Samhita Mukhopadhyay is sick and tired of being sick and tired. A self-described “professional feminist” and former executive editor of Teen Vogue, Mukhopadhyay has concluded that “work has become untenable.” Not just her work. All work. But the conclusion you might reach from her new book, The Myth of Making It, is not about work. It’s that feminism has become untenable.

Start at the beginning. Feminism was originally designed as a fight for equal rights for women—who should be able to vote, work, inherit money, get divorced, etc. Mission accomplished. Then feminism got more complicated. It began to argue that women had changed, somehow. They wanted sexual liberation and to stop being bored housewives. They had a new voice. They wanted to be treated like men, except maybe when they didn’t. And also they might want to make different choices about their lives. Maybe they wanted to get married; maybe men were the problem. Maybe they wanted to have children; maybe motherhood was just like chattel slavery. Maybe they could have it all—if only they “leaned in” or were employed at companies that valued work-life balance. Or maybe forced paternity leave would fix things. We could be like Norway or Sweden. Then there was grrl power, the idea that women could do everything. And also intersectionality. And now maybe trans men are women, too.

It’s a lot for a professional feminist to digest. And when the author finds herself living the dream of writing and editing and organizing and advocating on behalf of various publications and consulting firms and nonprofits, she assumes she has reached peak feminist. “The attention and the prestige of a job like executive editor of Teen Vogue were intoxicating,” she writes. “I knew this would be a unique opportunity, unlike any I’d ever had.”

This was her chance to change corporate media from the inside out. She could hire diverse staff and ask them to write articles about whatever woke fad struck her fancy. Like so many other women leaders, she could now ensure that there was diversity at the top of the company, that women’s voices were represented. And she could be a nice boss, too. The problem, though, is that it was still a company.

What I can now see (with the distance of perspective and some sleep) is that all these things were true: Teen Vogue was subversive.… We were inclusive, body-positive, diverse; we decentered the thin white bodies that dominated our industry.… But despite efforts to create its own world, Teen Vogue was still subject to the discretion of its parent company and the broader marketplace…ignoring profit was not an option.

Not an option!

Mukhopadhyay determined that true feminism should not be about helping individual women get ahead. Any success had to be collective. Indeed, a decade after “leaning in,” she is convinced that “any kind of feminism in the service of reckless corporate profits is probably not much of a feminism at all.” As far as Mukhopadhyay is concerned, as long as capitalism still exists, the number of women at the top of a company is meaningless: “Why should we celebrate Kamala Harris as a win for diversity when she may not be able to execute a progressive vision for the future?”

Mukhopadhyay even knocks studies that suggest diverse companies are more profitable because, well, why should that be the measure of success anyway? Indeed, she suggests that seeing successful women or people of color at the top only serves to make others feel bad. Even Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama are problematic: “We fetishize these stories rather than acknowledging that they are rare, if not nearly impossible…and often these stories, rather than being inspiring, make you feel like you can never measure up; that constant feeling of failure is a byproduct of an economic system that devalues you.”

She reports that she pushed herself “to work beyond what is reasonable and consider[ed] it a failure when I [hadn’t] accomplished something that was likely unrealistic or damn near unachievable.” She now thinks we should stop obsessing about “hustling.” Not only is hustling making us tired, it’s actually racist too: “In the late 1800s, the word hustle began to be used in reference to working hard—or, really, hard enough… the word was used to admonish workers—specifically black workers.” She cites its use in a black newspaper by an author who worried that “the average colored man does not know how to hustle.”

Mukhopadhyay maintains that all of this hustling—side jobs and freelance jobs and long hours—is just a way for employers to pay us all less for our work. It’s time for women to stop idealizing the hustle and quit working so hard. Which brings us to the “liberating power of naps.” Mukhopadhyay cites the work of Tricia Hersey, who founded the “Nap Ministry.” Hersey explains that “rest is a form of resistance” and “sleep deprivation [is] a racial and social justice issue.”

Mukhopadhyay says that “women should have the ability to engage in and fulfill their creative and professional desires without social and financial pressure at our throats.” Why shouldn’t men also have this ability? Mukhopadhyay doesn’t say.

Is it possible technically to have a company that is feminist? Yes, she says. There’s the astrology app called Chani, which offers, among other things, a salary floor of $80,000 per year, full health, dental, and vision coverage, “seven weeks of paid office closure,” “unlimited, flexible paid vacation, plus a vacation stipend,” and “unlimited menstrual leave for people with uteruses.” The company’s founder, according to Mukhopadhyay, “told Forbes that their revenue has grown.” Indeed, she noted that “living in a capitalist world, we are so indoctrinated to a scarcity mindset.… I believe that abundance begets abundance.”

In order to achieve the feminist ideal of a workplace, we just need to manifest it, apparently.

As the jacket copy for The Myth of Making It notes, “Over and over [Mukhopadhyay] found herself sacrificing time with family and friends, paying too much for lattes and limping home after working twelve hours a day.” As it turns out, this does not make her happy. She has a nervous breakdown after a bad work review—perhaps in part because she has built her entire identity around work.

The book actually reaches an oddly sensible conclusion. On the surface, Mukhopadhyay’s story is one of worldly success. But then she goes and talks to a friend—a lawyer who does social-justice work. The friend has a young daughter. The friend says to her, “I used to feel like I had to solve everything, and now I’m just happy leaving the office at four to spend the rest of the day with Arya.” Mukhopadhyay tells her she thinks that will change when the child is older, and her friend says, “No, dude. I really don’t think it will.”

So the professional feminist comes to find that her friend, another professional feminist, is more satisfied spending time with her daughter than trying to save the world. This leads to a revelation: “There is relief in this knowledge that work does not have to be our primary source of satisfaction.… Sometimes we can take jobs for the money even when we know doing so means not living out our biggest hopes and dreams.”

Most of the ideas spouted in The Myth of Making It are absurd. But in the end, my heart breaks for Mukhopadhyay. She is a 46-year-old woman who has just figured out that the most meaningful parts of life are the relationships we have with our friends and family—and that for the vast majority of women, motherhood is much more fulfilling than any job they will ever have. She even suggests that maybe all the things she was buying with the money she was earning at her important jobs may not have been worth it. Maybe the lattes were unnecessary; maybe living in a New York City apartment was unnecessary; maybe impressing Anna Wintour was unnecessary. “What if instead of having it all,” she says, astonishingly after hundreds of pages of nonsense, “we embraced having enough?”

This is vital. Maybe the next wave of feminism will teach women to consider it.

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