. The manosphere has to be the only place on earth where “straight” men perform straight-sex in order to impress “straight” men. May I suggest just… fucking each other? Maybe the entire manosphere will evaporate into air the day these men realize there’s an app called Grindr they can simply download in order to get validated by other men without radicalizing an entire generation of boys into hating the very gender that would be the first to welcome them with open arms into the LGBTQIA+ community.

My first instinct was to see the women who excelled at playing the exemplary bag charm as traitors to all women, because this entire ecosystem of male violence would be much harder to sustain without women playing along. However, I found equal parts solace and rage in the realization that most of these women feel systematically forced into this role as a way to survive in this capitalist hellscape. It may look like choice-feminism on the surface, but it’s glaring that it’s mostly strategy. In the first five minutes of the documentary, when Louis Theroux asks the woman hanging out with HSTikkyTokky what she likes about him, she bluntly answers: “his money.” I mean, it’s kind of hard to find anything else to like, or even tolerate, about these men, so I guess… get that bag, girl?

By now, we can sum up that the manosphere is essentially a self-sustaining ecosystem in which men monetize male frustration by rage-baiting other men into buying products, in order to receive validation within the same male hierarchy. Funnnn.

Now, how do we turn these men into allies in the fight for a matriarchal future?

The common ground is already there: these men hate the current system, or to eloquently put it in their words “the matrix.” I think I’ve made my point very clear by now that I’m morally standing against all of their views, but at some point, we’re going to have to swallow our pride on both sides and start fighting with each other instead of against each other. Like already mentioned, they’re not entirely wrong about everything that is wrong with the world we’re living in, they’re mostly wrong about who to blame. I hate to admit it, but their frustration and sense of betrayal is real. They were promised a version of life that doesn’t fucking exist, and instead of being given the tools to process that loss, they were handed an ideology that redirects their anger toward women.

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Recently, I had an odd thought: If we’re lucky enough to continue witnessing the collapse of patriarchy, who’s gonna make the tradwives come? If women’s economic survival no longer depended on marriage anywhere on earth, what would become of erotic submission? Does it still feel good when it’s not tied to security? Do tradwives know where to shop for vibrators? Do they know what turns them on outside of the fantasy of perpetual pregnancy and domestic submission?

The Breeding-Kink

What way better to induce this story than to serve you brewing hot a recent, (okay not super recent) sex story of mine? This is your informal trigger warning. Consider yourself warned. We were in the middle of it when he suddenly looked at me and said he wanted to put a baby inside me.

I gagged. Not metaphorically. Physically.

Part of me registered it as hot — primal, charged, a sentence engineered to bypass the frontal lobe entirely. Another part of me experienced something resembling war flashbacks, since my body remembers that the last time someone put “a baby inside of me” it eventually lead to “a baby outside of me.” Arguably, a baby outside of oneself tends to involve a minimum of eighteen years of logistical devotion, chronic eye bags, and the occasional €200 babysitter invoice just for the brief ability to wear heels, kiss a stranger and remember you have a personality. Tempting, truly.

As soon as he left (without putting a baby inside of me), I did what any woman with an internet connection and an uncontrollable urge to turn her dating life into amateur psychological field research would do — I disappeared into the depths of Reddit to find anything remotely verifiable about the so-called breeding kink. When it comes to understanding men, I tend to trust exactly one demographic: sex workers. They are, quite literally, the anthropologists of male desire. If anyone has seen into the unlit corners of the male psyche, it’s the women men feel safest revealing themselves to, the women they believe they’ve paid for anonymity. Luckily, this anonymity still allows for a certain kind of data gathering, the kind that tends to surface in anonymous internet forums.

I found myself on a mission to answer two existential questions:

1. Is it deeply unfeminist of me to find this… somewhat hot?

2. What is the underlying psychological architecture of the breeding kink?

One user speculated “Maybe they like the possessive aspect of it. It's almost like capturing the woman. Once she's pregnant, then she can't "get away". Some people might like the claiming part of. The man is "making her his" by putting his baby in her.”

Valid thesis. We’re starting off strong.

In another thread, a Reddit user announces she “stumbled upon a very weird subreddit in which men talked about ‘breeding’ various celebrity women.” What struck her, she writes, was that the conversations framed impregnation as a form of punishment or containment. “They were talking about breeding (i.e., impregnating) these women as a means of disempowering or grounding them,” she explains. “Not in a ‘I wish I could knock up Halle Berry so she’d be tethered to me’ kind of way — not that that isn’t problematic in and of itself — but worse.”

