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Below, Jennifer Reid shares five key insights from her new book, Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations. Jennifer is a psychiatrist, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and busy mom of two boys. She is also the creator, host, and author of A Mind of Her Own podcast and Substack newsletter. Whats the big idea? Women are socialized to feel constant guiltnot because they are doing something wrong, but because they are held to impossible expectations. This guilt can be unlearned by understanding its roots and replacing self-criticism with healthier ways of caring, motivating, and relating. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Jennifer herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Guilt: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Guilt, in certain circumstances, can be a helpful emotion. For centuries, humans have used guilt to help them connect, collaborate, and build community because the ability to feel guilty when weve harmed someone expresses to them that we care enough to feel badly about what has happened. It also motivates us to try to make a repair. Guilt begins to lose its benefit, though, when we are victims of manipulative guilt, whether from our families, our social networks, or in our cultural experiences. Gosh, I wish you were able to visit us more often, but I guess youre really busy with your big, important job. Manipulative guilt can feel pretty terrible. The most toxic guilt, however, is the type of guilt so many women feel almost constantly. This generalized, self-critical guilt leads to thoughts like, Why cant I do anything right? and Why dont I ever feel like Im doing enough? Rather than responding to a particular harm weve committed, were feeling guilty for falling short on several sky-high, unreasonable expectations. Importantly, this is not because we are getting something wrong. This is something women have been socialized to experience, often from a very young age, by the people who care for us and the culture during our lives. We are taught to feel guilty, and we are excellent students. 2. The Four Furies of expectations. Our guilt triggers are incredibly diverse, involving our roles as friends, sisters, daughters, mothers, romantic partners, and employees. But the foundation of all this guilt is based on just two key factors: our expectations and our perceived reality. This is the Guilt Equation, which tells us that our guilt increases when what we believe we should be doing (our expectation) doesnt match what were able to accomplish (our reality). If, for example, we believe a good mother would never forget to pack a bagged lunch on a field trip day, and it slips our mind, here comes the intense guilt. The often unreasonably high expectations women face tend to fall into four main categories, which I call the Four Furies: We are expected to be constant caretakers, making sure everyone in our lives has everything they need, even if this means (and it often does) that we put ourselves last. We must be hyper-accountable, especially for other peoples thoughts and feelings, even though we dont have any actual control over these: Mom seems sad. If I were a good daughter, I would be able to say the right thing to cheer her up. We are expected to strive for perfection in all things, but especially in our bodies, our minds, and our self-control. We should be able to have it all, balancing each of our responsibilities effortlessly, even when we feel totally overwhelmed. 3. Guilty can be sneaky. Before beginning the process of lowering this guilt, its important to recognize another fundamental truth: guilt may be serving us in a variety of ways. We may believe we need this guilt because it provides us with something we really wantmotivation. After all, if we dont feel guilty for skipping a day at the gym or berating ourselves for choosing to sleep in a little instead of getting up with our alarm, then doesnt this mean we will simply give up on ourselves? Guilt can also become a protective stand-in for emotions we dont feel safe feeling, much less expressing, such as anger or frustration. We tell ourselves, I shouldnt be so upset that my partner didnt do what I asked. Hes been really stressed at work, and I should be more understanding. These benefits of guilt, however, are costly because they force us to believe we are getting something wrong, relying on harmful self-criticism to push us toward a goal. Or we repeatedly shift these difficult thoughts and feelings inward where they continue to make us miserable, with no relief in sight. Instead of guilt, we can learn to tap into healthier and more beneficial strategies, such as using self-compassion to enhance motivation and allowing ourselves to experience the full range of natural human emotions. We can also focus our all-important attention on the ways we are already showing up, and the many things we are doing well. Guilt can also become a protective stand-in for emotions we dont feel safe feeling, much less expressing, such as anger or frustration. In addition, although we cant control the thoughts and feelings of people in our lives, we can shape our interactions with them through crucial communication strategies, including learning to accept disappointment in ourselves and others, being clear and consistent with our boundaries, and practicing the powerful art of delegation, even when were met with an eye roll or other clear expressions of frustration. 4. We can SPEAK up for less guilt. To learn concrete steps for lowering guilt, Id like to introduce SPEAK: Showing Up Paying Attention Examining the Evidence Taking Action Keep Going By showing up, you are telling yourself that you are important enough to warrant time, attention, and care, which is no small thing. Paying attention involves becoming a curious, non-judgmental observer of your thoughts and feelings throughout the day, which later allows you to examine the evidence for helpful clues about your own unique guilt triggers. As you gain these crucial insights, you can begin to take action. