You tell yourself once you start that new job, you’ll become the person who wakes up at 5 a.m. everyday. You know that going on more runs will make your body happier, but the sticky summer air is too easy of an excuse to reach for. You promise to reach out to that coworker for a networking meeting, but all your previous meetings were so awkward that you decide that you can pass on this one.

And you wonder, is it me?

Do I just lack ambition?

Am I not a disciplined person?

But you don’t stop to consider that maybe it’s not you, it’s what you’re pursuing. Maybe you’re in the wrong environment and you’re chasing after the wrong goals.

That Fish Out of Water Feeling

Growing up, I was always that ambitious, overachieving kid. Straight A’s, student athlete, the whole shebang. I was disciplined, I worked hard, and I had crazy big dreams. As a result, being disciplined and ambitious became a big part of how I viewed myself.

As I entered my early twenties, that started to change a little bit. At first, I thought I was just taking a breather. I was so overworked before college that it made sense that my body needed a break.

A couple years ago, I went back to school to get my master’s in investigative journalism. I had studied literature and creative writing in undergrad but I didn’t see how I could make any money with my degree, so I thought journalism would provide me with more stability while I could still write. Clearly, I’m not cut out to be a journalist because if I had just done a little research, I would have realized that the industry is dying and there is absolutely no stability in journalism.

By the time I realized, it was too late. Tuition dollars had been paid and classes had begun. So I felt like I had no choice but to put my head down and do the work. My program was focused on political and local news, which is not the type of journalism and writing that I had always been drawn to, but I actually started to do really well.

Pretty quickly, my professors began to praise me and my peers saw me as competition. I’ve always loved school and I’ve always enjoyed being good at school so I kept at it, without taking pause to ask myself how I felt about the actual work I was doing.

Something was always off, though. I felt so disconnected with myself and with everyone around me. And though I was determined to not fail, I still struggled to feel like my most ambitious self.

Here are some things that I should have known were symptoms of a larger problem, but didn’t realize it at the time:

• When my classmates talked about winning Pulitzers one day or getting that New York Times fellowship, I felt nothing. I couldn’t get myself to even pretend I wanted those things.

• When impressive award-winning journalists who worked at famous papers came to our classes to give us advice, I didn’t look at their life and think, wow, I want that. If anything, I was more focused on all the sacrifices they had to make. A little voice in the back of my head wondered, is it really worth it?

• When my peers achieved impressive things or got exciting opportunities, I felt no jealousy, just apathy. Good for them, I thought. I’d shrug and forget about it.

• When I applied for jobs, I limited myself by keeping it realistic. I didn’t aim high and I didn’t feel the motivation to, even when others told me I should.

• As soon as things got hard, I wanted to quit. I’ve never been a quitter, but the urge to quit was unbearably strong.

• I had this fish out of water feeling the whole time I was in graduate school. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I felt lonely and anxious, even though I was surrounded by perfectly nice classmates, and I felt like I was cosplaying someone I’m not. I just wrote it off as imposter syndrome at first, but it never went away.

I remember feeling so worried that something was wrong with me. I became so insecure about my lack of discipline and ambition. I wondered, am I just not an ambitious person anymore? Did I somehow use up all my ambition as a kid and now I have none left in the tank?

When I finally gained the right mind to ask myself if I enjoy the work of being a reporter, however, the answer was a very clear no. I liked the idea of being a journalist way more than being one.

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Discipline and Ambition Isn’t Hard When You’re Doing What’s Right For You

Once I came to this realization, I reflected on what I actually want to do and started making space in my life for the dreams I’ve always had. When I started doing the things I love again and creating what I wanted to create, suddenly, being disciplined and ambitious was no longer difficult.

Now, I can dream big again, envision a future where I get everything I want, even if it feels a million miles away right now.

Being realistic no longer plagues my mind. I feel like a kid again, wanting it all and not caring if other people will think I’m crazy.

I also started being self-motivated again. Getting myself to do all the not so glamorous parts of the work isn’t so hard anymore.