According to her post, male users would discuss actresses and write comments such as, “Someone should have bred her earlier so she wouldn’t have gotten into all that environmental stuff,” or, “Can’t believe she’s been allowed to do [x] for this long — she’s almost 30… she deserves a gang bang breeding to make sure she gets mothered.” The implication, she suggests, was that pregnancy would halt these women’s ambitions — that motherhood could be used to humble or neutralize them. “It’s not even rooted in insecurity about losing her,” she continues. “It’s just to tie her up with motherhood. Not even some selfish distortion of control or commitment — just for the sake of disempowering her. And that’s it.”

She concludes her post by calling it a “very bizarre way to think of procreation… like some sort of punishment for women,” adding that the subreddit appeared “weirdly obsessed with Emma Watson, so… sucks for her.”

The thread is followed by dozens of comments from other users sharing stories of what they describe as “baby-tethering” fantasies in their own social circles.

I decide it’s time for me to get the hell out of the Reddit rabbit hole.

By now, I’ve arrived at my answers.

1. It’s a grey zone — a bit like blasting violent rap while intellectually rejecting every lyric. Desire doesn’t always align neatly with ideology.

2. Misogyny.

Tradwives and Christian Grey

Now, I’m not saying the resurgence of tradwife culture is caused by a breeding kink. However, after diving much deeper into this rabbit hole than I probably should’ve, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that there may be a correlation. At the very least, there’s an overlap in fantasy architecture, a shared aesthetic of male virility, female surrender and domesticity as eroticized devotion. One user said: “They’re talking about using pregnancy and child raising as a way to control women. “Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” is a saying for a reason.”

My immediate reflex is to put on my platform Doc Martens boots and make a mental note to get my IUD checked.

Writing this piece just days after Hannah Neelman — CEO (I mean devoted mother) of Ballerina Farm, her empire (I mean her home) — announced her ninth pregnancy in a marketing rollout as spectacular as Erika Kirk’s grieving tour feels… cosmically timed. My first reaction to seeing that ad was that this is clearly a smart PR strategy to distract from her poop milk scandal. Promoting raw milk with a dash of poop and getting pregnant not for the third or fourth, but the ninth time, is certainly an interesting choice to kick off 2026. Oh, the serene simpleness of the cottage core lifestyle.

At this point, it is glaring that the whole tradwife aesthetic feels like patriarchy’s last branding attempt. I guess if they can’t force women into motherhood any longer, they can at least repackage it in a glossy box of female submission and market it back to us as empowerment. The premise of seeing the tradwife lifestyle as some sort of anti–capitalist, anti-hustle-culture revolution would almost make sense, if only it didn’t require an enormous amount of capital to begin with. Their revolutionary “escape” from capitalism tends to rest comfortably on a foundation of inherited wealth, billionaire husbands, and/or monetized content about escaping capitalism.

Tying it back to my breeding-kink observation, there is also noticeable erotic undercurrent: fertility framed as proof of masculinity (???), submission reframed as devotion, domestic labor stylized into erotic performance. For all the women who once drooled over Christian Grey (yes, fine, I did too), this will sound familiar. The very dominant, very troubled rich dude giving the shy, fragile Anastasia her “dream life,” as long as he gets exclusive access to her vagina and control over every step she takes — that dynamic was marketed as irresistible. Hot. The prime example of if he wanted to, he would. Never mind the minor inconvenience that we never actually learn what she wants, as she’s too busy keeping up with his instructions. I do sometimes wonder how many women left their boyfriends because their broke asses couldn’t afford to gift them an Audi A8 and that isn’t very if he wanted to, he would of them. Whatever. Now, looking at this dynamic through the eyes of a 28-year-old woman who has gone down a few too many rabbit holes — and no longer through the eyes of the 16-year-old who once believed her Christian Grey would one day come and make her come — I can clearly see how troubled this portrayal of their relationship really is.

And just like the Fifty Shades trilogy is less a depiction of every woman’s dream relationship and more a projection of what men think women should fantasize about, the tradwife circus isn’t some hidden collective desire of women either. It’s a meticulously curated performance, a circus really, one that all of its most visible ambassadors don’t even live by themselves. The women presenting this as the antidote to collective girlboss burnout are running businesses, negotiating brand deals and building media empires. Domestic submission is their fucking content strategy, one that has made Hannah Neeman a revenue of $70 million in 2023. Again, the serene simpleness of the cottage core lifestyle.

What young girls seduced by the aesthetic often fail to see is that the modern tradwife is, paradoxically, a career path and for fucks sake, it’s not even an accessible one. It is disproportionately available to white, middle-class women who have the economic cushion to monetize nostalgia — who can promote total financial and emotional devotion to a man while retaining seven figure digital income streams of their own.

