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Last week’s ADVICE TIME thread was incredible, like 2000+ comments incredible. If you want to figure out how to charm the kids on your next friend vacation, make friends as a mom of young kids in a place where the politics are hostile to yours, figure out first steps in investing, or simplifying your life *in actual practice,* this thread has advice for you (and so much more). Also check the first in our series of playlist threads (pump-up songs!!) with work/concentration songs and cry songs to follow.
Last month I taped an interview with Julie Kohler fdor the new season of White Picket Fence, a podcast that examines the structures and institutions that keep life shitty for so many American women. The interview weaved through so many of the topics I’ve written about here (and discussed in the podcast): trad wives, stay-at-home girlfriends, MLMs, Christian nationalism, Mormon TikTokers, renovation culture, clean culture, calendar culture, intensive parenting, plastic surgery, how little we study the women’s body…..and then we expanded the circles outwards to thin-tok (“eating disorder fight club”), the anti-birth-control movement (both pro-natalist and just women proselytizing the wonders of getting off hormonal birth control), Organization Tok, supplement culture, crunchy MAHA, the wages of postfeminism, and anti-girl-bossing.
The conversation allowed me to connect some ideas that had been bubbling up for the last year or so about this current moment, which I’ve come to understand as a moment of feminist exhaustion — and several branching reactions to that exhaustion.
When I say exhaustion, I mean it in two ways: first, the term feminism has been exhausted of its meaning — and, insofar as it’s deployed in popular culture, its politics. Many people would argue this has been happening for well over a century, but I place the current meaning-exhaustion to the early 2010s, when feminism became a cudgel that journalists used when interviewing female celebrities (“are you a feminist?”) to create a soundbite.
Within this understanding, feminism was a label you claimed, a vague belief system to which you subscribed — usually some version of the time-worn bumpersticker “feminism is the radical idea that women are people.” Within this line of thinking, you didn’t have to act like a feminist to call yourself a feminist; you just had to utter the words, and anything you did became feminist.
Feminism is, as the great theorist bell hooks famously argued, for everyone. But this understanding of feminism wasn’t and isn’t the feminism hooks was describing. It wasn’t intersectional; it wasn’t anti-capitalist; it wasn’t invested in dismantling the status quo. Its apotheosis — the Lean In-style boss bitch — was the opposite of all of those things: fiercely individualist, deeply capitalist, and obsessed with obtaining power and wielding it “like a man,” even if that meant reinscribing the status quo, particularly in regards to racial hierarchies and the performance of “proper” femininity, thinness, monogamy, and motherhood.
Feminism — again, at least in terms of how it was wielded in the public sphere — had effectively become postfeminism. You didn’t need to change the world, you just needed to figure out how to dominate it: how to beat them at their game. But that meant the game itself, and the harsh, exacting rules that guided it, remained the same.
Cue: the second sort of feminist exhaustion, which applies to the generations of women who understand their progressive, aspirationally intersectional, progressive world view as feminist….and find themselves utterly demoralized by a long, damaging fight that now seems to have lost ground.
This is a big umbrella of exhaustion. I’m talking about the ‘80s feminist punks and Gen-X Riot Grrls who tried to figure out an anti-capitalist way forward but every city where they wouldn’t get called names just for walking down the street became wildly unaffordable and they had to get an office job and somehow it’s twenty-five years later and they’re middle management and taking care of teens and aging parents.
I’m talking about Elder Millennials who dared call themselves feminist in some argument with a guy in 2000 and got called a ball-buster for months if not years and internalized the critics of Lilith Fair (both the people calling them a bunch of bra-burning lesbians and the feminists who called the entire festival too corporate and too white)….and were inculcated with purity myth garbage, deeply misogynistic celebrity gossip blogs, rom-com makeover fantasies, cool girl fetishism, and the Spice Girls as girl power. They survived American Pie and whale tails and now they’re being called cringe for having strong feelings about the return of low-rise jeans.
I’m talking about the second-wave feminists who were alive in a time before legalized birth control and abortion, who lived through the porn wars of the ‘80s, who were often the first or one of very few women in various classes and industries and male-dominated spaces, who watched Hillary Clinton and Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky degraded in public forums for very different reasons but with an unified, if unspoken, goal. I’m talking about the women who show up to the rally with the I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M STILL PROTESTING THIS SHIT.
