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.
Feminine and empowering.
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?
That’s the conclusion Erica Dowdy, a content creator who founded a marijuana company with her mother, came to recently after travelling to Europe and feeling intense pressure to create content the entire time, rather than enjoy the experience.
“I continued to observe the habits of Europeans while on that trip, and my biggest takeaway was how incredibly healthy and inspiring their work-life balance was,” she says. “I decided then and there, that's gonna be the best souvenir I could bring back home with me.”
Dowdy says she feels she has spent the last few years “girlbossing,” but now she doesn’t find the desire to hustle “impressive these days, nor is that an example I want to set for the younger generations that follow me.” She made the same proclamation in a recent TikTok
“I don’t want to girlboss anymore,” she declared in the video. “I don’t know if it’s the European lifestyle rubbing off on me, but I don’t think girlbossing is cool, I don’t think it’s impressive. I actually think girlbossing is kind of cheugy.”
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She’s right: Grinding away at building a career is not the end-all, be-all to a soft girl; it’s embarrassing. To them, the pursuit of what is known as “hustle culture” is not just toxic and potentially harmful to their health – it actively goes against what it means to be a woman.
“The feminine urge to tell women that hustle culture has been designed for the 24-hour male cycle and not the 28-plus day female rhythm, which is why we feel so burnt out and exhausted,” advised one adherent to the lifestyle. “And remind them that they’re not broken for not thriving in a world that wasn’t made with them in mind.”
In soft-girl world, breaking away from the grind to focus on your own well-being is held up as the bastion of success and the women who leave the corporate world to do things like travelling abroad, going to work as an innkeeper, or living “off grid” are #goals.
You may have a burning question: Who is paying for the soft-girl lifestyle? And, if we are assuming it’s a man, why does rejecting burnout and hustle culture need to mean that women should fetishise giving up their financial independence?
That girl is back.
It’s a valid criticism but one that many soft-girl advocates rarely engage with. And like any trend, there is a variety of ways to adhere to it. You can go full soft girl and literally never work, but obviously, many women can’t. For those still forced to grind for a wage, the lifestyle serves as more an ideal to strive for than a prescription for living. Thus the rise of the soft girl may not be just a rejection of the girlboss but also a reaction to the difficulty of living under late-stage capitalism, something that people of every generation are starting to chafe against.
After witnessing every generation before them struggle to get ahead while the rich just get richer, the soft girls’ choice to step off the treadmill could be seen as radically rebellious, and women of all ages are taking part. One adherent of the “soft life,” 30-year-old Britney Campbell, tells me that her upbringing greatly influenced her views on work and labour and taught her what she wanted to change.
“I grew up in a Jamaican household and all the adults had two jobs,” she says. “So for a long time I thought that was what was expected of me. Then, when I moved to Los Angeles to pursue art, it was easy to get caught up with hustle culture. At various points I had three or more jobs. Ultimately, I feel like the soft-girl life chose me. I think when you have worked a lot, you start to value other things. I found myself valuing my peace, my stillness, and once the mindset changed, so did my activities as a way to protect the peace I found.”
Like Campbell, many soft girls have come to the lifestyle after experiencing the burnout of a capitalistic society firsthand, posting their visions of the life they could have if they didn’t have to work. Many, including 24-year-old Alyssa Kurish, daydream about a simpler existence in which they are a wife and a mother first. Kurish is currently working full-time and says she was often taught she needed to hustle and strive for career success when she was growing up. But she finds herself now longing for a different kind of satisfaction.
“I think many women are becoming more in tune with their natural desires, embracing their femininity and choosing to build a more simple life, recognising the beauty in traditional values,” she says. “Family-based life allows for simplicity, focus, less stress, and a reclaiming of time.”
For this reason, the patron saint of the soft girl may be Sofia Richie Grainge, who at 25 has a loving husband, a beautiful home, an exquisite wardrobe, and, it seems, plenty of free time to focus on self-care and homemaking. Richie’s favourite workout, Pilates, has even become a key part of the soft-girl aesthetic, with many declaring it a cornerstone of the lifestyle. On TikTok, many women post videos in which they express their dream of being what they call a “Pilates wife” or a “Pilates princess.”
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This desire may even be impacting how Gen Z dates. Seeking, the luxury dating website that used to be known as Seeking Arrangement and also was focused solely on arranging relationships for sugar babies, did a recent study in which it says it found that 68% of Gen Z women on its website are seeking relationships with men between 10 to 14 years older who can “financially” meet them at their level.
The company blames the trend on the uncertain economic times Gen Z has faced during their entire adulthood thus far, from the pandemic to now. Thus, the company says, these women are “embracing the age gap to bridge the wage gap,” noting that the top three keywords Gen Z women are searching for on its website are “partnership,” “luxury lifestyle,” and “travel.”
“The data shows that a sharp increase in Gen Z sign-ups began in 2021 with the majority of Gen Z women looking for long-term relationships with established, wealthy millennial and Gen X men,” the company stated in a press release.