The tradwife fantasy can only exist in places where women already have rights. Without the women who fought for our ability to own property, make money, and speak publicly, the tradwife influencers selling submission online wouldn’t even have the right to open their goddamn mouths. Tradwife aesthetics exclusively thrive in liberal democracies where women can vote, work, divorce, own property, and monetize their own image online. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and try packaging total devotion to your husband as a lifestyle brand in Afghanistan where women are legally barred from autonomy, where they cannot leave their marriages freely, where education is restricted, where reproductive decisions are not theirs. Doesn’t sound like a great sales pitch anymore, huh? After all, the irony is: the fantasy of giving up power only exists because there was once a bunch of women putting their lives on the line to win power in the first place. And now you’re over here with your apron and your chickens and your tripod and tell us that you’re in your divine feminine. Shut the fuck up. The divine feminine is busy fighting regimes. Smuggling books into classrooms. Organizing protests.

The divine feminine is resistance.

So, who’s going to make the tradwives come after patriarchy?

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Since then, I’ve struggled to describe the state of the world without sounding either naïve or apocalyptic. The closest metaphor I’ve found is this: we are living inside a bruised fruit. Much of it is soft with decay, but if we collectively carve away the rot, we may discover that the seeds are still intact.

I spent a lot of time at that festival surrounded mostly by older women and a rather spiritual atmosphere and while I enjoyed the softness of it all, I kept wondering how these conversations could travel much further, if we changed the way we talked about them. How can we make this ancient knowledge — the way we lived as human beings long before patriarchy even became a thing — feel sexier and more relevant to a younger generation? How can we stop seeing matriarchal societies as slightly utopian anthropological curiosities and start seeing them as living case studies? And, most importantly, how can we use their very existence as proof that better social structures are possible and let that fuel our courage to build them in our own lives?

I couldn’t help but think that if we stripped away some of the aesthetic language and spoke more plainly about power, economics, and social organization, these ideas might resonate far beyond spiritual circles. Currently, the closest political language we have to matriarchy is feminism and I stand on its shoulders, always. However, feminism has largely been forced to work within the orchard patriarchy built. Matriarchy, on the other hand, doesn’t pretend the orchard was ever healthy to begin with. It acknowledges that much of it is bruised, that some parts simply cannot be saved. Instead of fighting over the least rotten fruit, it asks us to take the damn seeds and cultivate an entirely new farm.

Ever since that festival, I’ve been looking for signs in the wider culture, small pieces of evidence that people in my generation are already drawn to this way of living, even if they don’t yet have the language for it. The more I paid attention, the more I noticed that many of the trends we’re seeing right now actually reflect values that feel distinctly matriarchal.

So here’s my curated list of cultural shifts and pop-culture trends that I believe mirror matriarchal principles. These are small proof points that many of us are, perhaps unintentionally, building lives that center care, community, and relational power — without yet being able to name it. Or to put in the words of Gen Z, #hopecore.

1. The Collapse of Marriage as a Default Life Goal

See, I love love. I’m the type of woman who balls her eyes out at weddings. And I know three or five people who are genuinely happy in their marriages and that is beautiful and in many ways, sustaining a loving partnership in this world is radical in itself. What I don’t love is the institution of marriage and how it has been marketed to us as the ultimate measure of a life well lived. My problem with marriage as the default life goal is that it’s a profoundly uncreative standard. Out of all the ways a human life could unfold, we decided the ultimate achievement is legal proximity to a man? Surely we can imagine something more interesting than that.

In 2026, marriage is clearly far from the ultimate life goal for, I’d say, most people in my generation, not only because spending your life savings to celebrate being legally bound to a man seems like a dumb fucking idea to many of us, but also because it feels spiritually conservative. We’re clearly witnessing the slow decline of the idealization of the patriarchal nuclear family in pop culture and that shift is very matriarchal. Gen Z is all about chosen family, having a child with your gay bestie, communal living and partnerships that don’t require merging identities or sacrificing autonomy. If that sounds radical, it’s worth remembering that entire societies have organized themselves this way for centuries. In one of the world’s largest matrilineal societies, the Mosuo of southwest China, people practice what are often called “walking marriages.” Essentially, romantic relationships do not require cohabitation, legal contracts, or the merging of households. Women choose their partners, and men visit at night. If a woman no longer wishes to maintain the relationship, she can simply tell her partner to stop visiting her bedroom. Period.