I’m also talking about the women who grew up in high-control religions, understanding feminism as a core evil, who have come to embrace it but still struggle with deeply internalized misogyny. I’m talking about people who always felt like feminist spaces were too white, or too middle-class, or too obsessed with respectability — but got shunned if they voiced as much. I’m talking about everyone who thought that the best way to live their feminist values was to do it all — marriage, kids, career, house — and everyone who thought the best way was to reject doing it all, but are now exhausted by navigating precarity that’s only exacerbated by how much our country privileges partnered home-owners. I’m talking about people who’ve been at the center of this work for decades and people alienated by feminists in the 2014 Jezebel comments. We are exhausted.
And that exhaustion shows. Back in the 2010s, I called the display of that exhaustion a postfeminist dystopia, vividly displayed in texts like Girls, Revenge, and Trainwreck. At that point, I understood these shows as a sort of cautionary tale: behold the miseries of postfeminism! Bad sex, self-loathing, self-destruction, bad jobs, claustrophobic relationships you can’t quit!
I still understand those shows and films in that way. But over the last ten years, dozens of others have joined them: And Just Like That immediately comes to mind, but I’d also add Nightbitch, The Dropout (and all other narrativizations of Elizabeth Holmes), basically every Nicole Kidman vehicle, The White Lotus, Succession, Tar, and that’s just skimming the top of my head.
But here’s the funny thing: because of the slippage in feminism’s meaning, these texts are now understood as a sort of feminist dystopia, particularly when coupled with the non-fictionalized narratives playing out concurrently in the political world. (What is thousands of women bawling in suffragette-white pantsuits after gathering to celebrate Hilary Clinton’s win at an events center with a literal glass ceiling if not a feminist dystopia?) These fictional narratives don’t always explicitly position their protagonists as feminists, but there’s an understanding that this is what it means to try and have it all and do it all: you’re not just miserable; you’re monstrous.
[I want to again acknowledge that I’m purposefully wielding “feminism” in a vapory way — a reflection of how it was metabolized by contemporary popular culture. Bland, imprecise, unchallenging, white.]
So how do we make sense of a feminism that is exhausted? This is where the road begins to fork into the various reactions, factions, and practices that have subconsciously been the obsession of this newsletter for the last five years.
I divide the realm of Exhausted Feminism into four general quadrants, tracking along axes of ongoing investment in the status quo and relative investment in the intersectional feminist project of liberation — not just for women, but for all. These are loose groupings, held together not by identity but by positionality (aka, how they relate and respond to the realities of the world).
I.) FUCK IT, LET’S FIGHT
There are two major sub-groups here: people who’ve always known that they could never blunt their edges sufficiently enough to gain acceptance into the echelons of power and privilege, and people who figured out how to wield that currency, then lost it (or rejected it) and are ready to dismantle the entire apparatus. Home to legitimate radicals, firebrands, activists, and organizers who don’t mind pissing people off (and in fact think it’s part of the point) but also people whose politics might be less far to the left but have no qualms about pissing people off to protect others’ rights.
There’s often friction between these two sub-groups, in part because so many people aren’t given the chance to choose to fight — they have to fight. It’s also one thing to have societal power and then realize that it’s fleeting; it’s quite another to never have access. For some of these people, popular feminism has always been offensive. Plastic surgery has always been ridiculous; same for compulsory heterosexuality and beauty norms and rigid standards of gender performance. Others arrived at that place gradually, often after a trip through the portal or some other clarifying experience that underlined just how much work they put into achieving ideals they could never achieve (and that that was point all along).
I love and honor so many members in this group. Often but not always they are elders with tremendous lived experience and wisdom, and it feels important to spend time in their shadows. They’re not concerned with making men “feel bad” with jokes about misandry. They don’t care much about straight cisgender men’s feelings, period. If they don’t always get someone’s pronouns right they’re really, genuinely trying to (unless they’re TERFS, in which case, they’re misappropriating their years in the feminist fight and mis-identifying the enemy. Also, just to be clear: fuck TERFS).
