'Mum, I don't want your life.' Why young girls are saying no to everything we wanted.

My five-year-old daughter tells anyone who will listen that she is never getting married. 

She's never going to have children, either.

Instead, she plans to have three dogs, be very tall, and try every job there is, starting off with being Santa. 

In terms of dreams, she's got it nailed, but the life she wants is very different to the one I've built. That's AOK by me, but according to studies, she's part of a growing cohort of women who look to the lives of their mothers — elder millennials and Gen X-ers — and say: "Yeah, nah," to our particular brand of feminism. 

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A 2023 survey conducted by Ipsos UK and the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London spoke to over 20,000 people from 32 different countries. Over half of Gen Z (52 per cent) and millennials (53 per cent) thought gender equality had "gone too far" and that men were now being discriminated against. More shocking, less than half of the Gen Z cohort surveyed described themselves as feminist.

At the same time, we're seeing the rise of decidedly anti-feminist ideals from some members in the younger generations. Tradwives, for example.

On the face of it, you could assume (and many have) that this is a generational reaction to feminism itself "failing".

Dr Hannah McCann, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, says we're definitely seeing a rejection of what she calls "entrepreneurial feminism" (you know the type — the #girlboss, lean-in, make-it-a-power-suit-but-cry-in-the-executive-level-bathrooms brand of white feminism rewarded with pink cupcakes at an IWD brunch).

But she cautions against sweeping generalisations based on generational tropes as well. 

"I think a mistake that we often make talking about the generations is treating them as if they're a homogenous group," she told Mamamia.

"The kind of content that people are getting and the kinds of beliefs that they're forming are extremely niche and targeted, which is building all these kind of miniature groups of cohorts who have different beliefs. Obviously, we get that big data that says that fewer men than ever are supporting women's rights and so on, but mostly it's hard to say what Gen Z is really about. While you might have some getting married at 21, there's another cohort of queer, polyamorous Gen Z just living the opposite lives." 

McCann also points to the damage that some so-called feminists have done within the movement as a reason the younger cohort might be rejecting the label.

"Particularly in places like the UK," she explained, "where you've had people like JK Rowling saying: 'I am a feminist and I'm going to direct all my money to anti-trans efforts,' that has had a huge impact on people generally, not just generationally, being like: 'I am not going to call myself feminist in this context'. It's really, really sucked up the space for being committed to the label feminism."

Feminist exhaustion isn't feminism's fault.

In a piece entitled The Great Feminist Exhaustion, Anne Helen Petersen, who writes the popular Substack Culture Study, describes these women as a subgroup she calls "Mom, that sucks/we don't want your life".

"If feminism is what made us like this, they want to find a different, less harshly extractive way forward," she writes of this next generation of women, who have watched their mothers exhaust themselves on the altar of feminist ideals.

And Petersen isn't the first to posit the concept of feminist exhaustion; professors Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto penned an essay back in May for academic journal on the bone-deep exhaustion many feminists are currently experiencing. 

The crux of their argument: we're burnt out on caring. 

"We sink into its exhaustive quicksand," they wrote. "We feel it, we wish, overwhelmingly, not to do it, and yet we must—and we also choose to—go on."

And if we're all so exhausted, is it any wonder our kids don't seem interested in emulating what we've built?

We've been breaking ourselves, not breaking the system.

It's sobering and more than a little demoralising to audit my own experience of this white, middle-class sort of feminism and realise that perhaps I've been sold a lemon.

I've written about feminism for years. I've been to the marches, bought the t-shirts, voted accordingly and earnestly changed the gender of every male doctor, firefighter or police officer in the children's books I read my kids in an attempt to de-program them just a little bit. 

But personally, I'm beginning to realise I've also been complicit in the erosion of feminism's ideals by assuming that by simply working a bit harder, rearranging my priorities and folding myself into tighter squares, I was living the feminist dream of our foremothers. 

If I'm really, uncomfortably honest, I got so busy trying to build my own personal version of feminist success that as the years progressed, I stopped giving much time or attention to furthering the ideological ideals I was trying to exploit for myself.

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For me, and most of my friends, burnout has become the accepted collateral damage of 'having it all'.

So has the underhanded blame we assign to ourselves for daring to want to have it all.

We layer supplements, up our protein, track our sleep, hack cycles, break cycles, google 'perimenopause symptoms', practice mindful parenting, schedule date nights, keep romance alive, restrict screen time, give in to screen time, doom-scroll until 3am, share political posts that bounce around our algorithmic echo chambers, go on mental health walks while listening to podcasts about how to improve our lives, manage teams compassionately at work, then manage our own emotions less compassionately. We wonder if it's ADHD or hormones or motherhood or capitalism, but, spoiler: it's probably all of them.

This realisation that perhaps we've been unwittingly fighting on the team of the oppressor feels like waking up to discover we were part of a Ponzi scheme. The money was never in our account. 

And it's nothing so simple or fixable as hating our lives, or motherhood, or marriage. A person can be grateful for the beauty and love and people in their life while still awaking to the fact that this whole time we convinced ourselves we were tearing down the walls, even while we were making ourselves the mortar, slowly being crushed under the weight of the system we're holding together.

I'm still not quite sure what to do about recouping my losses from this ideological Ponzi scheme. 

I put this to Dr McCann.

"Everyone is exhausted," she agreed. "We've misdirected our energy in terms of thinking we can just kind of change everything on this micro-scale by raising kids in a different way, or trying to organise our family lives in a different way. But have we really done the work on things like transforming rights around parental leave and shared care and the arrangement of work life?"

For McCann, it's less about individual responsibility to change our own lives, and more about organising to enact meaningful change. 

"We [feminism] haven't been in a good space with this for a while. There hasn't been good substantive feminist organising for too long. We all got exhausted," she said. 

"But it's about where you direct your energy. It always comes down to energy in politics, so we can always redirect our energy."

Just like people who have fallen victim to Ponzi schemes, we can put our hands up. Tell people where we might have gone wrong. Use our voice to make sure it doesn't happen to others.

Maybe success doesn't look like flailing for personal gain inside a broken system. Maybe it looks like a collective rejection of what no longer serves us as a whole. Maybe then, we'll get a chance to shake off this exhaustion before it drowns us.

Feature Image: Getty.