2. Intergenerational Female Solidarity Becoming Aspirational

Think about how “cool, single older women” have become aspirational archetypes instead of cautionary tales. A generation that was raised on the warning — whatever you do, just don’t dare ending up an old spinster rotting in your apartment with cats, dying alone and unnoticed — has now rebranded her into the “hot divorced auntie in silk robes vacationing in Capri.” Not only do we find inspiration in these older women, we’re finally listening to them. The advice of our TikTok grandmas is taken seriously and I couldn’t be more happy about it. No one gives a single fuck about the advice of 20-year-old self-proclaimed life coaches anymore. We want wisdom shouted at us by a 60-year-old woman with a cigarette in one hand and a margarita in the other. Sixty is the new twenty, so to speak.

And surprise, this shift in the perception of older single women is inherently matriarchal. In many matriarchal societies, grandmothers are among the most important members of the community. They influence major decisions and are often the heads of households. What pop culture is doing, perhaps unintentionally, is rehearsing that hierarchy shift. From treating youth as the peak to understanding that power ripens.

3. Female Friendship as the Central Love Story

Matriarchal cultures have historically centered relationships among women as the sole stable relational core, and so does my generation, poco a poco. If you have two eyes and a few brain cells, you can clearly see the shift everywhere. You can see it in the way women have started treating friendships as sacred infrastructure rather than optional extras. In the way we fly across continents for each other’s birthdays but cancel dates without a second thought. We’ve basically realized that romantic partners come and go, but the group chat remains. Increasingly, the love and emotional literacy we experience in our female friendships has become the standard, one most men are neither accustomed to nor equipped to meet. We’ve realized that the average friendship between women would qualify as a very rare, very exceptional heterosexual relationship.

Every time my best friend tells me something her current situationship did right for once, we both chuckle because we know it’s something we would do for each other without even mentioning it.

4. Children Raised Without Male Authority Being Normalized

A shift I personally like to pat myself on the back for contributing to — at least in my small corner of the internet — is the rebrand of single motherhood. For decades, single mothers were framed as cautionary tales. Overwhelmed. Undesirable. Financially unstable. The ultimate social failure in human form. At best, fuckable. What we’re seeing right now is that single motherhood is becoming a flex — even a status symbol in some ways. As more women gain financial freedom, they no longer center their desire to raise children around the presence of a man. Instead of performing the mental gymnastics of finding the perfect partner, some are simply dropping dollar bills on a sperm donor. In fact, the number of single mothers by choice has increased by 60% in recent years. I could write an entire essay on its own about de-centering men from motherhood, but I’ll leave you with this: choosing solo motherhood is one of the most radical acts of bringing back matriarchy we can participate in, as it shifts the foundation of the family away from male authority and toward maternal continuity. The more women de-center men from motherhood, the more we challenge the entrenched belief that stability and parental authority depend on a male presence. In fact, it sure as hell can come from you and the community you intentionally build around your child.

5. Creators building community-first brands instead of product-first brands.

Think about how before 2020, every influencer seemed to be launching the thousandth skincare line or clothing brand. The formula was predictable. Build an audience. Monetize with a product. Scale. Exit. While this is obviously still a thing, we’re definitely witnessing a wider shift where creators with established platforms have stopped selling shit their audience doesn’t need anyways and started building rooms. Meet-ups for strangers. Run clubs.
Dinner nights in borrowed spaces. Co-living experiments. Group trips. Book clubs. You name it.

As a marketing girlie, this is an interesting shift for me to witness as it clearly shows that consumers no longer identify themselves by which products they own, but in what kind of rooms they belong. While this shift is not anti-capitalist, it is certainly post-individualist. It softens our late stage capitalist obsession with accumulation and replaces it with participation. A run club at 7 a.m. creates no tangible product, yet it generates something far more valuable: shared discipline, mutual accountability, inside jokes, shirtless men to drool over. A dinner night in a borrowed space produces no scalable asset, but it produces memory, trust, and relational depth.

Matriarchal systems have always understood that social cohesion is infrastructure. The courtyard, the kitchen, the communal table aren’t side notes to “real” economic life. They are the fucking center of it. Decisions are made exactly there. Resources are redistributed exactly there. Children are raised exactly there. Culture is transmitted exactly there. When we now witness creators pivoting from “buy this” to “come sit with us,” some of them are, whether consciously or not, rebuilding that infrastructure.

6. The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a Single Fuck

Alysa Liu winning a freaking gold medal at the freaking Olympics is one of the best recent examples of the subtle art of not giving a fuck — and excelling precisely because of it. The clips of her iconic performance are all over my For You page, and I’ve watched every single one at least 20 times. The energy she transmits as she floats so gracefully across the ice is contagious and shows the world that, in the end, it really comes down to how much fun you can have.

