Why Women Feel So Broken – And What They Can Do About It
An open letter to the feminists in despair.
Excerpts from an essay titled “Why are we all feeling broken?” by Emily Amick have been streaming through my Notes feed. The piece laments the plight of women in Donald Trump’s America.
Since the 2024 election, women across the country have felt at a loss. They can’t understand why so many of their fellow countrymen – and women – voted against Kamala Harris in favor of a pussy grabbing fascist.
I can empathize with what they’re going through because I asked the same question in 2016.
At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around why so many Americans were willing to vote against their own self-interests. Why would average people put a wealthy tycoon in the White House at the expense of a highly qualified woman?
A lot has changed in the decade that’s followed. But it’s not just my political beliefs that have shifted. The entire country is changing and women like Emily aren’t keeping up.
I was 25 when I voted for Hillary Clinton. Now I’m 33. Younger women don’t realize it, but your perspective on life changes when it finally dawns on you that you can’t girlboss your way out of your biological clock.
When I voted for Hillary I lived in a liberal enclave. I worked in Washington, DC and was surrounded by highly educated, liberal, urban women. I saw the world through their eyes, not the world as it actually was.
For them, The Patriarchy was the enemy so that became my enemy too. It wasn’t until I started asking questions that I realized The Patriarchy actually wears Prada. It’s not a cabal of evil men who are depriving women of their livelihood – it’s other women.
Then something fundamental changed. The world shut down and we were all left alone to grapple with the consequences of it.
What transpired during the COVID years wasn’t just a political shift. It radically altered the fabric of American society.
Millions of Americans had to reconcile with failed marriages and dead-end careers in isolation from family and friends. Kids lost the structure and social connections they needed at critical points in their lives. Young adults graduated into an economy that suddenly no longer existed.
The 2024 election wasn’t about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. It was about coming to terms with what had happened during this period of time. The vote for Trump had little to do with Kamala Harris as a person and had everything to do with the damage that had been done under her administration.
Emily’s essay points blame at “the system” as a way to come to terms with the results of the election. In doing so, she also provides a way for women to come to terms with their brokenness.
But the lens through which she and other women like her see the world is stuck in a pre-2020 paradigm. The problem isn’t “the system” anymore. Today, people recognize they have agency to choose better outcomes for their lives. There are no laws stopping women from doing anything. They have more freedom than they’ve ever had before.
The problem is that women have failed to take personal responsibility for the consequences of this freedom. They don’t acknowledge when poor choices lead to bad outcomes. For them, it’s far easier to blame a system than it is to face yourself in the mirror every morning.
The future is rapidly changing and it’s going to hit women hard. Our role in society is about to fundamentally shift. We can’t girlboss our way out of technological change which means we’re going to have to make some difficult decisions in the coming years.
But if you read Emily’s essay like I did, it appears women don’t have the capacity to make difficult choices. As long as they continue to be coddled by feminism and resist change, women will struggle to adapt in the years to come.
This essay offers a way forward. It uses Emily’s essay to establish a new lens through which women can view the world. It will provide recommendations for how all of us can build a better future without “attacking the systems that failed us” and burning the whole thing to the ground.
First, you need to come to terms with the fact that the world isn’t fair. The Patriarchy isn’t to blame for all of your problems.
In the beginning of her essay, Emily discloses that she is 40 years old. Her age is important because it denotes the point in economic history that she was born into and how that shapes her worldview. In her essay Emily writes:
We were raised on "girl power" but graduated into a recession. Told we could be anything, then called entitled for wanting basic stability. We are the first generation to be both overqualified and underemployed, drowning in student debt while being lectured about spending too much money avocado toast.
Emily rightfully acknowledges the lie all Millennials were told. But you can look at a lie in isolation. You also have to acknowledge where it comes from.
The parents, teachers, coaches, and trusted adults responsible for raising Millennials did so from the mid-1980s until the early 2000s. Back then the economy was good. Deindustrialization hadn’t completely decimated the manufacturing sector just yet. The first blockbuster internet companies like Amazon and PayPal were just getting started. And regardless of what you think of the man, President Clinton’s policies led the U.S into a budget surplus.
They told Millennials we could be anything we wanted because back then the world seemed limitless. The Cold War was over. 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. The world really was America’s oyster.
But as has been the case throughout history, the party had to come to an end at some point. In the mid-2000s a handful of investment banks wanted more leading to a housing market crash. A historic economic collapse unfolded, the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s.
Many of the adults in the room didn’t know what was happening. They couldn’t adequately prepare their teenage and young adult Millennial children on how to enter the world. They sent us off to college because for them that had been their ticket to the middle class.
Hindsight is always 20/20. The economic problems we’re dealing with today may actually be long-term consequences of the Global Financial Crisis from 2008. An era of cheap credit, combined with technological innovations restructured the workforce. Poor advice from our parents saddled us with thousands of dollars of student debt.
If you were born to bankers, politicos, or Silicon Valley technologists, your parents may have helped you navigate what was happening. The rest of us – children of miners, Rust Belt manufacturers, and Midwest farmers – had no such guidance. We’re only now coming to terms with how wrong the advice we received actually was.
Whether you realize it or not, the economy you’re born into pre-determines your success. This is shaped as much by socioeconomic class as it is the year of your birth. Morgan Housel makes this argument in his book The Psychology of Money.1 He writes:
Rising incomes among a small group of Americans led to [the ultra-wealthy] breaking away in lifestyle. They bought bigger homes, nicer cars, went to expensive schools, and took fancy vacations. And everyone else was watching – fueled by Madison Avenue in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the internet after that. The lifestyles of a small portion of legitimately rich Americans inflated the aspirations of the majority of Americans, whose incomes weren’t rising. (234)
Your success is determined as much by the luck of when you were born as it is by hard work. Those who were born during economic booms fail to see how the economy benefited them. At the same time, those born during busts also fail to see how the economy hurt them. There’s no system to burn down that can fix that.
The harsh truth is the world isn’t fair. Period.
Even though Millennial women in America lament the travesty of being sold false promises “wrapped in millennial pink,” they fail to consider that maybe they’ve actually won the lottery. Millennial women in other parts of the world don’t have the luxury to complain about the unfairness of the system. They’re too busy figuring out how to survive another day.
The world isn’t fair and it’s never going to be. Like gravity, it’s a fixed law of human existence.
The problem isn’t always the system. It’s that Millennial women expect the world to be something that it’s not. No matter how much they rage against the system, it will never be what they want it to be.