Your Job Won’t Make You Interesting

SAHM or working, you need something else going on

Photo by Maxim Ilyahov on Unsplash

You might think that a pretty blonde conservative woman whose job is being an Instagram influencer for a MAGA audience can do no wrong—but that wasn’t the case this week for emilysavesamerica, who posted a video the only way conservative influencers can—from her car—with an unexpected take: the tradwife movement is cringe, and women’s aspirations of being sourdough-baking SAHMs have a “slim chance” of working out. She also mentioned that a woman needs a job or a passion outside the home in order to be mentally stimulating to her husband. (She prefaced this part with saying you need to “bring more than sourdough to the table” and I thought she literally meant that sourdough alone was insufficient for dinner. I agree.)

Although I don’t agree with her full video, I got the sense that she was speaking about a very specific type of aspirational tradwife frequently seen on the right, whose brains have been cooked by Instagrammy historical revision to the point where they believe they’d genuinely be happiest subsistence farming. I agree with Emily that this is silly, and I wrote about it last year. But Emily’s message broke containment and proceeded to offend SAHMs across the political spectrum, many of whom don’t consider themselves tradwives—specifically her point about women needing a job in order to be mentally stimulated (and mentally stimulating for their husbands.)

People proceeded to argue about who actually has more compelling hobbies and who lives a fuller life, usually resorting to accusations of “being addicted to Twitter.” Girl, if you’re part of this drama at all you are addicted to Twitter. Being addicted to Twitter is the baseline.

I feel like I’m qualified to write about this because I have worked traditionally, I have worked from home as a mom, and for the past six months I’ve been a SAHM (I do still work, in the sense that I write this Substack—but only when my kids are asleep, so my day-to-day experience is that of a SAHM.) And I can confidently say that as far as being mentally stimulated goes (and being an interesting conversationalist for my husband) my 13-year career in tech was completely irrelevant. I found it mind-numbing, and I never enjoyed discussing it with him unless I was complaining about our CEO enforcing a RTO mandate after citing “not wanting her real estate to go to waste.” Being a SAHM—even if you ignore the brief parts of the day where I’m writing—is far more mentally stimulating for me.

Of course, it depends on who you are and what you do, but the biggest problem with making any blanket statements about what’s more fulfilling or stimulating is that there are huge differences between jobs—and between SAHM setups. But ultimately, I don’t think a job, either as a SAHM or in the working world, should be your main source of mental stimulation. Nobody is interesting solely because of their job. Putting all your eggs in that basket is a surefire way to be an extremely boring person.