It wasn’t until this year, at the age of 26, that I started to seriously consider the idea of just...doing nothing. Since I was very young I’ve known I didn’t want kids, but in their place, I pursued an MA and a career. Those seemed like my only choices, but at a certain point, I started to just like my life as it was—doing enough work to earn enough money, and then hanging out with the people I love and occasionally going on vacations. I like my life, and for the first time, I don’t necessarily want to strive for any larger goal.

But, of course, I feel guilty—as if I’m disappointing not only the success-obsessed, driven teenager that paid her way through an MA program by bartending 60 hours a week, but an entire generation of #hustling #girlbosses with pseudo feminist mugs. Since time immemorial, women have been pushed into having children, sidelining their own passions and work in service of the family unit. Post-war, second wave feminism did away with some of that—women could work, they could have a baby, they could have it all. In recent years, we’ve started to believe we can just want the career—to hustle and travel and wear designer suits.

These developments have been important and positive for many women, but more radical, perhaps, is the idea that we can do neither. Currently, if we aren’t either working on a career or having a family, we can feel as if we’re failing. But we the pressure to succeed and achieve in at least one of these realms, and increasingly both at once, feels like we’ll never be left alone to be content with doing our job and coming home. Work can be the thing we do in order to enjoy our free time—it doesn’t have to be a lifelong career, and we don’t always need to be pushing to be the boss. Forget having it “all”—why aren’t women allowed to just have “some,” and be happy with it?