I'm Ambitious. Shoot Me.
About the women getting rich off telling you to want less.
Somewhere along the way, having ambitions became a personality flaw.
Not for men. Never for men.
For women.
Specifically, for women who want careers. Who talk about money. Who have opinions about their own financial futures. Who dare to want something beyond the role of being the softest, most agreeable version of themselves for someone else’s benefit.
We have a name for this now. It’s called masculine energy. And apparently, I’m full of it.
Let me tell you what feminine energy looks like on TikTok nowadays.
It looks like a woman in a flowy dress on a farm, baking sourdough, talking about how she submits to her husband’s leadership and finds her highest purpose in serving her home. It looks like aesthetic reels of clean kitchens and obedient softness. It looks like comment sections full of women saying I want this so badly and this is what we were made for and modern women forgot how to be women.
It’s called the trad wife. And it’s everywhere.
And I have one question.
Do you know how much money these women make?
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: the most successful trad wife influencers are running businesses. Real ones. Brand deals. Real estate portfolios. Monetized platforms with hundreds of thousands of followers. The woman whose entire brand is built around submission and softness — whose entire bio is dedicated to her husband— is likely making more money than most of the women watching her and wishing they could afford to want less.
She is not a trad wife.
She is an entrepreneur who found a profitable niche.
And the niche is you.
She is selling you the fantasy of financial dependence while being financially independent herself. She is getting rich off telling you that ambition is unfeminine. She is building a career — a very successful one may I add - out of performing the idea that careers are for men.
I don’t say this to attack her. Honestly, the business model is brilliant.
I say it because someone should name it.
Now, I’ll be honest with you. I get the appeal, I’ve felt the pull.
After a long work week, after an all nighter finishing a management report for an 8am submission, after showing up to work with my eyes half open and my coffee doing nothing I have sat in that exhaustion and thought: what if I just didn’t have to.
What if someone else carried this. What if I could just rest inside someone else’s certainty for a while. What if the soft life was actually my life.
I understand the fantasy. I genuinely do. Any woman who tells you she has never felt it is lying.
But here’s what the fantasy doesn’t include: the part where that someone else isn’t always there. Not because they don’t love you no not at but because life doesn’t ask permission. Just like our parents will not always be there. Our partners will not always be there. The person you built your entire financial reality around is not a guarantee no matter how much you love each other, no matter how solid it feels right now.
The soft life is a beautiful idea. It’s just not a plan.
Now let me tell you what actually happens when a woman has no financial independence.
Not in theory. In reality.
Life is not a guarantee. Marriages end. People get sick. Accidents happen. The man you were told to depend on the one who was supposed to be the provider, the leader, the reason you didn’t need to worry about money is not immune to any of this. Nobody is.
And when something goes wrong, feminine energy doesn’t pay rent.
Soft submission doesn’t keep the lights on.
A carefully curated aesthetic of wifely devotion does not put food on the table for the children you had together.
The wisest women I know understood this quietly, without making it a TikTok. They built things in their own names. They knew what they had. They made sure that whatever happened, they would not be left with nothing. Not because they didn’t love their husbands. Not because they were masculine or cold or ambitious in some threatening way. But because they were smart. And they refused to let love make them foolish.
I want to be very clear about something.
This is not about women who choose to stay home and raise their kids. That is a valid, real, legitimate choice and I have nothing but respect for women who make it deliberately and happily.
This is about the shame.
The specific, targeted, relentless shame directed at women who want something different. The raised eyebrow when you talk about investing. The gentle suggestion that caring about your career means you’ve lost touch with your femininity.
That shame is not ancient wisdom. It is not “God’s design”. It is not feminine energy.
It is a cage dressed up in aesthetic linen.
And the women selling it are not in the cage with you.
They are outside it. Building businesses. Quietly making money. Performing the very thing they’re telling you to be while doing the exact opposite.
That’s the part that should make you angry.
Not at them. At the idea that you swallowed it.
That somewhere along the way you started to feel embarrassed for wanting more. For talking about money. For having a career you care about. For being, God forbid, ambitious.
As if ambition in a woman is a crime.
As if wanting to build something a career, a financial foundation, a life that belongs entirely to you is a betrayal of your softness rather than an expression of your strength.
You can be feminine and ambitious.
You can be soft and financially independent.
You can submit in love and refuse to submit in life.
These things are not contradictions. They never were. The contradiction was invented and it was invented by people who benefit from your smallness.
So be ambitious.
Build the career. Learn about stocks. Know what’s in your bank account. Make sure your name is on something.
Not because you don’t believe in love or partnership or family.
But because you are a person. A whole one. And whole people don’t outsource their survival to someone else’s continued presence.