This quadrant is aspirational in its unruliness but also volatile — and can, at times, gravitate towards policing the purity of others who land here, self-combusting before the real fires can get set. There’s a lot of righteous anger, often masking a well of deep grief for just how difficult the work has been, how long it’s taken, and, right now, the feeling that we’re culturally regressing. As in so many other corners of politics, there’s a warranted tension between the message that attracts those already on your side and those on the fence — a resistance to pandering rhetoric coupled with a desire to get shit done on a systemic level.
I think a lot of people want to be at home here but also feel like this is a home with a lease that’s ending in the very near future. What’s worked in the past, what’s led to progress — it’s just not working anymore.
II.) STATUS QUO BUYER’S REMORSE
So much ideological conflict happening here and I could honestly write about it forever. People in this group understand themselves as feminists, even if they might not have ever been the sort to, like, yell it from the rooftops or fight with their weird Uncle about it. They’re people-pleasers and achievers, successful but never abrasive. They’ve been able to obtain components of the status quo (marriage, parenthood, middle-class or higher income level, home ownership or steady rental) and made it through the first few whirlwind years of parenthood, but are somewhat stymied by how difficult it is to find happiness.
Some part of them knew the status quo could be stultifying, but assured themselves they’d do things differently. They’d work harder at marriage; they’d be amazing at being the fun, feminist mom. But hard work can’t modify a set of constrictive norms whose primary purpose is to make you feel like you’re failing at everything and need to do more (for others).
That’s easy to understand a few decades into the process, but much harder to internalize when you step onto the status quo escalator. Back then, you’re just thinking about success and wedding and cute pregnancy and a home of my own, not Blue Marriage and the Terror of Divorce, calendar culture and intensive parenting exhaustion, or renovation culture and the persistent feeling that your house is the source of all of your problems.
There are mortgages and college funds and 401ks in this quadrant, but there’s also a lot of student loans and “unused” degrees and credit card debt and the feeling that you’re in the “hollow middle class,” as maintaining the status quo has come to mean “maintaining a lot of debt.” That feeling of middle-class precarity (and fear of downward mobility) keeps people in marriages that are profoundly inequitable, in jobs that devalue them, and social scenes that bore them (or would straight up offend their younger selves).
And yet, they endure, because that is what people-pleasing achievers do. A lot of these women have come to low-key hate their husbands, not because they’re horrible or abusive, but because they’ve come to symbolize all they can’t escape. Their marriages are a major puzzle piece in the complicated lives they’ve built around their family unit, a certain amount of income, and a shared property — all of which would be destabilized by a divorce. Unlike trad wives, they have no moral problem with divorce. They are just terrified of trying to navigate life in a society that’s incredibly hostile to single people and anyone who’s been out of the workforce for any amount of time.
When there’s a persistent unequal division of labor in the home, that’s not a feminist marriage. But it is a marriage that allows you to maintain certain norms, which then supersedes the need for either partner to do the deeper work of creating equity. Also: what’s the alternative? GO DATE???? IN THIS ECONOMY??? Unlike Group I, who are exhausted because they’re fighting political structures (and, at times, each other), this group is exhausted because they’re fighting their husbands to please figure out how to RSVP to a birthday party.
This group feasts on divorce literature and books like All Fours (usually with the refrain “maybe just a little too weird for my taste!”). Sometimes they get a divorce and head to fuck it land, but more often, especially if they left the workforce when their kids were young, they direct their resentment into self-improvement: regimenting the body, organizing the home, renovating the bathroom. (I used to think of these activities as basic, but now I understand them as a natural impulse of smart, creative, problem-solving women shut out of their preferred corner of the workforce with time on their hands).
This group is magnetizied to feminist dystopia TV shows not because they think they’re dystopian, but because they feel weirdly relatable. There’s solidarity within this group (complaining about husbands is a team-building activity) but there’s also fierce individualism and a tremendous amount of fear. Their power flows from their investment in the status quo, and they’re (rightfully) terrified of what happens if they can no longer wield that power. See: the concurrent obsession with anti-aging serums and “invisible” procedures and the terror of menopausal weight gain, but also intensive parenting practices intended to sustain the status quo for the next generation.
