Young Americans: Pursue Meaning, Not Just Mobility
Danielle Franz /
There’s a popular idea circulating, especially for young Americans, that the highest form of freedom means having no one need you. It usually comes packaged attractively: summers in Europe, spontaneous road trips, disappearing off-grid on weekends, money invested in “experiences.”
On its face, this framing sounds harmless—just another lifestyle choice.
But it reveals something deeper and far more troubling about the way modern culture has taught us to think about adulthood, fulfillment, and especially womanhood. There has been an undeniable shift in the way culture defines freedom—as an absence of responsibility rather than a deeper sense of purpose.
Travel is not new, nor is adventure. Leisure, beauty, and autonomy are all things women have wanted for as long as we have existed.
What is new is the insistence that responsibility is a threat to a good life rather than the very thing that gives it shape.
This cultural script doesn’t spare men, who are increasingly encouraged to delay commitment, avoid permanence, and treat responsibility as something to be taken on only once every other box is checked.
It is reinforced not only by economic pressure and social norms, but also by modern dating expectations, with financial security, status, and total readiness as prerequisites for being chosen, rather than qualities built in partnership.
However, it lands differently on women, who are more explicitly told motherhood and marriage are something to be escaped.
Motherhood, in particular, is now framed as the experience that ends your life rather than deepens it.
Children are treated as a cost center, a limitation, a trade-off that must be justified, while consumption, mobility, and self-optimization are treated as unquestioned goods.
The difference is not moral but material: Women feel the consequences of postponement more directly. They are more expressly pressured to believe that choosing family is a form of self-betrayal rather than self-authorship.
The most common rebuttal to critiques like this is predictable: If people without kids are truly happy, why do they need to announce it?
But that misses the point entirely.
This isn’t about convincing any single individual their life choices are valid. It’s about the story being told to young women who haven’t yet chosen anything at all.
Entire generations of women have been trained to believe they are “missing out” on life by choosing to create it. That becoming a mother ruins their lives.
These lies have consequences.
We tell women explicitly and implicitly that a life oriented around family, service, and sacrifice is a smaller life. That they will “find themselves” in consumption rather than creation. And perhaps most corrosively, that needing and being needed is a form of weakness.
This framing collapses under even minimal scrutiny.
You can see the world and still build one. You can invest and still create something that outlasts you. You can experience freedom and accept responsibility. These are not all opposing paths.
The real choice being offered isn’t between children and travel, it’s between a life oriented toward legacy and one optimized to avoid constraint.
We should be honest about which of those our culture now celebrates.
“Rich,” we are told, means liquid. Flexible. Untethered. But that definition only works if you believe life’s purpose is to remain perpetually available to experiences and upgrades. It assumes that the highest good is optionality.
Yet, the things we most admire in every other context are products of people who accept limits. Who tied themselves to others. Who gave up certain freedoms with the understanding that mastery in every craft and pursuit requires constraint, years spent saying no to other paths to build something coherent and meaningful.
No serious person would argue a society can sustain itself on consumption alone. Yet, we increasingly ask women to do exactly that at the personal level.
I became a mother recently, and nothing about it fits the caricature young women have been sold.
My life did not shrink. My sense of time did not flatten. The world didn’t get smaller; it got more serious and important.
No trip has ever rearranged my understanding of purpose the way becoming responsible for another human being has. This doesn’t mean that every woman must become a mother, or that childless people live empty lives. Those are lazy counterarguments, and they’re not what’s at stake here.
The problem is not individual choice. The problem is a culture that relentlessly frames creation as loss and detachment as elegant sophistication.
A society that teaches women to fear responsibility should not be surprised when it struggles to find meaning biologically, culturally, or morally.
At some point, we have to ask whether a life optimized only for freedom is actually free and whether avoiding sacrifice is the same thing as flourishing.
Deep down, most people instinctively know experiences don’t replace the slow, unglamorous work of building something that doesn’t end with you. One is designed to keep us moving, chasing endless novelty; the other is built to let us stay in contentment.
Europe will always be there—and I have heard they let children in! So will the open road.
Different priorities are fine. Different definitions of rich are inevitable. But we should be honest about what we are trading and who we are teaching to make that trade before they even know what they’re capable of building.