Realizing this was a huge relief. But it also took me a while to figure it out. At the tail end of my short-lived reporting career, I remember crying to my partner one night and saying, “what if I just want an easy life? Is that so bad? But why does that feel horrible too? This feels like ego death, and I’m so confused.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to want an easy life… if that’s what you truly want. But when I said that, my body knew that it was a lie because it felt wrong in my heart: I’m not an unambitious person and I never have been.

I was just not living in alignment with who I truly am.

I was making career choices for all of the wrong reasons, out of fear of failure and judgement. And those choices were always going to lead me to a dead-end, so my ambition had nowhere to go. I can’t possibly be ambitious or disciplined for something that I don’t truly want.

But I’m grateful for the time I spent going down the wrong path, because it helped show me what the right path should feel like.

I know now that ambition and discipline will never be effective, nor sustainable, if it only comes from a fear of failure. Being ambitious and disciplined is an act of love: love for what you do, love for your dreams, and love for your self, present and future.

And even though my life feels more uncertain than ever, I also feel more calm than I’ve ever felt because not only do I have my ambition and discipline back, I know that this version of my ambition is much more sustainable, because it comes from a place of love.

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“I’m not settling for anything less than princess treatment.”

“50/50 isn’t fair, men should pay more.”

There’s a certain branch of feminism I’ve noticed that I like to call “make him pay” feminism. I hesitate to call it feminism at all because it’s not. However, many self-proclaimed feminists are the number one champions of these ideas, which are palatable enough for them to spread with ease, so I must acknowledge that this flawed morality is still an attempt at feminism while critiquing it.

Now, I’m not exactly trying to coin a phrase here because the term for this phenomenon already exists and it’s called benevolent sexism. It basically refers to things that are seemingly positive but ultimately reinforces traditional gender roles that subjugate women. So, a shiny rebrand of sexism that effectively appeals to women.

It’s a trap. It’s a mindfuck. It’s something that we must be aware of in order to outsmart.

There are three common components to benevolent sexism:

• Protective paternalism: chivalrous expectations that women need men to provide safety

• Complementary gender differentiation: women and men different traits and roles that complement each other but women’s roles are generally of lower status

• Heterosexual intimacy: women complete men in heterosexual romantic relationships

When I use the term “make him pay” feminism, I’m referring to benevolent sexism with a specific look at the economics of dating.

We’re at an interesting point of tension where younger generations have a widening gender gap when it comes to views on feminism and in recent years, we’ve seen traditional gender roles, especially in the form of online content, become trendier (think trad wife and SAHM mom content).

We’re also living in a time of great economic instability which can actually lead to a cultural shift toward conservatism and interestingly, higher rates of unemployment are associated with conservative attitudes on gender roles, according to this paper on how economic downturns impact gender norms from 2024.

These factors must have all contributed to this whole “make him pay” attitude gaining popularity but I’d like to add a hypothesis relating to heteropessimism. Despite the state of our economy, many women of this generation no longer have to date men for economic stability so modern heterosexual dating becomes mainly about finding companionship and emotional fulfillment. This sets a higher bar that most men cannot meet and women are realizing that but still largely want to participate in heterosexuality, so economic benefits have become a convenient compromise. But this compromise cannot be mistaken for empowerment, nor can it come at the cost of feminist values.

There’s No Such Thing as Fair

There are countless examples of “make him pay” feminism both online and offline but for the purposes of this piece I’m going to refer to three videos.

The first is a video of a woman saying “I am so far feminist that I have come full circle to being a little bit more traditional. I think the fact that we live in a patriarchy where a lot of expectations are put upon women to show up in life a certain way, to show up on a date in a certain way, it’s only fair for a man to pay on the first date.”

The second is of a woman saying that “50/50” (as in splitting bills 50/50 in relationships) doesn’t exist because a man eats more, consumes more, sweats more, etc. She doesn’t see the appeal in going 50/50 while cleaning up after this hypothetical man and she said “I would literally rather die alone than come home to a man who’s left his dirty shoes on the floor.”