I want to excavate some generosity for this group, or maybe just acknowledge they’re often acting out of fear, but I’d also argue that the politics and ideological compromises of this quadrant are the most insidious. They’re ostensibly invested in women having more power, but only certain types of women — women who can play by the rules, as they have, but never out-play them. They’re often deeply resistant to criticism and surprisingly easy to radicalize to the right, where you’ll still have to deal with your husband’s bullshit (until he cheats on you right around age 52, because men married to women in this quadrant often internalize the idea that they have a “right” to young women) but no one’s policing your kids’ Halloween costume for being appropriative (the horror, the horror).
If all this sounds bleak, IT IS. But if you’re wondering where so much millennial and Gen-X feminism went, it’s down this very beautifully appointed black hole.
III.) MOM THAT SUCKS / I DON’T WANT YOUR LIFE
Hello Gen-Z and Gen Alpha and welcome to the feminist exhaustion party!
When I was young, watching my mom navigate a deeply destabilizing mid-life divorce, I internalized several lessons: first, I’d never let a man, or a marriage, eclipse by own career trajectory; second, I’d always have my own money and means of survival; third, I’d never be dependent on a man do to stuff, from driving to drilling something into a wall. Some of those lessons have served me extremely well. Others have made me overly wary of dependency — or led me to (very predictable) burnout.
But talking to other women my age, those lessons were not unique. We watched our moms get married very young, have kids very young, and lose sight (or the ability) to pursue other avenues in life that would’ve brought them joy, fulfillment, or security. So as we, their children, grew up, we resolved to do things differently. Some became FUCK IT, LET’S FIGHT radicals, but others have tried to do and be “it all.” And now the next generation has observed the lives of their parents and aunties and elders, ostensibly or explicitly rooted in feminist goals, and have smartly decided: MOM THAT SUCKS.
The perfectionism, the attempt to reconcile the desire for personal success with the safety of the status quo, the self-flagellation, the stagnating and resentment-infused marriage, the obsession with parenting to the point that it replaces personality — they don’t want these lives. Or maybe they just think these lives look pretty miserable. Our politics are either diluted and compromised or brittle and unyielding. They look at us and see a bunch of people disciplined by precarity, cranky about both the past and future, and reproducing the same restrictive norms we once complained about so bitterly.
If feminism is what made us like this, they want to find a different, less harshly extractive way forward. Sometimes, that means embracing a reactionary stance that disavows feminism altogether — which I’ll talk about below — but it also manifests as a rejection of the norms that “good girl” feminists understood as the only way forward. What if we didn’t value career above all else? What if we make heteronormativity weird? What if we don’t just say things like “gender is prison” but act as if it were the case?
Chappell Roan, Doechii, Billie Eilish — all of them feel like avatars of this strain, which is very much in formation and still deeply structured by its relative youth. But it is also such a straightforward — and, to my mind, warranted — reaction to their elders’ exhaustion.
IV.) FUCK FEMINISM AND FUCK YOU TOO
When tradwives first became a cultural fascination, sometime back in 2021, I was repeatedly asked: where is this coming from? Where did these tradwives come from, sure, but also, why are so many people following them?
My answer has always been that these women have always been here — they were just blogging (the 2000s), writing columns in their local newspapers, church circulars, and homemaking magazines (every point in the modern era before that), or showing up in fictional form onscreen (pretty much all the “good” mothers of Classic Hollywood).
Women have also always been interested in tradwives, and the perfect, serene lives they seemed to live, particularly in times when most women feel exhausted by the demands of their everyday lives. I think back on World War II, when millions of women were single-parenting, thrust into new jobs with little training, grappling with the fear that every man they knew between the ages of 20 and 50 was in imminent danger — and then the war ends, and the culture has to figure out a way to make the millions of women who stepped in to do men’s work give up their jobs. The easiest sell: what if you could live a beautiful life at home, with a bunch of new machines and canned goods to assist you? Instead of two jobs (working inside and the home and out) you’d only be doing one! What a deal!
Obviously the “sell” was a lot more complicated — and millions of women who worked outside of the home before the war never stopped working, well, ever. But the housewife became the bourgeois ideal: every woman wanted to be one; every man wanted one to facilitate their lives.
We’re in a similar moment now, with a curious mix of the religious right, TikTok “stay-at-home-girlfriends,” Ballerina Farm, and crunchy vaccine-hesitant canning moms selling women a seemingly simplified (and aesthetically, far more beautiful) alternative to their current lives, and trad husbands hungry for appropriate help-mates. On the surface, the only requirement is “not working outside the home for pay.” But the ideological demands are more exacting: there’s the dependency on male partner, sure, and parenting as the primary source of worth, but there’s also tying one’s self-value to the ability to conform to traditional feminine norms.