So what does that have to do with matriarchy? Everything. Patriarchal success, written by white boomer men in suits and perpetuated by alpha bros in tank tops, is usually framed as sacrifice. Grind harder. Join the 5 a.m. club. Push through pain. Nose strips, my personal ick. Suppress emotion. Win at all costs.

Alysa stepped away from the sport when it stopped feeling right and came back on her own terms, for the fun of it, which is very matriarchal considering that matriarchal systems disrupt burnout logic entirely. Worth is not measured by how much you can withstand, but by how well you can sustain. Productivity is not extracted at the expense of life, it is woven into it. When we’re watching pop culture finally celebrate a version of excellence that is not tortured, not hyper-disciplined to the point of a mental disease, but embodied and self-directed, we are certainly witnessing a value shift in real time.

Conclusion

So why did I spend over 20 hours writing this weird-ass essay connecting pop culture to matriarchy, you may wonder? Because I hear a lot of complaining, but see little action. If we’re waiting for matriarchy to arrive politically, we will wait forever. The odds of a collective uprising where we all overthrow our governments and start organizing society in a matriarchal way are close to zero. Even if we did, most people wouldn’t even know their place in the revolution.

I personally believe the best we can do is educate ourselves on matriarchal knowledge and start implementing as much of it as possible in our own lives, gradually divesting from patriarchy in the process. Seeing the signs in pop culture, I’d say we’re on a better path toward it than we were five years ago, and that’s maybe all we need to hear right now. I take solace in seeing proof every day that more and more people are connecting the dots and implementing change instead of waiting for permission. Agency is a beautiful thing.

We’re on the right path, we just have to keep at it and turn up the volume.

Ps: If this essay resonated, the Matriarchal Study Club is where these conversations continue. It’s a structured space to study matriarchal systems, discuss their modern applications, and actively implement them in our own lives. We’re done waiting for the world to change. From now on, we’re busy reimagining how to live inside it. Join us!!

Five minutes into toddler talk and the waiter serving my wine, I find myself moving our bags to join the table of the little girl and her dad. The two girls giggle, stuffing their mouths with sushi using tiny panda chopsticks, while her dad and I slip into easy adult conversation. I can’t help but notice how everyone in the restaurant is watching the sweetness — and the little absurdity — of the moment, as if their favorite show were playing out in real life. You don’t often get to witness strangers befriending each other, but when you do, it lingers. It restores a hope in humanity you may have forgotten, and I believe that forgetting our inherent connectedness is one of the greatest tragedies of human existence.

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“I stalked him and saw that he went to a pro-Palestine demo in March 2024,” I proudly tell my best friend, shoving proof in the form of an Instagram photo dump under her nose. Our conversations these past months have mostly revolved around everything from making sure we don’t get STDs to making sure the world isn’t collapsing.

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I, too, want my 2015 brain back. I, too, am grieving the world we were promised. I, too, am grieving the idea of a future that felt expansive, abundant, maybe even a little naive, but hopeful. I, too, am grieving ease.
The kind of ease where I could just quickly open Instagram on a night out to hype up my bestie’s drunk bathroom selfie edited with the Valencia filter— definitely not the kind where I have to check the app anxiously every two minutes to see the latest horrors those five crusty men are facilitating instead of dragging their asses to one fucking therapy session.

I, too, am grieving the quiet optimism that came with believing things would get better. That progress was linear. That if we just worked hard, stayed kind, and voted, the world would fix itself. I, too, am even grieving grief, because what I’m grieving feels too superficial to even name, when mothers are grieving their dead children. My sadness, too, feels embarrassingly small in comparison, like a luxury emotion, a privileged ache.

We can and we should grieve all of these unfulfilled promises, while not resorting to apathy.

What we are witnessing today is straight up the collapse of a system that always looked good on paper but was built on stolen land, stolen labor, and theories of control disguised as order. You simply cannot promise peace, while waging war. You simply cannot promise prosperity while extracting life from the Global South. You simply cannot promise democracy while upholding the hierarchies of white supremacy and colonialism. It was doomed to fail from the very fucking beginning.

As much as it hurts knowing a system built on the greed and ego of a few old ugly man is costing the life of millions of civilians, it needs to crash. Don’t worry, it won’t be the end of the world, it will be the end of their world. It is okay, fuck even necessary to mourn, as long as we let that mourning sharpen our clarity, not dull it.

