Sheryl Sandberg is back. In her best-selling 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, the former chief operating officer at Facebook encouraged women to commit to their careers and become corporate bosses and leaders. Now it’s 2026, and she’s worried about a rise in traditional values and women leaving the workforce.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Sandberg’s nonprofit is focused on “pushing back against the ‘tradwife’ and manosphere movements that prioritize women’s roles as housewives.” In a recent LinkedIn post, Sandberg urged us to “keep the past where it belongs—in the past.”
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On this, as with many public conversations today, complexity has been lost. Women are cast either as independent “girlbosses” conquering corporations, or as stay-at-home wives, subservient to their husbands. For most women, these are caricatures. Social-media platforms amplify extremes; reality lies somewhere in the middle. I don’t know many ruthless girlbosses. I don’t know many young women completely abandoning work to become housewives, either.
Something is changing, though. Gen Z women do seem dissatisfied with corporate feminism. One survey in the U.S. recently found that 47 percent of Gen Z women would rather be “happily married with kids and a normal job” than a “trophy wife with a rich partner and no job,” “highly successful, independent and famous—even if single,” or “in a relationship and childfree, with a creative career and lots of travel.” According to another recent report, for the first time in a decade, women are less interested in getting promoted than are men.
I don’t believe that these women have been brainwashed by the manosphere or convinced by conservatives that women shouldn’t work. It’s more complicated than that. My own skepticism of “Lean In” feminism, for example, doesn’t have to do with women working or not. I’m a writer who doesn’t do much else other than write and think about writing. My worry is that leaning in to work often requires leaning out of something else—namely, other people. This is the question I’m interested in: What does leaning in mean for the people we love?
As a teenager in the early 2010s, I absorbed much of “Lean In” and later girlboss feminism from the internet, mostly through Instagram posts and Snapchat stories about building empires and hustling harder. Alongside advice on advancing my career came a message about how to treat other people. I learned that a successful woman puts herself first, goes after what she wants without apology, and cuts off anyone holding her back. Needing others was a weakness; love and friendship were fine—so long as they didn’t get in the way.
I heard this message elsewhere, too. The same thread runs through online self-help culture: no mercy for others. Instagram reels of relationship “red flags”; TikToks about toxic partners; Reddit forums where the most common advice given is “break up.” In this world, other people are symptoms, warning signs, threats to our peace. We are rarely encouraged to think of their needs, or compromise for anybody else; they must accommodate our anxieties, our attachment styles, and our healing journeys—and, if they can’t, they’re out.
This attitude isn’t confined to young women. I see the same mindset in male self-optimization and productivity content—the 20-step morning routines, the rigid diets and sleep protocols and gym schedules of the manosphere. Much of it looks to keep others at arm’s length, never fully letting anyone in. The advice is often the same: ditch friends, divorce wives, release dead weights. People are either assets or liabilities, to be discarded or upgraded as needed. Everything is in pursuit of Bugattis, better watches, bigger bank accounts.
I worry about a generation aspiring to lifestyles that are this, well, neurotic. And I’m suspicious of productivity advice that requires avoiding other people, that makes human needs feel like distractions or deficiencies. I have the same skepticism toward the trend of becoming “high agency,” an increasingly popular concept among young men: it preaches how never to be limited by anyone else, how to identify drags on your potential, how to calculate the sunk cost of people in your life. But we are not autonomous agents—we get sick, we lose our way, we depend on other people. The more I considered these worldviews, the more I became convinced that they’re not about leaning in to anything; they are more like excuses to move away from others, to leave them behind. Everyone becomes an obstacle, every commitment an inconvenience. Even love becomes a disruption.
What connects corporate feminism, therapy culture, self-optimization content, and the manosphere? A fear of vulnerability. A refusal to sacrifice or compromise. We want to win, to dominate, and never to need anybody. Some conservatives blame feminism for this attitude, but I see it as just one movement that has ended up in the same place as many others, all sounding the same message, delivered to all demographics: work first, love last. Be anything but vulnerable.
This is why we see so many rules online: a woman should never depend on a man financially, never marry before she has established herself, never put her ambitions on hold for a relationship. Never stay with anyone who triggers anxiety; never show weakness. At this rate, we’ll never love anyone, never build anything together.
Social media pushes this rigidity. It’s a kind of cognitive distortion, a protective instinct: if we follow the rules, if we control every variable, we won’t be hurt. But there is no winning formula. You can contort yourself into the perfect caricature, build a fortress of money, status, and self-sufficiency, but you can’t remove the risk from love.
All this leads away from a basic human instinct: starting families. These movements don’t always say so outright, but it’s their logical endpoint—the place we arrive if we live by these rules. We don’t want family life to cost us anything. It’s hard to give yourself wholly to a corporate career without changing, without beginning to see pregnancy as unproductive and time with children as a loss. Essays by both mothers and fathers have even expressed regret at having children.
Some in Gen Z seem to be turning away from this mentality. They are repelled by how corporate life can colonize our most human moments: marriage proposals turned into LinkedIn posts; women working from hospital beds after giving birth; men asking whether they are allowed to hate fatherhood because becoming a parent made them less productive.
If these movements are really ways of pulling back from others, of protecting ourselves, then the answer is to do the opposite: to lean toward people again. And if young women are beginning to find that courage, we should welcome it. It isn’t a regression but a recognition that building something stable requires risk: we must stake ourselves to someone. We have grown up in a world that encourages risk in everything except other people. If I have to bet my life on something, I’d rather bet on another human being.
More than anything, I believe, my generation needs to lean on, and into, others, with all the risk, vulnerability, and uncertainty that entails. Life has a way of shredding checklists and timelines. Better to embrace it, in its complexity. Most of us live between the poles—neither feminist caricatures nor alpha males, neither tradwives nor girlbosses. Those are the people I’m rooting for: ordinary men and women, willing to lean into each other, to risk love, and to see what they can build together.