The pursuit of “purity” (in body, in cleanliness, in cooking) is closely related: the more attentive you are to eliminating the “toxins” of the outside world, the better mom, partner, and woman you become. (Because the ideal woman is a self-annihilating one). It also offers an opportunity to control an otherwise uncontrollable world: all you have to do is limit your sphere to your own home! The workplace is unpredictable, but the hall closet is imminently organizable!
Many of the most prominent tradwives are devoutly religious, but many women who’ve gravitated towards the tradwife floodplain are just seeking this sort of legible order and control. It’s so, so much easier to understand your husband as “head of the household” and the woman as “in charge of every other damn thing” than try to figure out an equitable distribution of household labor. It’s much easier, particularly in the U.S., to have a parent who “naturally” stays home — in part because our civilization, particularly when it comes to schooling and eldercare, is organized around that reality.
So many of our grandmothers and mothers worked incredibly hard to leave this sort of life behind. They wanted different sorts of marriages, different sets of knowledge, and different places for themselves in the world. They wanted futures of their own making. The fact that so many women are opting to return to this sort of life, or at the very least fetishizing it, underlines just the resilience of the patriarchal status quo. And feminism, at least in its current exhausted form, has been out-matched by the slow-focus bucolic visions of the right, with their promises of simplicity and domestic joy.
At least that’s how it’s manifesting for women in their late 20s and 30s. For younger women, the rejection of feminist politics is showing up in the re-embrace of all the shit millennials and Gen-X have disavowed from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s. Tanning, starving yourself, low-rise jeans, thongs, vague or explicit cool girl raunch — with the very of-the-moment additions of “preventative maintenance” plastic surgery, Thin-Tok, and “everything showers.” In short, the redirection of the majority of one’s energy into radical discipline of the body.
If the TradWife elides the work of ideal femininity — Ballerina Farm just wakes up and looks like that! — the Gen-Z Postfeminist broadcasts and monetizes it. They think any attempt to point out how poorly that route turned out for older feminists is not just cringe, but contradictory. Isn’t the point of feminism not to dog on other women??? Isn’t it MY BODY, MY CHOICE??? Didn’t you say we shouldn’t TALK ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE’S SIZE or PERSONAL CHOICES??? I’ve seen Tradwives pull similar rhetorical moves, wielding feminism’s hollowed-out core, and the idea that anything can be feminist (and above reproach) if a woman does it, like a lance.
I’ve always been taught that the history of feminism is a history of continually battling the forces of regression: for every two steps forward, you create a backlash that pushes you at least one step back. But I think that metaphor only works when feminism, itself, is a robust battering ram — and when we believe that the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice. But right now, feminism feels too exhausted to push forward: it’s too politically weakened, too vulnerable to others’ manipulation, and ill-equipped to confront a moral arc that is not bending towards justice. And while I know that those invested in the continued dominance of white patriarchy are the number one problem, I also feel like feminism, at least in its current state, is inadvertently helping the cause.
Maybe the women who eventually coalesced under the banner of third wave feminism in the ‘90s felt this way back then: that unless they refined feminism’s aims and got explicit and exacting about how white bourgeois women are getting in the way, then feminism was no longer a useful tool in the ongoing fight for liberation. Maybe some of you who were part of those conversations can remind us. What I do know is that women’s rights — including and especially marginalized women’s rights — are eroding at an alarmingly rapid rate, and our exhausted feminism has been unable to protect any of us.
So what would a movement look like that’s rooted in economic equality, but also cognizant and actively combatting all the ways socialist movements have failed to address patriarchal norms operating within? That is truly gender-inclusive but not invested in “not-all-men” coddling? That isn’t invested in purity policing but doesn’t hedge when it comes to its values, and that honors those who’ve fought the fight but celebrates new ways of fighting it?
Fuck if I know! I barely mustered enough might to write this essay. We’re all doing too much. We’re watching too much, angry at too much, reading too much, exercising too much, working too much, parenting too much — which leaves us with so little time to strategize, organize, or even just imagine a different way forward.