Wake up bitches, there’s abso-fucking-lutely no point in staying civil any longer, when being civil means being palatable while fascism rebrands itself as a Tiktok trend (skinnytok & cleangirltok, I’m talking about you!!) There’s abso-fucking-lutely no point in being nice any longer, when being angry is treated like a personality flaw instead of a sign that we’re still awake. To Trump’s statement that Greta Thunberg is a ‘young woman with anger issues’, she replied the world needs more angry women, so may I suggest ditching your soft girl era in favor of entering your crash-the-fuck-out girl era?

It’s no fucking coincidence that I started connecting the dots during my six months of celibacy. We’re all so busy centering our lives around men that most of us never realize: it’s been men, all along, who were so god damn afraid of our power, they had to distract us with the biggest bullshit scams to ever exist. It’s no fucking coincidence that the second I stopped letting men consume my time, my body, my thoughts, I started seeing it all for what it really is. The systems. The distractions. The way we’ve been taught to crave being chosen more than we crave our own liberation.

There’s no difference between a r*pist and the men who currently hold all the power. (plus, some of them are convicted r*pists which is like absolutely no surprise at all). It’s built on the same idea: the belief that domination is a right. That taking what doesn’t belong to you is power. That consent, autonomy, and dignity are optional when you're the one holding the pen, the gavel, the weapon.

It’s about time we start seeing it for what it is: It’s all the same fucking disease. Patriarchy dressed in different uniforms. Courtrooms, boardrooms, war rooms. They violate bodies, borders, and ecosystems with the same entitlement.

The thing is, we almost didn’t notice, many of us never will, because their violence is systemic, polished, made legal. But at the end of the day, it’s still violence. While they kept us busy, feeding us breadcrumbs and giving us just enough rights to shut our lip-glossed mouths, they were out here writing the rules, hoarding the wealth, and destroying the planet. Gaslighting us into believing our worth depended on how desirable we were to them, while they stripped Indigenous communities of resources, bombed countries for profit, and buried accountability under the disguise of progress.

If rage is all I have left, I’ll use it. Fuck, I’ll happily let them choke on it. Apathy is a privilege I don’t want, and honestly, none of us can afford. The world doesn’t need more polite women. It needs more of us fully awake, fully pissed off, and absolutely unwilling to play along. It needs more of us to remember who the fuck we were before they told us we’re here to please them.

After approximately 30 hours of desperately trying to cope with the most excruciating pain I’ve ever known, I gave in and let them inject the longest needle I’ve ever seen into my spine. I fell asleep. The next thing I remember was being woken up by the nurses, telling me I needed to push. Fast.

Just minutes after they woke me up and forced me to push, they placed my daughter on my chest. After the brief relief of knowing she was alive and well, I felt immense confusion about how I would ever catch up on that sleep. I never did.

Little did I know that the humiliation and isolation I experienced in that labor room were just the trailer for everything that was about to unfold. I walked into that hospital needing women to hold me through the most sacred experience of my life, but instead, I was treated like a problem to be managed— ideally as quickly and efficiently as humanly possible.

And if my birth story isn’t the perfect metaphor for what motherhood feels like in a capitalist, patriarchal society, I don’t know what is. Efficiency. Isolation. Gaslighting. Medication. Unsurprisingly, the system didn’t just fail me during labor. It kept failing me relentlessly in all the moments that came after, and it continues to do so, as if it once made a silent vow to keep punishing me for daring to expect more.

Since I’m not the only woman on this planet who damn well understands the underlying motivation to opt for a child-free life after experiencing the soul crushing reality of motherhood in the system we’re forced to mother in, I decided to include the voice of the fabulous Briana, along with insights from hundreds of mothers I polled on Instagram, in this essay.

The voices of women choosing to live a childfree life are getting louder and louder — and rightfully so. I think we can all agree that, much to the dismay of many men in the comment sections beneath those posts, women are done subscribing to the bullshit narrative we were fed as little girls. It took many of us a few messed-up relationships, abuse, and a whole lot of therapy to understand that this narrative wasn’t designed to serve us, merely to contain us.

Children’s books and Disney movies did an excellent job in convincing us that our highest calling was to become wives and mothers. That our value peaked when a man chose us and a baby ultimately completed us. But what we weren’t told is what happens after the fairytale ends. When your handsome prince suddenly wants to get blackout drunk with his boys instead of taking care of his child. When your pretty dresses aren’t possibly big enough to cover the isolating pain in your chest.

We weren’t told that motherhood can feel like a beautiful prison.

Personally, I gaslit myself for long enough into believing that it’s not actually that bad, but I’m done subscribing to the glamorous image of motherhood that has been sold to us for decades by the media. Motherhood doesn’t look like a blonde, white woman with shiny hair blissfully breastfeeding her baby. Cinderella isn’t the blueprint. I bet that bitch has bills to pay, too.

