You can’t have it all

The phrase was never a lie about what’s possible. It was a trap in how we measure a life.

When Jérémy Doku left Belgium’s World Cup camp to be at the birth of his first child, a pundit on French television called childbirth a disgusting moment at which the father is useless. He serves no purpose, she said. He holds a hand, takes a photo, an extra in the room. Hundreds of footballers would kill to be at a World Cup, and here was one proposing to leave it for an event that did not even require him.

Doku went home. His son was born. He flew back, and Belgium lost nothing on the pitch. He was there for his child and he was there for his team, and neither cost the other anything. If the phrase “having it all” describes a real state that a person can actually occupy, then this, surely, was it.

A continent argued about it anyway. Which tells you the problem was never whether you can have it all. Here was a man who plainly did, for one clean weekend, and it produced not satisfaction but a row, because what actually offended people was not that he had failed at something. It was that he had refused to treat his life as a set of separate things competing for the same hours, and had the nerve to be right.

Except he didn’t, of course. Look closely and the seams show immediately. He was there for the birth, for however many hours a ten-hour flight each way permits, and then he left again, which means his partner did the part that comes after, the first nights, the raw disoriented early days, without him, holding a newborn while the father of that newborn was in another country being a winger. He carried whatever it costs a person to do that, to hold his son and then get on a plane. And the team trained without one of their players for the better part of a week. Did that lose Belgium the tournament? Almost certainly not. Belgium were not winning the World Cup. But “it probably didn’t matter” is not the same as “it cost nothing,” and the honest version is that every part of this involved a real sacrifice by someone, quietly absorbed, in service of a weekend that still gets described as him managing to do it all.

That is the actual condition, and it is not a female one. It is not even a modern one. It is simply what a life is: a set of genuine commitments that do not fit inside the same set of hours, so that honouring one always means shorting another, and the only real question is who absorbs the shortfall and whether anyone admits it happened. “Having it all” is the phrase we use to pretend this arithmetic can be beaten. It cannot be beaten. It can only be hidden, usually by a woman, usually for free.

Where the phrase came from

The phrase arrived in 1982, on the cover of a book. Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money, Even If You’re Starting With Nothing, by Helen Gurley Brown, who edited Cosmopolitan for a living and was, by then, in her late fifties. It became a kind of scripture for a certain sort of ambitious woman, and the title outlived the book so completely that almost nobody now remembers the book had a subtitle, or an argument, or an author who meant something particular by it.

Here is the part that should have been a clue. Helen Gurley Brown never had children. Did not want them, never had them, and wrote accordingly: her “all” was love, work, money, sex, the life of a woman who had built something from nothing. Motherhood was simply not in it. The children that now sit at the dead centre of the phrase, the ones whose bedtimes and school plays and first steps make the whole equation impossible, were not in the original at all. They were added afterwards, by other people, quietly, until “having it all” came to mean the one thing its author had specifically arranged her life to exclude.

And once the children were in, the sum stopped working, which was rather the point. A career held to the standard of someone with no family, a family tended to the standard of someone with no job, a marriage, a body, a home, each maintained as though it were the only thing being asked of you. Nobody could clear it. It was never designed to be cleared. It was designed to be aspired to and fallen short of, permanently, by women who would then understand the shortfall as a personal failing rather than a rigged sum, and who would buy a great many magazines in the course of trying to close it.

What almost nobody did was point out that the arithmetic was impossible for everyone, and always had been. That a man with a demanding job and three children was also, by any honest accounting, not having it all: he was missing things, constantly, by simple absence, and the only reason it went unremarked was that nobody had thought to hold him to the standard in the first place. The impossibility was universal. The accusation was selective. And the phrase did its most lasting damage not by lying about whether you could have everything, but by teaching an entire generation to see a life as a set of separate accounts, each to be settled in full.

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The trouble with separate accounts

Notice what the accounting model does to a day. It takes a single, continuous life, the only one you have, lived in one body across one set of hours, and it partitions it into departments. Work here. Parenting there. Marriage in its own column, health in another, the self - your identity and purpose - somewhere at the bottom, usually overdrawn. Each department gets its own standard, and, this is the ruinous part, the standard is set by the people who do only that.

You measure your work against the colleague with no children. You measure your parenting against the mother who does not work. You measure your marriage against the couples who seem to have endless unclaimed time for each other, and your body against people whose actual job is their body. Every one of these comparisons is rigged, because every one holds you to the output of someone spending all of their hours on the single thing you are spending a fraction of yours on. Held that way, you are failing everywhere simultaneously, all the time, by definition. Not because you are doing badly. Because the measurement was never survivable.

This is the engine underneath the exhaustion, and it is worth being precise that it is not the same thing as being busy. Busy is a volume problem, solvable in principle by doing less. This is a framing problem, and it survives doing less perfectly intact. You can clear the calendar, take the sabbatical, drop to four days, and still lie awake running the same audit, behind on work, behind on the children, behind on the marriage, behind on yourself, because the audit was never about how much you were doing. It was about measuring five part-time lives against five full-time standards and recording the gap as personal failure.