The last is a video of a woman explaining how she got a man to change his mind on 50/50 and agree to pay 100% of rent by arguing that the burden of pregnancy and childbirth falls solely on the woman.

These videos all have a few things in common. First, they are all strangely aware of the oppressive nature of gender roles. They acknowledge that society places expectations on how women need to show up in life and in dating, and how traditionally women are expected to do more housework. Despite their awareness, they also somehow end up reinforcing those gender roles more by concluding that a man paying more is enough to, almost, make up for the inequalities between men and women.

Woman = child-bearer and domestic laborer. Man = financial provider.

Most importantly, what these videos all have in common is that they’re trying to have a conversation about fairness. They pinpoint what makes heterosexual relationships unfair, but their solution to navigating fairness is misguided.

The second video points out that “50/50 doesn’t exist” and she’s absolutely right. 50/50 doesn’t exist because fairness doesn’t exist. No matter who you are in a relationship with, there will be no such thing as true fairness and equality because all relationships have a power dynamic. This is, of course, also true of same-sex romantic relationships.

It would be quite difficult, and frankly quite boring, to only seek people who are the same age, same race, same gender, same class, same earnings, and so on. And even if you did, there would still be an inherent power dynamic due to other factors like personality differences.

The solution to these power dynamics isn’t to make the person with more power pay for the difference. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule for finances in relationships and my purpose here isn’t to propose one. But saying that the person in power should be paying 100% of finances like dates or rent is a very money-focused and lazy solution for both parties involved.

Conversations about the unfairness of 50/50 have a tendency of becoming about the unequal division of emotional and domestic labor in heterosexual relationships. In the second video, what starts as a discussion of 50/50 becomes the woman complaining about cleaning up after a man and never wanting to come home to a man’s dirty shoes on the floor.

We all know by now that in heterosexual relationships, women perform a lot more emotional labor but, once again, the solution to that gap isn’t to get the man to pay for that emotional labor. Doing so only enables the lack of emotional maturity in men while reinforcing the patriarchal idea that women are responsible for domestic labor while men are responsible for financially supporting the household.

When men generally make more than women, it’s also not hard for him to pay more. What’s harder is for him to grow emotionally so that he will start picking up after himself and carry that emotional and domestic weight.

Using Economic Benefit to Justify Heterosexual Participation

For a long time, I was genuinely very confused about why some women, who are clearly aware of the oppressive nature of traditional heterosexual relationships, are also championing the idea that men should be responsible for paying for dates and bills.

I thought I must be missing something and perhaps it’s not my place to comment. I don’t date men so maybe I just don’t get it. At the same time, though, the best view of the court is from the bleachers.

As many people have already pointed out, for women, this is the first generation where they don’t need to date men for economic stability so they can seek partnerships solely for companionship and emotional fulfilment. This is a great freedom to have but then you realize that emotional fulfillment is a higher bar that most men cannot meet. So now, a lot of women are realizing that they are not benefitting from heterosexuality at all.

But most women still want to participate in heterosexuality because they’ve been taught it’s valuable and heterosexual love is desirable. It’s also incredibly difficult for most women to decenter men.

This is the paradox Asa Seresin points out in “On Heteropessimism”: straight women will be the first to critique heterosexuality, but never take steps to detach themselves from heterosexuality: “That these disaffiliations are ‘performative’ does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality.”

This refusal to abandon heterosexuality has left straight women grasping for reasons to stay, ways to justify their participation in heterosexuality without feeling like they’re compromising their feminist beliefs.

As more and more women reach the point of heteropessimism, they realize their choices are to either keep their standards so decent that men may not qualify and so they’ll likely have to stay single or they compromise and find a way to feel empowered in relationships that they know are inherently oppressive to them.

And instead of holding men accountable or risk staying single, many straight women reach instead for economic benefits as a way to justify their heterosexual relationships.

Seresin wrote “Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem” and I would like to add that it conveniently allows women to complain without reflecting on their role in upholding the problem.