We ask the experts what exactly Pilates is, what to expect and what kind of benefits it can have on your physical and mental health.
Motherhood is also the desire of many soft girls, especially those who can stay at home with their kids.
Niki Puls, who calls herself a “slow-living CEO” on TikTok, often posts about how she quit her corporate job once she had kids and says she has never been happier or more fulfilled.
“I wanted to be a girlboss before I became a mom,” she tells me. “After we started our family, all I wanted to do was love on my family and slow down. I always pictured myself as a girlboss until I had kids and realized that girlboss culture can be toxic and lead to burnout. The soft-girl lifestyle is much more sustainable! I once dreamed of being called a girlboss; now all I dream of is providing the best for my family and making lifelong memories.”
Young moms who do stay at home are nearly fetishised on soft-girl TikTok, with their videos extolling the virtues of their “soft living” with their babies getting millions of views. Women dream of being a “stroller mom” in her “mom era” going on “hot mom walks,” unapologetically saying they want to quit their corporate life for family and joking that women should have never fought for the right to enter the workplace.
While many of these comments are made in jest, the truth is that being in your “hot stay-at-home mom era” can be a slippery slope into becoming a #tradwife, another corner of TikTok where young, usually religious women extol the virtues of the patriarchy.
“I’m teaching my daughter that it is perfectly acceptable to depend on a man,” declared one proud 24-year-old #tradwife, Jasmine Darke, in a recent video. The video got more than 700,000 views, but many commenters weren’t convinced.
“SO glad I was taught the exact opposite,” wrote one woman. Darke tells me that, while she does face criticism for her beliefs, she has observed other women her age beginning to “embrace traditional gender roles,” as she puts it.
“I also believe there's a growing interest in ‘feminine’ pursuits like motherhood and homemaking in my generation because many of us are reevaluating our priorities,” she says. “In a fast-paced world, people are seeking more balance and meaning in their lives. Motherhood and homemaking offer a sense of purpose and connection that resonate with a lot of individuals, especially in the age of digital connectivity.”
As the soft-girl life grows in popularity, some Gen Z'ers are beginning to call out the more questionable messaging associated with it. Shania Bhopa, a 25-year-old Canadian PhD candidate, tells me she grew so concerned by what she was seeing on TikTok she decided to post her own video, titled “Why the Soft Girl Era Is Toxic.”
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“I think it's just promoting the traditional gender norms that we have worked so hard to push back on,” she tells me. “And Barbie would say the same thing. It's just not Barbie to promote those very stereotypical gender norms, especially in a world where equity, diversity, and inclusion is so important. Many people don't conform to the typical male or female identity.”
She’s particularly bothered by the soft-girl trend of labelling things that are naturally healthy for women to avoid, burnout, for instance, as being negative because they have “masculine energy.”
“I think ‘soft-girl energy’ relates joy to being docile and lacking goal-oriented tasks throughout your day,” she says. “But why can't you be crushing your goals and still feel well and not absolutely burnt out? For some reason, working hard equals burnout in this absolute manner. And I don't think that's fair to generalize like that.”
It’s true that living the girlboss life can be challenging. Burnout is real, and hustle culture is totally toxic. In many ways it does seem kind of empowering to take up the soft-girl ethos, to break away from the rat race, and stop feeding into the machine of labour.
But it seems that in an effort to make things better, soft girls may be swinging to another extreme. Women, as Bhopa notes, can do both. They can focus on building wealth and achievement for themselves in a healthy way. They can prioritize being a boss and avoiding burnout. In that way, women can actually do it all.
While pursuing soft-girl TikToks, I stumbled across a video from a woman named Fiona Co Chan titled “How Being an Anti-Girl Boss Was the Best Thing for My Life.” In it, she explains how, although she initially worked in “hustle culture” in the tech industry after college, she then moved across the world after meeting her husband, a move she describes to me as “choosing love over career.”
Yet Chan is, by definition, indeed a girlboss. She is the CEO and founder of the makeup company Youthforia, which has gone viral on TikTok and got a $400,000 deal on Shark Tank.
So can you be a more balanced girlboss? Chan says yes.
“I really try to make sure I dedicate time for things that really energize or inspire me, and I make sure I get enough rest,” she says. “I definitely have days where if I'm really not feeling it, I won't push myself too hard or make any major decisions.”
Two years after making her viral video, Jones says she has found herself in a more supportive workplace, and still is striving to put the “soft life” into practice every day. She is also trying to do it all, work to live but also make sure she isn’t living to work.
“To me, a soft life is akin to getting out of the rat race, to putting yourself first over hustling or some unattainable idea of success that continues to leave you unfulfilled,” she says. “A soft life doesn't mean not working or just giving up on accomplishing things; for me it's about reprioritizing your life and your work around your own peace, contentment, and fulfilment wherever possible.”
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.
This feature was originally published on GLAMOUR.com.
I have been empowered to dress how I want to because I am not performing for anyone.
