The "We Do Not Care" Club Has Gone Global. No Wonder.

February 10, 2026|Tania Mullan

SOMA WELLNESS CO. | WELLNESS JOURNAL

The "We Do Not Care" Club Has Gone Global. No Wonder.

Why midlife women are finally dropping the nonsense, keeping what matters, and refusing to perform for everyone else. A love letter to the slippers you wore to Woolies and did not regret.

SOMA Wellness Co. · February 2026 · 13 min read

Quick Answer: Why has the We Do Not Care Club resonated with so many midlife women?

Because it gave women a funny, honest name for something many were already doing: withdrawing energy from low-stakes performance and redirecting it towards what genuinely matters.

Midlife can bring hormonal change, disrupted sleep, stress and decades of accumulated responsibility. Age can also sharpen priorities. Selective not caring is not giving up. It is often discernment.

You are standing in Woolies in your slippers. Not the cute "just popping out for milk" slippers. The actual ones. The ones that have seen things.

You clock it somewhere around aisle four. Five years ago, you would have gone home and changed, mortified. Today you look at the bananas, look at your feet, and think: honestly, the bananas do not care, and neither do I.

Your bra came off the second you got in the door last night and did not go back on for the school run this morning. The washing has been living in the basket for three days and nobody has perished. Someone at the barbecue made a comment about your jeans and you felt precisely nothing.

Not rage. Not collapse. Not even a beautifully organised comeback in the shower three hours later. Nothing.

None of this used to be true about you. Or it was true, and you would have died before admitting it out loud.

If any of that sounds familiar, congratulations. You may already be a member of the We Do Not Care Club.

It started with one woman in a car park

On 13 May 2025, Florida content creator and mother of three Melani Sanders filmed herself from her car in a grocery-store car park. She could not find a proper bra, so she had left the house in a too-small sports bra with everything apparently choosing its own direction. She announced that she no longer cared.

Then she invited her perimenopausal, menopausal and postmenopausal sisters to add their own lists.

The response was immediate. PEOPLE reported about 200,000 likes and 24,000 replies to the original post. By the end of 2025, The Guardian was describing a worldwide sisterhood with millions of followers across Instagram and TikTok, along with local chapters started by women who recognised themselves in it. Sanders was named PEOPLE's 2025 Creator of the Year, and The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook followed in January 2026.

The movement also reached women with enormous platforms. Sanders appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show with Halle Berry, Ashley Judd made a tribute post, and Sharon Stone was among the public figures following along. But the reason it travelled was not celebrity. It was recognition.

"It's a true sisterhood. I could never have dreamed this." — Melani Sanders, speaking to PEOPLE, December 2025

Sanders did not invent women being tired of nonsense. She gave it a name, a laugh and somewhere to gather.

Why it hit this hard, this fast

Because midlife women have spent decades being expected to care about everything.

The children's needs. The partner's mood. The ageing parents. The birthday cards. The school forms. The appointment nobody else remembered to book. The house looking visitor-ready. The tone of the group chat. Whether you seemed grateful enough, polite enough, helpful enough, low-maintenance enough, attractive enough, softly spoken enough and somehow still fun.

There are only so many tabs a woman can keep open before the browser crashes and starts playing a video from 1990.

By midlife, the system is overloaded. Something has to give. What often gives first is the small, performative stuff that was never actually yours to carry in the first place.

"Midlife does not make you care about life less. It makes you care more about what really counts." — Tarnia, Founder, SOMA Wellness Co.

There is a biological layer, but it is not the whole story

No, oestrogen does not flip a secret "stop caring" switch in the brain. The joke is cultural because the load is cultural. But biology is still in the room.

The Australasian Menopause Society notes that hormonal changes, disrupted sleep and psychosocial stress can all contribute to mood changes, irritability, anxiety and difficulty concentrating during the menopause transition. That does not explain every boundary you set. It does help explain why the old margin for absorbing everybody else's needs can feel thinner.

There is also a broader ageing pattern here. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen's work on socioemotional selectivity suggests that as people become more conscious that time is finite, they tend to prioritise emotionally meaningful goals and relationships over peripheral ones. In plain English: time starts to feel too valuable for nonsense.

Put that beside broken sleep, changing hormones, work, caregiving, children, parents and a lifetime of being praised for being endlessly accommodating, and the club starts to look less like apathy and more like triage.

"I have ADHD, I'm perimenopausal, I don't know how my frontal lobe's doing, I'm concerned for her!" — Em Rusciano, Australian comedian and writer, Star Observer, November 2025

This is not the same as letting yourself go

Not caring is not the same as having no standards. Women in the We Do Not Care Club are not suddenly careless, cold or selfish. They are questioning standards that were handed to them so early, and repeated so often, that they began to feel like facts.

The perfect mother. The agreeable colleague. The cheerful daughter. The calm partner. The friend who always replies. The woman who keeps her body, home, face, children, inbox, mood and tone acceptable at all times.

Honestly, it was never sustainable. It just looked impressive from the outside.

You did not necessarily lower the bar. You finally asked who put it there, why it was set so high, and whether it was load-bearing at all.