And the gap cannot be closed by effort, which is the cruelty of it, because effort is precisely what it demands. The harder you push on one account the further behind you fall on the others, so the ledger always shows red somewhere, and the red always reads as your fault, as insufficient trying, when it is nothing of the kind. It is arithmetic. You are being asked to be five people, and you are one, and the shortfall you are punishing yourself for is simply the distance between those two numbers.

The machine that keeps score for you

There was, once, a natural ceiling on how many people you could measure yourself against. You knew the mothers at the school gate, the colleagues on your floor, a handful of friends. The comparison set was small and, mercifully, made of actual humans with visible flaws. The internet removed the ceiling.

Now the standard is delivered to you, continuously, on every account at once. Here is a woman with visible abs at six in the morning, filming her cold plunge, and the health ledger updates: behind. Here is someone’s renovated kitchen, spotless and styled and child-free in the frame: behind. A founder announcing a raise, a couple on an anniversary trip, a friend’s five-year-old reading two years above her age. Every swipe is another full-time standard held up against your part-time reality, and the machine is tuned to serve you precisely the ones that will land.

And every so often, someone says the quiet part into a microphone: Emma Grede, who built Skims and Good American and is about as successful as the model allows a person to be, went viral for telling women that working from home is a career killer. Careers require proximity and visibility, she said. You want the pay rise, the promotion, the corner office? You need to be there. When it blew up she doubled down, called it career suicide, said she believed it hit women hardest. The uncomfortable part is that she is not simply wrong. Visibility does help. That is exactly why it lands as it does: not as a lie to be dismissed but as confirmation, from someone who made it, that there is yet another ledger you are quietly failing, and that the failing is your own fault for not being in the room. She was not being cruel. She was reading out the score.

It is not, set against all this, remotely surprising that six in ten senior women report being frequently burned out. It gets explained as a workload problem, and workload is real. But these are the women who have come closest to assembling the whole impossible set, the career and the family and the rest of it, which means they are the ones with the most accounts open at once and the most standards streaming in against each. Exhaustion is not a failure to cope. It is the correct response to being scored, continuously and simultaneously, in five games by judges who are each only watching one.

Seasons, not scorecards

Here is what the ledger cannot hold, and what the phrase was built to hide: a life is not lived in parallel. It is lived in sequence. It has seasons, and the defining feature of a season is that some things are dormant in it, on purpose, without that dormancy being a failure.

Nobody stands in a field in January and marks it down for not producing wheat. The field is not underperforming. It is doing the thing that fields do in winter, which is to hold, and rest, and wait for the part of the year that asks something different of it. We understand this instinctively about land and about almost nothing else. Certainly not about ourselves. A person whose work is dormant while their children are small is not failing at work. A person whose social life has gone quiet during the hardest year of building a business has not failed at friendship. They are in a season, and the season has a shape, and the shape includes things deliberately left fallow so that other things can have what they need.

The scorecard cannot see this, because the scorecard takes a snapshot and grades every account in the frame at once, in the same instant, against its own full-time ideal. It has no concept of later. It cannot tell the difference between a friendship that has ended and a friendship that is simply resting through a period when you have nothing spare to give it. It reads every fallow field as a barren one. And so it convicts you, permanently, of failing to do simultaneously what was only ever meant to be done in turn.

None of which makes the choosing painless, and this is the part the gentler version of this essay would skip. Seasons involve loss. The year your work is dormant is a year of your work that does not happen, and you do not get it back, and some opportunities will pass and not return. The friend you cannot show up for may not wait. Choosing what a season is for means choosing, by the same act, what it is not for, and that is a real cost paid in real things, not a mindset adjustment that dissolves it. The difference is only this: a cost you have chosen, in service of something you have named, is a season. A cost extracted from you invisibly, while you try to keep every account topped up at once, is just attrition. Both hurt. Only one of them means anything.

What a life actually is

Which returns us to Doku, and to what the row was actually about.

The comforting version of this essay would tell you he found the answer: he sequenced it, flew home, flew back, had the birth and the tournament both, proof that with enough resolve the clash dissolves. But that is not what happened. The birth and the World Cup fell in the same handful of days. They could not both be fully had. He chose the room his son was born in, and in choosing it he gave something up, the days of preparation, the full focus, whatever a father surrenders by being on a plane during the first raw nights. There was no arrangement of the calendar that made the cost disappear. There was only the choice, and the price of it, paid.

That is not a failure of having it all. That is what a life is. The wheat and the barley sometimes ripen in the same week, and you cannot be in two fields at once, so you decide which one, knowing what the deciding costs. Every honest life is a long sequence of exactly these decisions, most of them far smaller than a World Cup, all of them real.

“Having it all” was only ever a promise that the choosing could be avoided. It is not a hard thing made achievable by effort. It is an impossible thing, sold as a standard, to people who then spent their lives feeling they had personally failed to reach it.

You will never have it all. Nobody has, including the people who appeared to, including the woman who coined the phrase and quietly built her life around not attempting it. What you have instead is the choosing. The only question worth anything is whether you are making those choices on purpose, in the light, knowing what each one costs, or whether you are letting a scorecard you never agreed to make them for you, and calling the exhaustion that results a personal shortcoming.

One of those is a life. The other is regret.