Two years ago, Mia Jones felt stuck. She had barely started her career, but she already felt incredibly burnt out.
“After the pandemic I found myself working in a 9-to-5 job that, on paper, appeared to be propelling my career along the prescribed societal trajectory, the path I was told I ‘should’ be on,” the now 24-year-old says. “But as each day passed, I felt like I was drifting further away from my true self and my creative aspirations.”
Jones decided to express her feelings as many young women these days do: in a TikTok rant, which soon went viral.
“I don’t want to be a girlboss, I don’t want to hustle, I simply want to live my life slowly and lay in a bed of moss with my lover and enjoy the rest of my existence, reading books and creating art and loving the people in my life,” she said.
Jones isn’t alone. For many Gen Z women who have entered the workforce during the past few years, their greatest dream increasingly is to have the chance to achieve nothing. At least, by traditional capitalist standards.
Welcome to the world of the “soft girl,” the lifestyle choice that many young women are now holding up as an ideal. The soft girl doesn’t value the grind or getting ahead. She prioritises slow living. Her days are filled with a nearly obsessive focus on self-care, from making the perfect morning smoothie to tending to her skin and trading in hardcore HIIT workouts for leisurely “cozy cardio.” Long-term, the soft girl dreams of making dinner for her husband and, if she’s got them, staying at home with her kids. She’s not interested in being promoted or founding her own company. She’s in touch with her feminine energy, her menstrual cycle, and her moods.
“Soft life is having time, space, and protection to heal the feminine,” wrote one devotee in a TikTok video. “Soft life is romanticising every moment of your day. Soft life is releasing the compulsion to produce and accomplish.”
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In other words, to be a soft girl is to radically reject the idea of being a girlboss, the bastion of feminine achievement that was an ideal during the tech boom of the late 2000s and 2010s.
Women who strove to be girlbosses went to bed late and got up early to sweat it out at Barry’s or Soul Cycle. They idolised female business leaders like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer (who famously worked from her hospital bed after she delivered twins). They sipped cocktails among other professionals at Audrey Gelman’s The Wing, slathered on as much Balm Dot Com as their face could handle from Emily Weiss’s Glossier, preordered the Sophia Amaruso’s biz-advice book literally called Girl Boss while listening to Hillary Clinton speak about breaking the glass ceiling.
They took up space, they leaned in, they asked for more.
It’s now 2023, and many girlbosses have fallen from grace. Clinton lost the presidential race to Donald Trump. Big tech is in chaos, and many people have been rewarded for their years of grinding by being unceremoniously laid off. The Wing was forced to close amid numerous news reports of racism and toxicity, and Gelman now runs a “corner store” full of $100 candles in Brooklyn.
The next generation of women have watched all of this unfold, observed our burnout and our late nights, our stress fractures and our egg freezing, and said, No thanks. What about if we just didn’t try so hard?