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach but instead, it allows you to use the strategies you find most helpful. You could challenge unreasonable expectations by learning to limit unhealthy comparisons, especially with strangers on social media. You can rewrite unfair childhood scripts such as being labeled the girl who took care of everybody, by learning about cognitive restructuring, which involves treating your initial guilty or self-critical thoughts as rough drafts, rather than the final product. You can strengthen your sense of self-efficacy by adopting a growth mindset and using tools from positive psychology to reject the idea that you must be perfect to be loved. Finally, and most importantly, you can vow to just keep at it, every single day. 5. Lowering guilt for ourselves and future genrations. We have been socialized to feel guilty, repeatedly reminded that we should be striving for unreachable levels of caretaking, accountability, perfection, and life balance. This has not occurred on an individual level, however, but rather as a delayed shift of the expectations women continue to face, even as weve fought for and achieved more opportunities to create the families, careers, and lives we most desire. This can be our legacy: living our best lives with far less guilt. But this also represents an opportunity for massive change. Much has been written about intergenerational transmission of trauma, a powerful influence on future populations down to the level of their gene expression. What this suggests is the considerable potential for women of this timethrough our refusal to continue living with constant guilt, unfair expectations, and overlooked contributionsto create a cascade of agency and empowerment that affects generations of women to come. This can be our legacy: living our best lives with far less guilt. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
It now takes more than 23 weeks on average for an unemployed person in the US to find a new job. For 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, they are still job hunting six months later. Long-term unemployment is now at its highest level in three years. Thats not great news for those affected by the layoffs sweeping through companies like Target, Amazon, Nike and Pinterest in the first months of the year. As of January 2026, there are 386,000 more long-term unemployed Americansthose who have been looking for jobs for more than 27 weeksthan there were in January 2025. How did we get here? A low-hire, low-fire environment defined much of 2025 and is now carrying over into 2026. While this has kept the unemployment rate historically low, at just over 4% in December, news of corporate layoffs wereand still arenever far from the headlines. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009. U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, compared to 1.46 million in 2024. Private employers added 22,000 jobs in January, payroll processor ADP reported last week, again far fewer than economists had predicted. Another upshot of a low-hire, low-fire environmentfewer people quitting their jobs, with most opting to sit tight in their roles and ride out a tumultuous economy. This perfect storm means those in need of a job are having a harder time finding one. Its simple math: The supply of job seekers is far outpacing demand. Roughly one million more people are seeking work than there were available jobs as of December, according to BLS data analyzed by Indeed. By now, theyve also exhausted their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits in many cases, which replace less than 40% of a persons previous income on average. The long-term unemployment issue shows no signs of abating. Instead, faced with a stagnant market and a broken social contract, many are getting creative with solutions. The unemployed-to-self-employed pipeline has never been stronger. Others are channelling their inner doomsday prepper. Some, instead of spending their days poring over job listings or firing out résumés, are simply accepting their fate and reframing it as their funemployment era. Whatever the casea lot of Americans are out of work. And staying that way for a long time.
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E-Commerce
Gary Vaynerchuk prides himself on being ahead of the curve. As the chairman of communications company VaynerX and the cofounder of Resy, not to mention an angel investor in brands like Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and Venmo, he knows a thing or two about trends in business. And in a new interview with CBS Mornings, he shared what he thinks is to blame for consumer burnout: not advertisers, social media, or even consumers themselvesbut modern parenting. I think that parenting needs to be called out of the last 40 years, Vaynerchuk said. I believe that the burnout, the insecurity, all the stuff we talk about, I believe the reason we’re buying more stuff is, we’re using it as Band-Aids and glitter because we’re not strong enough to be secure in what we are and who we are and what we have. What many people blame on an oversaturated market and the omnipresence of social media, Vaynerchuk attributes to overly lax parenting. After all, he says, being inundated with ads is nothing new. We grew up with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. MTV Cribs had plenty of run, he pointed out. We want to blame technology for a much bigger issue, which is modern parenting misstepped. We don’t hold kids accountable, we don’t ground, we definitely don’t whoop. Vaynerchuk claimed he receives tens of thousands of DMs from 20-to-30-year-olds every month that often cite frustration with being coddled by parents, from being tracked on apps like Life360 into adulthood, to having their lives bankrolled with no expectation of paying their family back. We’re sending these kids into the real world, and we’re wondering why they’re depressed,” Vaynerchuk continued. “They’re depressed because they weren’t taught any accountability. Eighth place trophies for everyone.” We’ve demonized losing, when losing is the teacher,” he added. View this post on Instagram A post shared by CBS Mornings (@cbsmornings) Elsewhere in the interview, Vaynerchuk gave his predictions for the next big industry in Americalive shopping, already a half-trillion dollar industry in China, is where social media in 2009 wasas well as for the future of artificial intelligence. All of it is gonna lead to us having more time for leisure, he said. I think there’s a scenario where we go to a four-day work week because of efficiencies and subsidies from the biggest winners in AI.” People are worried about losing money,” Vaynerchuk continued. “People are scared of losing their jobs. But the tractor was invented when 80% of us worked on farms 200 years ago, and we found new jobs . . . Instead of, wah, wah, wah, what about, Let me take control of it? What about all the people that might get inspired by this interview, and get a job in three years that pays them three times more that they’re happy about, because they took the AI surfboard instead of putting their head in the sand?
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E-Commerce
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