If you're sick of societal expectations, consider poking one to see whether there's actually anything there

It might just be your own reflection, shimmering like a mirage

I’m Jordan Call, a former lawyer turned writer and stay-at-home dad. This is my blog The Fare Well Files, where I write about—well, whatever I want, but often things like parenting, creativity, AI, and the evils of the Sun. Subscribe! It’s free! You know you want to!

Just a kid (mine) making summer memories with an expensive toy (her shadow)

I woke up way too early this morning, so as usual, I poured myself a fresh, steaming mug of Substack to start the day. The first article I happened upon was this one from The Pomegranate by Lauren Ahmed, published I think like five minutes ago:

Stop Trying to Make 90s Summer Happen

In it, Ahmed describes “90’s Summer,” how great it was, and how difficult it is to replicate nowadays, because we’re all oversubscribed in every aspect of our lives, and the fabric of 90’s Summer was woven with space, independence, and boredom.

I can confirm that 90’s Summer was great, and that the way that we as Millennials have structured ours and our children’s lives makes it difficult to recreate. I don’t feel the need to hand-wring about this: different doesn’t necessarily mean worse, and many of the trade-offs we’ve made are reasonable ones.

But towards the end, the piece has a section that bemoans society’s unreasonable expectations placed on parents, especially mothers (emphasis mine):

As their mom, however, I am a lot more stressed out than I need to be not only because of the insane misalignment between childcare schedules and work (a system that will inevitably force a reckoning sooner than later) but because society expects me to do both. I need to be an accomplished career woman and provider and also give my kids a magical summer that defies every aspect of our 2025 infrastructure. I need to give my kids enrichment opportunities, but not too much because that will rob them of spontaneity. I need to give my kids the independence to wander, but not so much that a neighbor calls the police to inquire about who, exactly, is responsible for these children. We need to teach our kids to code to fight the bogeyman of “summer learning loss,” but we also need to give them 1,000 Hours Outside.

The idea that “society expects” is a strange one to me. I have a couple genuine questions:

First, what we mean by “society”—is it friends and family? People on the internet? Weirdo strangers who try to give you unsolicited advice for your life? (I know this does happen occasionally, from personal experience!)

Second, I'm curious what it means that such group of people “expects” something from us. My background is in law, so laws are the first thing I think of when we talk about how Society creates and enforces expectations. Obviously this isn’t that.

I’m guessing that this is talking about some kind of social shaming—that the expectations are communicated by stuff people say in person or on the internet, and the enforcement mechanism is social disapproval for non-compliance. Is that it? (Again, genuine question.)

I ask because I am a stay-at-home dad, which certainly is a socially unusual path. I think I could fairly say that most people would “expect” me to work outside the home in the way you'd expect a dog to like bacon, even though not all necessarily do. But I almost never feel socially shamed for doing this. And I know scores of stay-at-home moms, and I almost never see or hear anyone shame that choice either, especially because this is a very established and well-trodden path for women, historically. But by that same token, I also know lots of full-time working mothers. And most people seem to respect that path too!

So to me, it’s not obvious that “society expects” any of this—and even if it did in some way, I’m even less sure that it matters.

But I must be wrong about this, because this isn’t just a passing sentiment in a one-off piece. It’s a feeling I see expressed all the time: society has unreasonable expectations and makes too many unrealistic demands, especially on parents.

If you could snap your fingers and make this not the case, how great would that be? Is such a thing even possible?

I think it may very well be.

I have a theory about many of these kinds of societal expectations. It seems to me that in many cases, when we think Everyone Demands that we do something, what’s really going on is that we have a Voice In Our Head that is making the demands.¹ We feel like we should be doing more, we feel guilty for our supposed shortcomings, we feel like we’re not enough. Most of us are masters of self-imposed pressure and expectations. But rather than interrogate that voice, which feels like part of us, we externalize it, and say that it’s everyone else that is turning the screws. We think we’re being judged. We think everyone is watching and clucking.

I’ve felt this before. A trivial example from my life comes from the various times I’ve done content creation—my YouTube channel, Instagram pages for my band, and this Substack. In all of these cases, I’ve felt pressure to post “regularly,” whether weekly or daily or whatever. I thought that all of my adoring fans (which number in the sixes or sevens, not counting my mom) would be annoyed or disappointed or judge if I missed my schedule.

Then, I realized something: absolutely nobody cares. And if they do happen to care, then on their list of things they care about, it ranks at right around number 512,902. My new rule of thumb is if you’re wondering what people think about you, the answer is: they don’t. They’re all too busy thinking about what everybody is thinking about them. I guarantee that the person who does 99.99% of the thinking about you is you.

And again, the irony is that I actually think the overwhelming majority of people respect both working and full-time parents who don’t “do both”²—when they think about those parents at all.

So it may not happen with the snap of your fingers, but I think it can happen with a snap of your mindset.

If anyone thinks I may be right about this and is looking to make this snap in their own lives, I'd highly recommend the work of Paul Millerd, especially his book The Pathless Path. It’s a case study in learning to break away from supposed societal expectations, facing and processing your own expectations for yourself, and building a life that genuinely fulfills you without worrying about what anyone thinks.

At the end of the Pomegranate piece in question, this is exactly what Ahmed decides she’s going to do: shrug off society’s expectations and just focus on doing what works for her family and career (emphasis mine):

I can’t snap my fingers and make it the 90s again, but I can give my kids a real 90s summer. Like my parents, I can decide that I am only going to do what I can do with the hours, finances, and kids in front of me. Sometimes, by necessity, that’s more and sometimes it’s less. While I will make a point to be the maximum amount of flexible when people in my orbit are battling impossible summer childcare schedules, I refuse to imbue summer with any kind of special power. I’m not going to make it an elaborate set piece instead of just a season. The truth is that we don’t need to curate a specific experience just because the temperatures outside are climbing. We can even accept that as times change, it’s okay for our kids to someday be nostalgic for streaming the Minecraft movie instead of going to Blockbuster video (RIP to the unique carpet smell). Ultimately, the pressure is off: childhood is fun because it’s childhood, not because we spent it at the pool versus the YMCA day camp. The most 90s thing I’m doing this summer is refusing to measure any absurd KPIs to determine if my kids are bored or scheduled enough.

Hear, hear. This is exactly the move. The only thing I question about this paragraph is whether there was really any pressure on in the first place.

1. I don’t disagree that this voice may very well have been planted by someone external to us that we’ve encountered, perhaps when we were young and impressionable. Could be a parent, could be a stranger, could be a message we saw on TV. But if your threshold for “societal pressure” is “someone is out there saying it,” then I have bad news, because anybody can say anything, and somebody out there always does.

2. Obviously working parents are still fully parents, but definitionally they can’t be said to be “full-time parents,” otherwise, that term wouldn’t mean anything.