{"id":297,"date":"2024-05-20T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-20T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/local-woman-discovers-leisure-in-european-city\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T18:37:37","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T18:37:37","slug":"local-woman-discovers-leisure-in-european-city","status":"publish","type":"essays","link":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/essays\/local-woman-discovers-leisure-in-european-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Local Woman Discovers Leisure in European City"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"

Where we spent the vast majority of our trip\u2014on patios.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

I couldn\u2019t resist naming this essay \u201cLocal Woman Discovers Leisure in European City,\u201d as I recently learned all the cliches about life in Paris (and my reactions to them, as a former girl from the Kentucky suburbs) are deserved.<\/p>\n

Yes, the food tastes better, and somehow even a straight pastry-and-cheese diet didn\u2019t make me feel like a walking GMO. Yes, people really do rip cigarettes and espresso on patios at all hours of the day and all days of the week, and they\u2019re doing it for pleasure, not to fire up the cylinders for a cubicle marathon.<\/p>\n

Walking through Paris felt like sliding into a different time register. We slept until 10, drank coffee with dinner, and floated down wide, cobblestone streets, earning side eyes and open jeering from French people who didn\u2019t find our tacky, American joy very palatable (the sequins and glitter probably didn\u2019t help). I embraced the sort of vacation mentality that only feels possible in Europe, where it somehow always feels like everyone else is kind of on vacation, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"

Completing the European Eras Tour pilgrimage.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

I allowed these indulgences while maintaining an acute awareness of the fact that it was precisely the opposite behavior\u2014going to bed by 10, sitting at a desk all day, keeping a firm grip on everything around me\u2014that enabled me to take such a trip in the first place; that is, without going into debt or financially compromising Future Me. This is a weird conflict with implications I\u2019m still untangling.<\/p>\n

It made me wonder who I might have become had I grown up attuned to that frequency, and not the frenetic, achievement-oriented one that begins plotting college admissions in kindergarten and making five-year plans for slotting childbirth into a ruthless ladder ascension. <\/p>\n

I came back to the US on a high after spending 72 hours with my closest friends: women who are vibrant, sharp, and magnetic, each leading a full, meaningful life. It\u2019s probably safe to say I\u2019m the most one-dimensionally work- and money-obsessed in the bunch, and being around them reminded me of the importance of things like hobbies, slowing down, and\u2014dare I say\u2014just messing around. <\/p>\n

During my 24-hour trek back to California, my feeds became saturated with clips from a commencement speech at Benedictine College that was going viral. In it, a man younger than I am extolled the virtues of traditional femininity (among other things) to an unsuspecting crowd of 22-year-olds. The speech had only been delivered 48 hours prior, but already an ample discourse had begun.<\/p>\n

He addressed the \u201cladies\u201d in the room\u2014on the day of their college graduation\u2014and said he\u2019d \u201cventure to guess\u201d that while \u201csome\u201d of them \u201cmay\u201d go on to have careers, \u201cthe majority\u201d are probably \u201cmost excited\u201d about their marriages and future children. (Effectively no modern political issue, no matter how seemingly irrelevant to the circumstances, made it through the 20-minute tirade unscathed.)<\/p>\n

He was duly roasted. But predictably, the same old back-and-forth took shape in comment sections with people shouting past one another. \u201cNowhere did he say women couldn\u2019t have both,\u201d one person commented, \u201cWomen can have it all, family and career.\u201d \u201cRight,\u201d another fired back, \u201cHe just said that a woman\u2019s life doesn\u2019t begin until she accepts her role as a wife and mother.\u201d <\/p>\n