Getting straight women to completely abandon heterosexuality isn’t realistic, nor even necessary, but I think that if you are going to participate in heterosexuality, you do have to play a role in holding men accountable and part of doing that is to not allow them to pay for their lack of maturity but holding them to a standard where they become emotionally and domestically competent.

And is that fair? No, of course not. But remember, fairness doesn’t exist.

If you know me, you know that I love Addison Rae. Hear me out. I never paid much attention to her when she was a TikTok star but when she released her debut album last year, it sparked something in me that I’ve only ever felt when I was 10 years old listening to Lady Gaga sing “Born This Way” and shock the world with her meat dress at the 2010 MTV Music Awards.

I’m serious.

There are lots of pop stars out there, but I think Addison Rae is a true artist. There are so many reasons I’m drawn to her (perhaps more on that in a later post), but in particular, I respect the way she approached her career.

About a year ago, Rae went on the New York Times Popcast and she said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: taste and choice is a luxury.

She said this in the context of how she got started on TikTok.

“It was a lot about how am I just gonna get out of here? It wasn’t even about like alright let me show the intricacies about myself right now,” Rae said.

Rae was born in a small town in Louisiana and from a young age, she knew she wanted a life on stage. She loved dancing, singing, and acting. She loved performing and knew that she had to get out of Louisiana and move to LA to do so.

And she never lost sight of that goal. She convinced her parents to let her attend LSU so that she could try out for their well-known dance team. The only way for her to afford the tuition was to make the dance team and receive a stipend but to audition, she had to enroll first. She made it through the first round of auditions but ultimately, was left out after the final cut.

When that didn’t work out, she pivoted. She pursued broadcast journalism for a second, thinking that it could be a good way for her to get on camera. And maybe, she thought, it could lead her to other on-camera opportunities that involved dancing and singing. But she quickly realized that she hated reporting on things she didn’t care about.

Then, came TikTok. She had already been on the app for a few years and she had a feeling that “something is here and I don’t know what it is but I need to show up,” she said in the NYT interview. She didn’t know how TikTok would lead her to where she wanted to be, but she had a feeling that this was an opportunity she couldn’t miss.

At that point, she said she was making up to a dozen videos a day. She was being very strategic about choosing music that was trending to dance to and she said that it was a “sacrifice” that had to be made.

For her, TikTok was her ticket out of Louisiana. As soon as she gained enough traction, she moved to LA, got management, and started to pivot to what she wanted to do all along. She told her managers immediately that she wanted to be a pop star and she knew she had a small time window to make that shift.

In the YouTube comments, I saw someone say that “selling out” first to gain a platform and then using that platform to follow your true path is “the new model” and praised Rae for recognizing that early.

And I agree with the sentiment but I don’t see what Rae did as “selling out.” I think she made a necessary sacrifice and a strategic choice, and even if she did sell out first, is that so bad?

I think too often, we concern ourselves with putting out “good” work. We question, will this be considered “good” art? Will people recognize my talent and validate it? Will it be respected by others, especially those I look up to? And we get so caught up in these worries that we end up… not putting out any work at all.

These questions are also all different ways of asking, what will people think of me?

But consider that you are not defined by your work. You are not defined by everything you produce. You are not your art, just like you are not your thoughts, you are not the shoes you wear, you are not your 9-5 job, and you are not the dessert you had last night.

Not everything you produce is going to be the truest reflection of who you are, and that’s okay.

Whether we like it or not, we live in the age of social media and now, more than ever, it has become inevitable for artists and non-artists alike to use social media to their benefit. So, you can choose who you want to be: the person who complains about how soul-sucking it is to be pulled into this chronically online life (and it is!) or you can be the person that uses it as a tool to your advantage. (And yes, it’s possible to be both! Complain, and do it anyways).

Addison Rae’s TikTok videos were not the pinnacle of her career, not the epitome of her artistry. They simply served as stepping stones, a means to an end. But because of her TikToks, she’s now able to create things like Aquamarine and Fame is a Gun.

Whether you see what Rae did as selling out or not doesn’t really matter. She made necessary sacrifices, and it got her to where she wants to be. In order to make good art, we have to be willing to make bad art. In order to get opportunities, we have to be willing to show the world our work, good or bad.

