For as long as I can remember, I have been told that I can have it all.
The career. The money. The marriage. The children. The nice house. The vacations. The friendships. The hobbies. The glowing skin. The gym membership that I actually use.
Apparently, I can do everything.
And honestly, that sounds exhausting.
The message usually comes disguised as encouragement. Women can be ambitious now. We can build careers, make our own money, travel the world, fall in love, start businesses, take care of our parents, stay fit, maintain friendships and still have enough energy left to be emotionally available at the end of the day.
It is a beautiful message.
But somewhere between you can have it all and you should have it all, I think we lost something.
Because what if I don’t want it all?
I started thinking about this whenever I saw another version of the perfect woman online.
She wakes up at 5 a.m., works out, journals, reads, meditates, drinks something green, goes to work, runs a business on the side, cooks healthy meals, has a beautiful relationship, travels three times a year and somehow still has time to make a “day in my life” video.
She has mastered adulthood.
And sometimes I look at all of this and think, Ah. Am I So behind?.
Maybe I should be doing more.
Maybe I should save more money, exercise more, read more, travel more, network more, date more intentionally and become more intentional about being intentional.
There is always something else to improve.
I don’t think ambition is the problem. I like ambition. I like the idea of building something and being proud of what I have accomplished.
But I wonder if we have become so obsessed with improvement that we have forgotten that a life can also simply be good.
Maybe I don’t want a six-figure career if it means spending every waking hour thinking about work.
Maybe I don’t want to become a CEO.
Maybe I want a job that pays me well, gives me enough time to see the people I love and allows me to take a vacation without checking my email every three hours.
Maybe that’s enough.
And maybe I shouldn’t have to defend that.
There is a strange pressure, especially for women, to prove that we are making something of ourselves.
Previous generations fought for opportunities that women didn’t have. Now that more doors are open, there can be this quiet expectation that we should walk through every single one.
And the funny thing is that none of these expectations sound particularly unreasonable on their own. It is when you put them all together that you realise someone has basically handed you a full-time job called Being a Woman Who Has Her Life Together.
For a long time, success looked like accumulation to me. More money. More achievements. More qualifications. More experiences. More places visited. More things to show for the years I’ve spent alive.
But I am beginning to wonder if a successful life has less to do with how much you accumulate and more to do with whether the life you’re building actually feels like yours.
What if success is having enough money to feel secure rather than becoming extremely wealthy?
We underestimate how valuable an ordinary life can be.
There is nothing particularly impressive about coming home from work, making dinner, watching something stupid on television and talking to someone you love about your day.
There is nothing glamorous about living somewhere quiet, knowing your neighbours, having a small circle of friends and spending your weekends doing things that will never make it onto Instagram.
There is nothing wrong with wanting peace.
In fact, I think peace is one of the most underrated ambitions.
Dandere, Sep 2026.
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