So why are so many moms disappointed by motherhood, when we’ve always got told that it’s the most beautiful event to ever possibly happen to a woman?

Why are so many women opting for a child-free life?

I also asked moms on my Instagram what disappoints them about motherhood — here are a few of their raw answers:

‘The lack of support and nourishment of the mother who is holding it all.’

‘Having to do everything quickly (let me take a quick shower/ let me quickly eat etc)

’The mental load of ‘unseen’ small tasks that keep life going. Cooking, cleaning, laundry etc.’

‘The people who just don’t show up that you thought would. Especially your own mom.’

‘We were sold an idea of equality with our (male) partners, but kids show you how unequal it really is’

‘Women romanticising birth, postpartum, raising a child and therefore trapping each other.’

‘Being responsible for my daughters. I miss being reckless and doing whatever.’

‘Being trapped with a man you don’t want anymore, financial dependence’

‘The father’

‘The world’

I think what’s ironic is that growing up, I never heard a mom complain about motherhood. The only message that seemed to stick was that the love I’d feel for my daughter would somehow fix everything. I wish even one mom had sat me down to prepare me for what was coming. I wish we could all agree—as mothers—to stop romanticizing motherhood. That way, women who are unsure about having kids could make an informed decision instead of buying into decades of propaganda. And moms who feel crushed by the reality of it wouldn’t feel even worse comparing their journey to some mom on Instagram, perpetuating that same propaganda bullshit just to brand herself as the perfect mom.

I wish we would realize this: Perfect mom. Good mom. Bad mom. Hot mom. Cool mom. MILF. None of these labels trying so hard to box us in actually matter — because the benchmark was set by men. Built to make us manageable. Palatable. Non-threatening. Easy to praise when we conform, easy to shame when we don’t. Motherhood isn’t the problem. The way motherhood has been policed, judged, and commodified through a male lens is.

And even though you’d think we’d know better by now, we all carry parts of ourselves that are still trapped in the socialization of the “good girl” who eventually gets rewarded with her perfect happy ending. Deep down, we’re still performing for approval — still trying to outperform other women to earn validation from a system that never wanted to validate us in the first place. We need to collectively unsubscribe from this shit show.

I’ll never forget when I asked moms on Instagram to privately share something they’d never say out loud, one mom said, “Sometimes I dream about being hospitalized just so I can get a break from my kids without feeling guilty.”

This is how bad it is y’all. A mother so burnt out she wants to get hospitalized should be proof enough of how ridiculously non-existent the support we receive as mothers is. We need to break the silence, stop pretending motherhood is the equivalent of a Disney movie, and start demanding real support—emotional, practical, and systemic. We won’t win this game by perpetuating a false image of motherhood just for the quick dopamine hit of being praised for our burnout. We will, however, create a different world for our daughters if we stop romanticizing the bare minimum treatment and start asking for the place in society we deserve.

That means not clapping for men who babysit their own kids. Not calling it “help” when a dad changes a diaper. Burning the idea that exhaustion is a badge of honor and replacing it with a demand for actual support. Structural change. Community care. Paid leave. Affordable childcare. Respect for mothering as labor.

Like dating a dude who wants to go 50/50 but still expects girlfriend treatment — we should be the ones covering the whole fucking bill and then leaving the table, instead of thanking him for offering to pay for his own meal. Maybe we have to be uncomfortable for some time to change the narrative, but maybe that’s the only way we can build a world where our daughters don’t have to recover from the lives they were told to dream about.

Thank you so much for reading this piece. If you want to support my work, it would mean the world to me if you donated to my fundraiser. I’m raising money to produce my own geo-docu series, where I share the raw, unfiltered stories of mothers from all around the world. It’s about damn time people finally listen.

If you want to read more from Briana, click here.

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I’m not talking about squeezing in more coffee dates or finally replying to the pile of WhatsApp voice notes I never have time to listen to. I’m talking about actually building a village. And that starts with redefining what friendship means.

For the longest time, I treated friendship as an afterthought. Something I had time for in less busy periods of my life. Something I get to nurture once everything else in my life is taken care of. Ever since I started traveling full-time, I’ve come to value the friendships I have a million times more — because I realized that our friends are truly the very thing that make our world go round. You can’t choose the family you’re born into, and relying on a single human being — aka your romantic partner — to bring you ultimate fulfillment was never real for anyone besides fucking Cinderella. So really, what we should be focusing on is finally leveling up our friendship game. We’ve spent years optimizing every part of ourselves to attract the perfect partner, like it’s some kind of Olympic sport — but no one ever taught us how to nurture deep, sustaining friendships.