On its face, splitting hairs over the rhetoric of a 28-year-old man who gets paid $4 million per year to kick balls for a living is absurd. We all know being a homemaker is a legitimate job that some people find very fulfilling; we all know it\u2019s ridiculous to suggest it\u2019s inherently the most fulfilling occupation every woman could aspire to (the nuns at Benedictine agreed, disavowing his statements<\/span><\/a> afterward), and more ridiculous still to accept a young man as a credible source on women\u2019s path to contentment. Frustrated by the familiar dialogue, I ended up channeling my feelings via a reprisal of a Taylor Swift song<\/span><\/a>. <\/em>It\u2019s Female Rage: The Musical<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This schism is familiar: Pitting stay-at-home moms against women who want careers. The tradwives vs. the girlbosses in a pay-per-view cagematch, caricatures of feminine nurturing and ambition. Traditionally (and by traditionally, I mean, the 1980s), \u201chaving it all\u201d meant a family and a career\u2014but only for women, obviously, since a man with a family and a career is\u2026just a man.<\/p>\n

The promise coming from the tradwife corner<\/span><\/a> is that ambition is a trap and one should retreat into the supposedly more \u201cnatural\u201d soft life of the family instead, presuming these are the only two spheres in which a woman can find meaning. <\/p>\n

As such, a common retort when a woman expresses a desire to remain single or childfree goes something like this: Your career won\u2019t love you back<\/em> (the implication being, of course, that children are like Tamagotchis, and if you birth, feed, and bathe one, the return on emotional investment is all but guaranteed). <\/p>\n

Following my weekend in Paris with my three best friends (all of whom are unmarried Gen Z\/millennial cuspers), I was struck by the utter lack of this binary. If my friends are any indication, this generation\u2019s definition of a full life extends far beyond both the grinding hustle of unchecked careerist ambition and<\/em> the often thankless domestic labor that accompanies motherhood in a world where women statistically bear a disproportionate amount of the work. (It would appear US birth rates are at an all-time low<\/span><\/a>, so maybe this observation goes beyond the anecdotal.) <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

\n

A full life might mean forgoing the benefits and drawbacks of focusing too intensely on either, at least for a while. We stayed up late at caf\u00e9s talking about the Parisian open mic nights where my friend performed before the rest of us arrived; about another friend\u2019s recent art exhibit at a gallery and her backcountry skiing hobby. The other guided me through breathwork and gave me tips on raising my chronically low HRV, something she knows a lot about after years of independently studying and practicing meditation. We talked about the best books we\u2019d read recently, regaled one another with lawless college stories, and debated the practicality of wearing silk scarves unironically back on our home continent (jury\u2019s still out).<\/p>\n

What was notably absent from these discussions: talks of romantic partners, any whisper of eventual children, or serious career considerations. My friends date and enjoy their jobs to varying degrees, but much like their French counterparts, they work to live, not live to work<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I want more of this<\/em>, I decided from the bubble of our easy togetherness, admiring the full, well-rounded lives my friends have created. This thought was followed swiftly by an uncomfortable realization: the lifestyle that enabled these sumptuous conditions on my behalf was the antithesis of them. <\/p>\n

Some of this is undoubtedly the natural delusion we all feel on vacations (\u201cI\u2019m going to move here!\u201d<\/em>), but there\u2019s a larger, structural dynamic at play. As our personal lives and preferences evolve, it almost definitionally upends the structure of our financial<\/em> lives, too. Whether that\u2019s because you decide to become a parent, change careers, or simply pour more of your limited time and energy into enjoying your life. Priorities are not static.<\/p>\n

So maybe the centrality of the traditional \u201chaving it all\u201d narrative in the conversation about women\u2019s lives has outlived its usefulness. It hardly feels capable of illustrating the multitudes that my friends\u2019 lives contain: passion, art, music, emotional regulation, self-inquiry, leisure, curiosity, adventure, and untold other endeavors that have nothing to do with their relationship to anyone else, be it spouse, boss, or offspring.<\/p>\n

We play an important role in one another\u2019s lives, too. It\u2019s strange how the fierce bonds of female friendship never seem to enter the equation when women are lectured about how their careers will never love them back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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