This morning, I came across an interview with Hannah Pearl Davis that articulates several tensions I’ve been reflecting on for some time.
It is genuinely refreshing to encounter a woman in public life who speaks with clarity and courage about the real pressures facing both men and women today. More than merely “speaking sense”, she gives voice to something many intuit but rarely articulate: that modern expectations are stretching people - especially women - ever thinner.
Women today are asked to carry an extraordinary load: professional ambition, social presence, caregiving, constant self-optimization, and the cultural insistence that they must “have it all”. While this narrative is often framed as empowerment, its unintended consequence is chronic stress, compressed time, and a shrinking capacity for deep flourishing. Achievement and independence are worthy aims - but when pursued without regard for rest, connection, and the natural rhythms of life, they become self-defeating.
This strain is increasingly visible in rising mental-health and wellness issues. Many people are attempting to build complex, demanding lives on unstable foundations. The fundamentals - regular exercise, good nutrition, alignment with circadian rhythms, and psychological stability - are not optional luxuries; they are prerequisites for moving from mere survival to genuine thriving. Feeling grounded, open, and engaged with the world depends on these basics. As Bertrand Russell observed, “The wise use of leisure is a product of civilisation and education”. A life with no margin, no rhythm, and no recovery is not a mark of progress, but of imbalance.
These foundations underpin everything else: relationships, dating, career fulfilment, creativity, and, ultimately, the capacity to form and sustain a healthy family with a partner who has likewise invested in their own foundations.
From a biological perspective, the realities of fertility further sharpen this tension. Women face a narrower reproductive window, while men, physiologically, have a much broader span. This is not a moral judgment; it is a fact of human biology that shapes lived experience. When cultural and economic pressures encourage women to indefinitely delay or deprioritise family formation, they may unintentionally narrow their future options for building the relational and familial life they might later desire. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is difficult to argue that the deep human drive to form families and raise children is incidental or socially constructed. As Edmund Burke put it, “Society is indeed a contract…not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be born.” Continuity, care, and generational responsibility are not regressions; they are civilisational achievements.
Crucially, this conversation is often derailed by a simplistic framing that casts women as broadly “oppressed” within modern Western societies. While historical injustices should never be minimised, the claim that women today lack agency or equal rights is increasingly disconnected from reality. When equality is pursued not as fairness or opportunity, but as enforced sameness - ignoring biological, psychological, and relational differences - it risks producing the very injustice it claims to oppose. Hannah Arendt warned of this tendency, noting that “Equality of condition, though it may appear as a natural consequence of justice, is in fact one of the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern political life.” When difference is denied rather than integrated, resentment and tribalism often follow.
At the heart of this issue is a growing discomfort with reality itself. Aristotle captured the essence of wisdom when he wrote, “The mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it”. A healthy society must be able to examine ideas - about gender, work, family, and identity - without turning them into unquestionable dogma. When abstraction overtakes lived experience, ideology replaces understanding.
This is not about “oppressing men,” nor about diminishing women. It is about recognising the cost of relentless expansion - of time, energy, and emotional bandwidth - without honouring the natural limits and cycles of human life. Women encouraged to measure success exclusively by standards that prize constant productivity and competition - standards forged in contexts that undervalued relational depth - are often set up for exhaustion, alienation, and, in some cases, irreversible loss of opportunity.
As Kahlil Gibran observed, “Work is love made visible…but the love of work must not overshadow the love of life”. When worth is equated with perpetual output and external validation, we lose sight of equally vital dimensions of human flourishing: intimacy, family, meaning, and the quiet inner life that gives coherence to everything else.
True empowerment, then, must include the freedom to choose the life one genuinely wants - not merely the life one is socially rewarded for performing. Yet freedom divorced from responsibility and reality is not liberation. Isaiah Berlin cautioned that “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death for the sheep.” A culture that prizes unbounded choice while ignoring human limits risks harming the very people it claims to empower.
Perhaps the deepest challenge is simply seeing clearly. As George Orwell put it, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Biology, time, family, and human vulnerability are not oppressive truths to be overcome, but realities to be integrated wisely. Only by grounding equality in reality - rather than ideology - can it serve human flourishing rather than undermine it.