Delulu Is the Solulu

Somewhere between 2023 and now, the internet decided that ambition needed a girl-coded translation. "Lucky girl syndrome" told women to manifest raises and acceptance letters by just insisting they were already lucky. "Delulu is the solulu" turned self-delusion into an actual strategy, with half joke, half genuine advice. "That girl" woke up at 5 a.m., journaled, and drank her celery juice before conquering a to-do list that looked suspiciously like a McKinsey slide. Ambition, once the domain of the girlboss (a word we have already buried, mocked, and half-heartedly tried to resurrect), got smaller, softer, and somehow more palatable, with a pink bow and a POV caption. (And yes, the thumbnail is in fact, the girl who first taught all of us we could do both, Elle Woods)

Most commentary on girl-trends wants to settle whether they're good or bad, empowering or regressive, and then move on. I kept getting stuck on the part after that. What happens to ambition when it has to disguise itself as luck, delusion, or a morning routine just to be spoken about at all. Who gets to skip the disguise. What it would even sound like if a girl were allowed to just say she wanted something, and worked for it, without the cover story. I didn't have anywhere to actually sit with those questions, so I started building the place myself. Oh, and you're actually in it right now.

"Not-Trying"

Girl math taught us to reframe spending as though we were bad at arithmetic. Lucky girl syndrome does something similar to ambition, by reframing working for something as having been chosen for something. You didn't grind for the internship, you were always going to get it, you just had to believe it first. The result is, a cosplay. Girls achieving real things while performing as though achievement fell into their laps, because wanting something out loud, and clearly working for it, still reads as unattractive, unfeminine, a little too much.

None of this is new. It's the same logic that had women in the 2000s calling themselves "not like other girls" for having ambitions coded as masculine, except now the move is inverted. Instead of distancing from girlhood to be taken seriously, you stay inside girlhood and just insist the ambition was never really yours to begin with. It was luck. It was delulu. It was the universe. Anyone but you, actually wanting it.

This is the exact knot Lore's Money & Ambition vertical exists to untangle. Not another girlboss listicle, and not the flattened opposite either, where wanting things gets treated as embarrassing unless it's seen in soft-life aesthetics. Just girls writing plainly about what they want and what it's actually costing them to get it.

Reneé, Chappell, and the Girl Who Wants Things on Purpose

Compare the lucky girl to the recent run of pop stars who have made wanting things loudly into the actual subject of their music. Chappell Roan's rise has been narrated almost entirely around her refusal to perform gratitude on demand, declining to shrink, publicly naming the terms she wants from fame instead of accepting whatever shape it's handed to her in. Sabrina Carpenter's public persona plays with hyper-femininity while making it clear that her ambition is no accident. The girlishness is the branding, not a way to hide the fact that she worked, methodically, for over a decade before anyone noticed. Reneé Rapp has said, more than once, that she's tired of being asked to be humble about wanting a career this badly.

None of these are "lucky girls." They are girls who want things on purpose and have started to say so, which is a different register entirely from manifesting a promotion while insisting you already deserve it without naming that you also fought for it. If lucky girl syndrome is ambition laundered through modesty, this is ambition stated plainly, and it's telling that it still reads, to a lot of people, as abrasive.

I wanted Lore's Culture & Identity vertical to take artists like this seriously as evidence, not just as content. When a seventeen year old reader sees Chappell Roan refuse to be grateful on cue, that's material for thinking through her own life, not just a clip to reshare.

Motility, Again

Iris Young's account of "throwing like a girl" describes how girls learn early to under-use the space available to them, taking up less room than they physically could, whether in a doorway, a job interview, or a room full of louder voices. Ambition has its own version of this restricted motility. A boy who wants a thing says so and reaches for it. A girl who wants a thing has historically needed a cover story: luck, delulu, a vision board, anything except the plain sentence I decided I wanted this and I am going to get it.

What "that girl" and "lucky girl syndrome" actually reveal isn't that young women have suddenly become obsessed with manifestation. It's that ambition still has to be snuck in through softer language to be socially legible. The girls in these videos aren't lazy or delusional. Often, they're working extremely hard. The aesthetic just requires them to narrate that work as ease, luck, or destiny, because narrating it as effort still risks sounding like a girlboss, and we've collectively decided the girlboss is embarrassing now.

This is why Lore has a Power & Politics vertical sitting right next to Worn and Spill. The way a girl learns to take up less room doesn't stay contained to one part of her life. It shows up in how she talks about a promotion and how she talks about a government, in what she'll argue for out loud and what she'll only admit in a confession she thinks no one important is reading.

Who Gets to Skip the Cover Story

Who gets to drop the pretense entirely also matters. The girls filming "get ready for the 9-to-5 I manifested" content are already resourced enough that luck was never really the operative variable. Meanwhile, the ambition of a first-generation founder, or a girl running a chapter of something in a country where "founder" isn't a word girls are handed casually, doesn't get the luxury of being called luck. It has to be named, defended, and justified in a business plan, because no one is going to assume it happened to her by accident. The softness of "lucky girl syndrome" is itself a privilege. Only some girls' ambition gets received charitably enough to be reframed as fate rather than interrogated as an overreach.

I started EmpoweredGirlhood at fifteen, and I have never called any of it luck. I'm building Lore because I want a place where a girl writing about wanting something badly doesn't have to translate that ambition into an aesthetic before anyone will take her seriously enough to listen.

Where This Leaves the Girl Who Wants Things

The answer isn't to reject girl-coded language altogether and speak only in the flat, humorless register the girlboss era demanded. Some of the softness is useful. It makes ambition less isolating to talk about, easier to admit to a friend group, less like a TED Talk. But there's a difference between using softness as a way in to talking about wanting things, and using it as a way to hide that you wanted them at all.

That's the entire premise behind Lore. A place for girls to enjoy this, rant about this, learn about this, and write about all of it and so much more, without having to choose between being taken seriously and being allowed to be a girl about it. The girls I find most convincing right now, on stage, in my group chats, running their own small operations before anyone's given them permission to call it that, are the ones doing both at once: dressing ambition up in whatever aesthetic makes it bearable to talk about out loud, while still being completely unwilling to call it luck. That, and the vision board, is what Lore is for.