Lazy girl jobs, lazy girl workouts, lazy girl this, lazy girl that. If you’ve been anywhere near a social media platform in the past few years, you would’ve seen some version of the lazy girl trend. It sounds like just what you need to lead a happy, balanced life, but let me, a millennial feminist, explain to you why the lazy girl trend is terrible for women in India. Yes, I will womansplain this to you.

Twenty years ago, I was in college, irrationally excited about adult life. I wanted to do everything I had seen on TV and in the movies – get a job, have a vibrant social life, date people for the heck of it, join the coolest gyms that would give me new lifelong friends, and maybe create a family of my own. Then reality hit and the rage began. Soon, I understood why most adult women, especially in India, were angry or sad.

The trad wife life isn’t cool

Millennial women in India were at a crossroads of sorts in our 20s. We knew what feminism meant and how important it was for us but we were also told to maintain a balance. It was expected of us to get jobs and make careers but we were also expected to toe the line of tradition in our personal lives. So, of course, we got jobs but we fought to not bear the onus of “balance” and tradition.

We worked long, long hours, many times overnight, to prove to the world that we could do anything a man could. We could do night shifts, field duties, long difficult commutes, and more. Many of us bore the continued backlash against women at work, whether in the form of sexual harassment that we couldn’t speak about or being worked to our bones by snide male bosses trying to prove a point. We cried in private, not on social media, over how tired we were. We raved and ranted at home and among our female friends. But when we showed up to work, we gagged ourselves enough to not show the slightest hint of emotion and mistakenly reinforce a stereotype. And now? Gen Z women cannot stop complaining about how hard it is to have a job, so much so that the trad wife life is being sold as an aspiration.

We’re all tired, so we understand the desire to sit at home and do nothing. But millennial feminists know what this life costs. We fought the system that told us it’s great to stay home and watch TV and let the men do the work because we saw what it did to our moms, at least who were the OG trad wives. Being a trad wife doesn’t mean baking cookies in an aesthetic kitchen with a well-behaved toddler on your hip. Unrelenting hours of unpaid labour is what the trad wife life is all about. It’s about letting go of all your freedom, be it financial or otherwise. It’s not a happy, Instagrammable life and it definitely isn’t aspirational.

What should be an aspiration for young women, especially in India, is claiming positions of power for themselves. We laid the groundwork and made sure women were finally heard in boardrooms. Now is the time for Gen Z women to take over boardrooms and aspire to be the decision-makers at work, not look for lazy girl jobs that just pay the bills.

“Feminists ruined it for us”

Nora Fatehi famously said something to the tune of feminism ruining society in a podcast. What she did not realise was that legions of feminists before her made it possible for her to have a career. Recently, we also heard something similar in Love Is Blind Habibi, a Netflix reality show. And the line “feminists ruined it for us”, voiced by a model, was just a cute little moment in the show. This is all happening at a time when women are fighting for survival across the world. But hey, feminists made you go to work, our bad.

Maybe it’s about time you placed the blame for being overworked and underpaid where it actually belongs. Unchecked capitalism, not the movement to recognise women as human beings.

Dump the lazy girl trend and get out of the house

Touch grass, as you say. The pandemic changed the world in a lot of ways and one of those changes was in how we socialise. I get it, it’s great to be comfortable at home in your PJs, but not all the time. This can work in first-world countries (at least a few) where a woman’s freedom can be taken for granted. Generations of women have worked alongside men in these countries so it’s not a new thing for them. It is for India.

Till our moms’ generation, women were told that they shouldn’t step out of the house without a man. Many women are still told that their rightful place is in the kitchen and to focus on babies, not careers. Curbing a woman’s individuality is the norm in this country, and one of the best ways to do that is to kill her confidence and make her unable to go anywhere or meet anyone on her own. We fought against this life and went out with aplomb. We went out to work, we went out with friends, we just went out. And we refused to listen to anyone who told us that we were “too free”.

Now, all you want to do is stay home. Trust me, no amount of filters and cute aesthetics will make up for the freedom you feel when you can go out whenever you want and do whatever you want. Don’t say staying home is your choice as a feminist. You’re falling for a social media algorithm that suits white women, not us.

Gen Z women, this is not an attack on your seemingly carefully curated lives. Lead a pretty life by all means. This is a wake-up call from a generation that survived obstacles and challenges that we hope you never have to face.

Related: Gen Z Is A Social Butterfly, Yet Isolated: Why Are They So Lonely?

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