When a person is this exhausted, we tell them to rest. When a piece of land is this depleted, we let the land lie fallow. When a perennial begins to wither at the end of the season, we cut it back and let it hibernate for the winter. We place faith in its eventual restoration, because that is how the world works: you work, you rest, you regroup, you refocus, and you work again, because the work is never done.
The same is true for political movements. They can be reborn, refocused, and redirected, but only with rest and reconsideration. And until we can make space for that sort of political imagination, we’ll be locked here, flailing, with increasingly debilitating exhaustion, against a tide working so methodically to return us to the past. ●
One of the great things about writing a newsletter is I can put ideas out here and ask for your elaboration and extension of them. So let’s elaborate and extend. What else is debilitating the feminist project? Or, more hopefully, where do you see the future of the movement coming to life? If you’re a policing asshole in the comments, you’re doing exactly what I describe above as making this work difficult. Let’s work VERY HARD to keep this a good space on the internet, even as we work very hard to discuss the future of feminist politics.
Very Pertinent Reading:
Also make sure and check out this ep of the Culture Study podcast on what it actually takes for a tradewife to leave — and this episode on how the pop culture of the ‘90s and early 2000s messed up millennial women.
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At the risk of saying something completely banal and obvious, I think one’s relationship with feminism is profoundly shaped by one’s life circumstances. I’m almost 40 and grew up with a lot of low key feminist vibes in my family (grandma was a second wave feminist, mom always worked outside the home, my first concert was Lilith Fair) and have always, always identified as a feminist and think it’s kind of weird when other women don’t.
I’m going through a very unexpected divorce (having been married to a “good guy” known in our community for doing things like organizing for reproductive rights!) that is shattering all of the (pretty bleak and meager to begin with) illusions I had about my marriage representing a form of feminist security despite being in a patriarchal society. I thought I was married to one of the “good ones” and it turns out he wanted to blow it up. And I hate to say it but this divorce has 100% reactivated my latent misandry because of how I was blindsided.
In some ways I am profoundly grateful that being a feminist is my oldest identity because it feels like a self protection auto immune response right now. And I have to say that since this divorce has me questioning so much about my own relationship patterns and other very personal things and returning to a life of being single for the first time since my twenties, it’s also at the same time revealing to me how deeply heteronormative and couple oriented American feminist discourse is, when almost half of the country is single.
If feminism is always anchored in discussions around the things that partnered people face (especially things that partnered hetero couples face), then feminist discourse is always going to have an air of navel gazing for the many millions of people who are navigating life, whether by choice or by circumstances, without a partner.
I, elder millenial, have had this thought floating around for a long time, and it is something I think is both small (because it relies on individualism to understand it and change) and half-formed, but in a couple of sentences, it's this:
So many of my college-educated, hetero- and cis- female friends married 'feminist' men and now find themselves cracking the sad jokes about their 'third child' (oh hi, buyer's remorse). When we were growing up, all of us being brought up by feminist or just in the workplace mothers, boys and girls, heard the messaging that girls can be anything and can be a man's boss and it doesn't make her bossy and girls can be at the table, too! And we all embraced it. All of my friends' partners are absolutely fine with their wives working and often out-earning them. They have women bosses and never make a weird noise about it. But there wasn't a model that also showed the boys, *and that will mean you will be a caregiver and homemaker and responsible for your family beyond a paycheck and grilling the meat*. We somehow didn't all get hook's message that feminism was for everyone - and that radical restructuring was needed of all gender norms, not just the norms around women's roles in society. So these men don't see their own responsibility in making the home function, because as far as many are concerned, they are absolutely feminists (voted for Hillary, clearly happy to have a woman as boss!) and they just magically don't see dirt and clutter and birthday invitations.
I'm the mother of a male child and I have a male partner who was raised by a single, working mother (who would never call herself a feminist) but who was just expected to be part of making the house run because there were no options. My son sees what I think is a pretty good role model for someone who runs the house and our lives just as much as I do, and yet... where are my blind spots? What am I missing in this conversation? What am I missing in making sure my child is raised to know he must also be able to look at a full laundry hamper and understand the myriad tasks related to doing laundry without someone else telling him it must be done? How much is an individual problem and where does that intersect with whole societal changes?