What we no longer care about

In no particular order, and with zero apology:

whether the socks match
whether the house is visitor-ready or simply lived-in
the eyebrows being sisters, twins or former acquaintances
whether dinner is technically "things on toast"
leaving the party before dessert, or before 7pm, honestly
whether the swimmers can be seen from space
the group chat deciding we have "gone quiet"
being called "too much" or "not enough" by people who were never going to be satisfied either way
having opinions now, out loud, without warming the room up first
who sees the slippers at the supermarket

What we still care about, deeply

This is the actual point. The club was never really about not caring at all.

our health
our children becoming decent humans
friendships that feel mutual, not one-sided
bodies being supported, not punished
time being respected, including by us
homes that feel lived in, not staged for an audience
peace
truth
the women we are becoming

The We Do Not Care Club is not about giving up on life. It is about giving your energy back to the parts of life that actually deserve it.

The awkward bit: freedom can feel like guilt at first

When you stop people-pleasing, it does not always feel like freedom straight away. Sometimes it feels like guilt wearing freedom's coat.

You might over-explain why you left early. You might send a six-paragraph message to support the sentence "I can't take that on". You might soften a boundary five seconds after setting it because the old training is still very committed to the role.

And people who benefited from the endlessly available version of you may not clap for the new one.

That does not mean the boundary is wrong. It means the old arrangement has noticed you are no longer doing unpaid emotional overtime.

Your first official We Do Not Care audit

Try this this week — care about one thing 10 percent less. Ask yourself: What am I caring about that does not actually matter? Who taught me I had to care about it? What would happen if I cared about it 10 percent less? What would I have more energy for if I dropped it? What do I still care about, deeply, no question?

Then choose one small performance to stop this week. Leave the towels unfolded. Decline the thing you do not want to attend. Wear the comfortable shoes. Answer the message tomorrow. Do not begin with your entire life. Begin with one thing. Release the pressure one choice at a time.

One important distinction

Selective relief sounds like: "I no longer care whether the neighbour approves of my garden, but I care very much about my daughter, my health and the friend I have been meaning to call."

Persistent loss of interest sounds different. If everything feels flat, you have withdrawn from what you normally value, low mood is continuing, or you feel hopeless or unsafe, please speak with your GP or another trusted health professional. In Australia, Beyond Blue is available on 1300 22 4636 and Lifeline on 13 11 14.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

"I have always been better at pushing through than stopping…"

I am a Type A woman who can set ridiculous standards just to feel half as good as everyone else. When my health began to decline in my mid-40s, I did not make life smaller or kinder. I tightened my grip and tried harder, partly to prove I could still live the life I had always lived.

I grew up with that old 1980s misogynistic story that women over 40 "let themselves go". That their ambitious years were over and their value now lived mostly in what they could do for everyone else. I reject that story. I have been a mother since I was 20 years old. I love my children fiercely, and I want this third act to hold some of the dreams I put down while raising them.

The difficult part is learning the difference between wanting more from life and demanding more from myself. Social media does not help. Everyone is performing the home, the business, the body and the morning routine, while becoming a better version of themselves before breakfast. I have spent years trying to be better than I was last week, last month, last year. It is exhausting.

The We Do Not Care Club did not make me stop caring. It planted a seed that perhaps I could stop caring about everything. It gave me permission to laugh at myself, take myself less seriously and ask what I could safely put down. With my health, the stakes are real. If I keep forcing my body to perform at the pace my mind demands, I know I can end up back in a wheelchair.

The funeral test is blunt, but useful. Will it matter that there were dishes in my sink? No. That my hair spent roughly two decades in a mum bun? No. That my nails were never manicured, my feet never pedicured, or that I sometimes arrived at a friend's house in my pyjamas? Also no. Will it matter that my children became good humans, capable of meeting life? Yes. That I did my best to show up as a decent human myself? Yes. That I gave this third act a real chance without sacrificing my body to the performance of it? Absolutely.

For me, the club is not an encouragement to give up. It is permission to sit the performance down for a minute and work out what really counts.

With warmth, Tarnia Mullan Founder, SOMA Wellness Co.

If this is your first time here: a steadier way through midlife

SOMA Wellness Co. is an Australian nervous-system brand created for women who feel wired, depleted or unlike themselves in the rocky middle of perimenopause and menopause.

Our hormone-free botanical infusions use carefully selected, high-quality botanicals with human research behind the individual ingredients. They are designed to help support the recalibration of the sleep-wake cycle in midlife.

Vitalitea Daylight supports steadier energy, clearer focus and a calmer response through the day. Serenitea Moonlight helps the body settle and supports deeper, more restorative sleep. Together, SOMA Duo gives you a simple morning-and-evening anchor when your body seems to have forgotten when to switch on and when to switch off.

SOMA Circle is the community side of what we do. Once a month on Brisbane's north side, women gather for a rotating nervous-system practice such as somatic movement, breathwork, sound bowls or meditation. Think of it as a small taste of a retreat brought to the suburbs. No pressure to know anyone or perform wellness. Just women moving through the same transition, a guided practice, and a chance to feel supported, less alone and more settled in your own body.

Between gatherings, our private Facebook group is a warm, non-judgmental place to ask questions, share the messy middle and hear from women who understand without needing the long explanation.

→ Explore the SOMA Duo · → Join the private SOMA Circle

SOMA is hormone-free, stimulant-free and sedative-free support for midlife nervous systems, and designed to complement, not replace, medical advice or treatments such as MHT/HRT. We believe there is no single right way through midlife.

Share this article. Send this to the friend who is clearly already a member and just did not know the club had a name. Or send it to the woman who keeps apologising for being different lately. She may need to hear that different is not always decline. Sometimes it is the beginning of telling the truth.

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Join the conversation: What have you quietly stopped performing in midlife? And what do you care about more clearly now?