We leaned in like Sheryl told us to, worked damn hard, built full careers and calendars… yet so many of us are feeling a deep sense of existential exhaustion.
This book investigates why the women who were promised empowerment are now struggling under its weight.
Blending cultural analysis and candid conversations with millennial women figuring out work and motherhood, it exposes what we give up in the quest to “have it all”.
Superwoman Is Tired takes readers from the nagging sense that they’re failing to a powerful realisation: the problem isn’t them. The book unpacks how millennial women were encouraged to pursue ambition without a system designed to support it, revealing why modern success so often leads to burnout. By the final chapter, readers have a new lens on how to define success for themselves.
She has a senior role she worked hard for, a partner who considers himself progressive, a child she adores, and a calendar meticulously filled with colour-coded childcare, meetings, workouts, and the occasional “me time”. Yet there’s a tiredness that no amount of sleep seems to fix.
This story is now so common among millennial women that it barely registers. The anomaly is which women are tired: the educated and ambitious, who followed the rules most faithfully, and paradoxically, are coming undone by their own success.
For years, it has seemed like this exhaustion is an individual problem. Women just need better boundaries! More resilience! There are planners and podcasts urging self-care. But what if this tiredness isn’t a personal shortcoming? What if it is the entirely predictable outcome of a system that is asking more of women than ever before?
Millennial women have been ushered into the workplace in unprecedented numbers. Yet the unpaid and emotional labour has remained: organising domestic life and keeping everything outside of work running. What changed was that these responsibilities have now been layered on top of professional ambition.
Women are doing multiple jobs that were never designed to coexist at full intensity. While one demands constant availability and measurable output, the other demands emotional regulation and moral responsibility. Both are treated as non-negotiable.
This tension is historically specific. Millennial women were raised to believe that education plus ambition would equal freedom and that we could have careers and families. In reality, we entered adulthood into a world of longer working hours, permanent digital availability, expensive childcare, and stagnating wages, all while expectations at home shifted far more slowly than expectations at work.
When the rhetoric is empowering, the blame turns inward: if you are exhausted, you must be managing your time wrong. You didn’t optimise! You didn’t ask for help in the right way! This is how structural problems have become psychological ones, and this is why women become preoccupied with fixing themselves instead of questioning the conditions they are navigating.
The media can chalk it up to a loss of ambition but many women aren’t abandoning ambition at all. We are questioning it and asking whether the version of success we inherited is worth the cost of sustaining it. We were promised empowerment, and got exhaustion, and this book explains how we can save ourselves.
About the author
Adele Barlow is a writer and marketer with over 18 years’ experience working across tech, startups, and mission-driven organisations. After becoming a mother, she began to notice a pattern among the women around her: deep existential exhaustion. Superwoman Is Tired grew out of her desire to understand why.
What comes after ambition?
“Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning with our ambitions. We’re not resigning en masse—because who can afford to quit her job in this economy?!—but we are trying to figure out a new set of goals and guidance for our professional lives. Thanks to long-simmering inequality and stubborn sexism, clarified by the pain of the pandemic, our definitions of success increasingly lie outside the realm of work. We are waking up to the fact that our jobs are never going to love us back. And we are trying to adjust accordingly.”
The Soft-Girl Revolution
“Women who strove to be girlbosses went to bed late and got up early to sweat it out at Barry’s or Soul Cycle. They idolized female business leaders like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer (who famously worked from her hospital bed after she delivered twins)…. The next generation of women have watched all of this unfold, observed our burnout and our late nights, our stress fractures and our egg freezing, and said, No thanks. What about if we just didn't try so hard?”
Why millennials are quitting
“For millennials and the younger generation Z and Alphas, who may never be able to afford to buy a home or retire at a reasonable age, there is a growing feeling online that hard work is fortifying a system that, at best, is giving them nothing back and, at worst, is actively screwing them over… The goal of a softer life is more time and energy for what makes you happy and as little time as possible focusing on what doesn’t.”