I’ve been going after certain jobs and careers for the wrong reasons and I’ve pushed my dreams to the side because frankly, I’ve been too scared.

When I told a friend last week that I want to pivot in my career and invest in artistic pursuits, she was very excited for me. She said she admired my bravery but at the same time she couldn’t imagine taking such a big risk like I am because she would be too stressed about her finances.

This led me to think, who can afford to have dreams?

For many people, dreams are expensive. Investing in a career in art or entertainment or whatever they are passionate about is terrifying and risky. And perhaps that’s true now more than ever, due to rising costs of living all over the country. Many of us were also taught growing up that life as an artist means one of starvation. We were pushed to aim for stability, to get that practical corporate job or go into STEM fields and forget about something as frivolous as the arts.

For full transparency, I grew up wealthy. And I’ve always believed that if you come from a family like mine, where you have a financial safety net, then you are more obligated to pursue your dreams because why wouldn’t you? Isn’t it easier to take risks knowing that you have a safety net? So why not take advantage of the privileges you were born with?

But when I look around at the people I grew up with, people who also have immense financial privilege, it seems to me, at least from what I can tell from afar, that they have not taken risks more than any other group of people. In fact, most people I know from my childhood have chosen safe careers that make a lot of money: consulting, accounting, law, etc.

This makes me think of what my childhood friend told me a few years ago.

I’ve known this friend since we were toddlers and we were raised in the same environment, our families coming from similar backgrounds. We lost touch after high school but reconnected a few years ago, when we were fresh out of college and working for the first time.

She often complained about not liking her job. She felt overworked but she admitted to me that she doesn’t want to live a life that’s less comfortable than what she grew up with. She couldn’t imagine losing any of the luxuries she’s always had access to.

I admire her honesty. And I get it. Who would want to give up access to a certain lifestyle? I’ve also heard similar sentiments from my own family, who urges me constantly to go after jobs that offer high pay and stability because they don’t want me to lose my financial privileges either.

There’s that, and then there’s the pressure of paying back your family who gave you access to those luxuries in the first place. My dad has supported me now through two degrees and a couple years of rocky employment. The fact that this is a rare privilege is not lost on me. I feel so lucky to have his support but I’ve also always felt a lot of guilt to be on the receiving end of his hard-earned money and now that I’m shifting into an even riskier career, the guilt has only gotten stronger. He’s spent so much on me, and although he doesn’t ask this of me, I feel obliged to give back somehow, make him proud, and to do it sooner rather than later.

I’m realizing that taking risks and going after your dreams isn’t as simple as who can afford to? The better question is, who is willing to try? Who is willing to go through the pain and discomfort of investing in themselves? Because there will always be a reason not to. There will always be pressure from the outside world. There will always be fear. And even if you have money, money will always be a stressor.

Of course, having financial privilege is a HUGE benefit. I don’t want to discount or understate that at all. It is one of the biggest privileges one can have in our society. It is a boost that I am so incredibly lucky to have been born into and it does make taking risks and investing in my dreams a little less scary than for someone who doesn’t have the same safety net.

But it’s not the only factor and courage can’t be bought. It’s also not a trait that is decided upon birth. Courage is something that you must cultivate in yourself, a muscle to be exercised and a practice to be implemented daily if you want to give your dreams a chance of coming true.

Consider, too, that it is in capitalism’s best interest to convince you that art and dreams are not worth your time. It wagers the bet that stability, or more often the illusion of stability, is too appealing against your fears. And it sells a lie that there is no money in art, that the only thing you can count on is the forward progression of STEM fields. But it is an artist’s job to imagine and that begins with imagining a path to an artistic life for themselves.

My parents have always urged me into stable, high-yield careers. I am old enough now to understand that they just want me to be taken care of and this is one of the ways they show their love to me.

But how I show love for myself is different. It’s believing in myself. It’s taking leaps. It’s taking my dreams off the shelf, dusting them off, and trying again.