As a society we’re currently stuck in what I like to call "let’s grab a coffee and catch up" culture. And I’m so fucking sick of it. Of course I wanna get coffee with my friends. But I also want to grocery shop together. Help each other unpack after a trip. Cook dinner side by side while our kids run around. I want to be so damn involved in their lives, that there’s no need to catch up. We keep saying we don’t have time for friendship, but that’s because we treat friendship like another task on our never ending to-do list, instead of weaving it into the everyday.

Most of the things that make us “too busy” — errands, chores, life admin — would not only be easier but also a lot more fun if we did them together.

I’ve never understood people who cancel on friends because they “have errands to run” or their home “isn’t clean enough.”
Like… respectfully, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK???

I believe part of why we treat friendship as an afterthought stems from our never-ending hustle to reach our ultimate potential as early as possible in life (definitely before our 30s so we can make it onto the Forbes 30 Under 30 list). Sure, I see how we could reach our goals faster if we weren’t rotting away on a friend’s couch, debriefing last night for five hours over cold fries. Or if we didn’t spend hours on a terrace in the sun talking about our first heartbreaks. Or spend our savings on a group trip to Ibiza instead of building an investment portfolio.

But isn’t that, like... the point of living?

We were sold the lie that if we’re just independent, rich, and famous enough, we’ll find ultimate happiness. But none of it means anything if we don’t have anyone to share it with.

The Alpha bros can yell into their microphones as loud as they want about how important it is not to “waste your time” with the wrong people — but I wonder how, in a world increasingly built on hyper-independence and hyper-convenience, hanging out with real people in real life could ever be seen as a waste of time. Quite the opposite: thinking we’re superior to everyone else, and that only the “best” people in the “best” networks deserve our attention, is making us straight-up sick. I’ve never felt fulfilled after meeting someone famous — but I do feel really fucking happy after joking with the barista about something silly and seemingly meaningless.

Yes, there are people out there who genuinely want to drain our energy. But here’s the thing: We can’t be robbed of something we’re giving away freely and generously.

Walking through life carefully because we’re too afraid of giving too much is the silliest thing we’ve ever been taught. How beautiful it is to be the person who gives too much. What an honor it is to be that person. I’d much rather be the one who got played because she gave too much than the one who walks through life thinking everyone is out to get her.

We act like friends are robbing us of the precious time we could spend building systems for financial independence — but what if independence was never the goal, and never will be? I don’t want to reach independence if the cost is isolation. I don’t want to rely on big companies to make my life easier, that’s literally what friends are for.

The thing is, everyone wants a village—but no one wants to be a villager. We all want the benefits of a community, but forget that it comes with a cost. And often, that cost is inconvenience. It’s showing up when we’re sleep deprived. It’s giving more than we get, and doing it anyway. It’s holding space for a friend who’s unraveling. Watching someone else’s kid so they can shower, scream, or just breathe for a second.

Often, it’s less glamorous than we imagine, but it’s the only way we build something real. We need to remember that villages don’t simply appear out of nowhere, they’re made. Intentionally. It’s up to us to decide, in this fucking moment, that we want to be the ones who go first. The ones who offer help without waiting to be asked. The ones who reach out, show up, and stay a little longer, even when it’s inconvenient. Real connection isn’t built in monthly scheduled catch-ups. It’s built in the most mundane moments that become special because we choose to be there.

So maybe the question isn’t “Where’s my village?”
Maybe it’s: “Who am I willing to be for someone else?”

Because that’s how it starts.
And that’s how it grows.

Connection isn’t convenient, but it’s the only thing that’s ever truly saved us.

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The island I’m exploring, once a serene piece of heaven, has now been invaded by people from all over the world who think their privilege of earning higher salaries than the locals is reason enough to ditch their morals in favor of a capitalistic version of "self-realization." Welcome to the new Bali. A place that promises optimization. Thriving businesses at the cost of workforce exploitation. Instagram-worthy cafés built upon the ashes of local food stalls. Beige padel clubs erected on the very fields where kids once played football. 15 bedroom villas built by couples, because why have an apartment in your own country when you can have a mansion in Bali.

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While my parents worked stable corporate jobs, I dreamed of being my own boss—leading a small team of hipsters who supported my mission to change the world, writing dinners with the girls off as business expenses, having a golden credit card with access to airport lounges, and flying out to Cape Town to run marketing ads that were too creative for the mainstream public to fully understand.

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So yeah, I genuinely love what this year has made of me and, (un)fortunately, I will stay the same.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL YOU BEAUTIFUL AND INCREDIBLY TALENTED HUMANS, I LOVE YOU!!! <33

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