Why are we all feeling broken?

Raw power meets raw milk, the rise of masculine energy, the costs of millenial pink and the coming of the second Trump era

This is the last post in a very special series on the EYP Substack in honor of my 40th birthday.

• The first post was about my advice for living the good life

• The second post was about my goals for the next decade

In the kitchen

I wrote the first draft of this substack more than a week ago. Days before the wildfires ripped through LA devastating so many lives. Since then my rage has only grown.

I am so sick of politicians using these disasters for personal gain and one-upmanship. While our forests burn and our communities are devastated, politicians engage in their familiar dance of finger-pointing and jurisdictional squabbling, treating these disasters as political footballs rather than the life-and-death emergencies they are.

Perhaps most egregiously, the same leaders who dismiss climate change's role in exacerbating these fires continue to block meaningful legislation that could alter our path to environmental devastation and better prepare our communities for future catastrophes. While homes burn and firefighters risk their lives, the rich seek to privatize their protection and tweet conspiracies intended to destroy trust in government. The human cost of this political malpractice is staggering - families displaced, lives disrupted, and entire communities reduced to ash while those in power seem more concerned with maintaining their political narratives than protecting their constituents.

Meanwhile, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan to whine about how corporations have been “culturally neutered” and need more “masculine energy.” The idea that insufficient coddling of male aggression is the genesis of society’s woes is so ludicrious it boggles the mind.

I’ll be writing more on this in the coming weeks as an administration full of men who have this same notion of what it means to be masculine takes power.

Because this renewed era of the rising crypto-bro Roman empire UFC-obsessed masculine comes at the cost of others. Their domination is secured by our subjugation.

Roe has been overturned. Women are bleeding out in ERs while doctors consult lawyers because they are terrified of being prosecuted and thrown in jail. Maternal mortality (particularly for black women) is rising while billionaire bros tweet about how scared they are about population collapse.

There is a massively funded conservative messaging infrastructure telling women our true and only purpose is motherhood, that we should quit birth control, leave the workforce, homeschool our children and drink raw milk. For the first time since 2011, the number of women serving in Congress is declining, while men debate our fundamental rights like they're notes on a drawing board.

And all of this is worse for women of color in all age groups.

We were raised on "girl power" but graduated into a recession. Told we could be anything, then called entitled for wanting basic stability. We are the first generation to be both overqualified and underemployed, drowning in student debt while being lectured about spending too much money avocado toast.

We graduated into a workplace that is perfectly engineered to burn us out.

We’ve been subjected to constant pressure to be "always on" while simultaneously being told to "set better boundaries." There’s the expectation that we'll handle everyone else's emotional needs while never having any inconvenient feelings of our own.

I've watched men repeat my ideas in conference rooms like they're discovering brand new continents, claiming territory I mapped months ago. I've smiled through gritted teeth in doctor's offices as they tell me I’m imagining my symptoms and maybe I just need to drink more water.

We're expected to lean in while the rug is being pulled out from under us, to hustle harder in a gig economy that stripped away stability. To build our personal brand while somehow remaining authentic (and also competing with fake AI accounts optimized for maximum impact by the companies to whom we have sold our attention.) We’re told to demand better pay, but also to be grateful we have jobs at all.

We’re supposed to celebrate when a company announces their ‘revolutionary’ new parental leave policies that still somehow leave women as the default parent.

They sold us empowerment wrapped in millennial pink, then mocked us for buying it. Told us to speak up, then called us aggressive when we did.

We're not just tired. We're tired of being called hysterical for seeing clearly. Tired of being told to stay positive while watching our rights disappear. Tired of carrying the emotional weight of a system designed to fail us while being expected to show up every day with a smile.

Then there is the commodification of our exhaustion. Some genius marketer looked at our burnout and thought: "There's profit in this pain." Suddenly self-care wasn't just taking a damn break - it became another full-time job. Meditate more! Journal more! Try this $80 bath bomb that promises to solve your existential burnout! Buy this planner that will finally help you "have it all!" As if we needed one more thing to fail at.

Tired women are easier to control. Tired women don't have the energy to question why they're doing the work of three people for the salary of less than a man. Tired women are too exhausted to notice that "having it all" means doing it all. Tired women don't have the bandwidth to overthrow the system.

I recently asked my followers if they felt more broken than ever. The 2024 election hit different. It wasn’t the shock of 2016 when people thought pussy hats and marching would be enough. It's not the pandemic panic where we suddenly became teachers and remote workers while keeping our families alive. It's watching our fundamental rights become bargaining chips and knowing that half our country voted for ir. Our friends, our family, our neighbors. It's seeing decades of progress treated like a pendulum that can simply swing backward and then get stuck in a time warp.

"I feel like I'm mentally preparing for the worst while being told I'm overreacting," one follower wrote. We're living through the very scenarios we were called paranoid for worrying about. The exhaustion isn't just bone-deep anymore. It's soul-deep.

There's something uniquely devastating about watching systems fail us in real time. We followed the rules. Got the degrees. Trusted in institutions and procedures and protocols. Now we're watching those same systems protect the men who want to strip our rights away, one judicial decision at a time.

No one is coming to save us.

We are it. We have to save ourselves.

I’m not going to tell you to march. I’m not going to tell you to knit. I’m pissed off and I want to win real institutional power. The resistance is over. We gotta go on the offense. Attack the systems that failed us and then rebuild them so that they work for us and for everyone.

No one else is going to do it. It’s up to us.