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By Anna Rahmanan
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When I wake up in the middle of the night, usually from what I assume is general anxiety about the current state of affairs in America, but also about all the things I have to do for my children while trying to excel at my job, be a good wife, a good daughter, a good sister, exercise regularly, maintain a reasonably presentable home and somehow remain an overall upstanding member of society, there are very few things that can calm me down.
One of them is watching Gwyneth Paltrow make an extremely elaborate breakfast while it's still dark outside.
A few weeks ago, in the darkness of my New York bedroom, Paltrow appeared on my phone wearing a pressed yellow shirt, men's boxer shorts and those black, slightly emo glasses that somehow make her look very cool. Her hair was messy (I just got out of bed!), she had no makeup on and the Smashing Pumpkins' "1979" was playing in the background, a song that immediately transported me back to the hopes and dreams I had about a decade ago. No pun intended, the ingredients were all there and they sucked me in.
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Paltrow was making what she described as "the viral" egg katsu with soy-braised garden vegetables and sausage, an absurdly elaborate breakfast, particularly for someone who appeared to have just rolled out of bed.
At one point, an egg slipped off her spoon and she let out a little cry of frustration. Even Gwyneth Paltrow makes mistakes! The whole thing was so...soothing?
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The video is part of her Boyfriend Breakfast series, a tradition she began while dating her now-husband, Brad Falchuk, when she would prepare him something special every Saturday morning.
The kitchens change (how many houses does she own?), but the vibe is the same. There is always a fresh cup of coffee, a relaxing, nostalgic tune playing in the background, an occasional trip to her own garden to collect vegetables and Paltrow wandering around in pajamas, sometimes wearing glasses, cooking without a cookbook in sight. I cannot stop watching the display of serenity and I wonder why.
I love watching people cook, which is an essay for another day, but what fascinates me about my obsession with these particular videos is that they should, by any reasonable measure, make me feel terrible.
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Here I am, awake at 3 a.m., mentally preparing dinner for 12 hours later, trying to figure out what is healthy, what groceries need buying, which work deadline I might miss and whether I can squeeze in a workout before someone needs me again.
I am simultaneously watching Queen Paltrow calmly harvesting vegetables for breakfast and I'm not mad at her for it. I'm not even jealous. I'm soothed while realizing, once again, that women (well, "regular" women, that is) cannot have it all.
Different factions of society have spent decades telling us that the career, the marriage, the children, the beautiful home, the toned body, the hobbies, the self-care and the friendships were all in reach. I now know better.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2025 time-use survey found that women spent an average of 2.4 hours a day on household activities, compared with 1.6 hours for men. Women also had less leisure time. That’s just one of many stats.
Perhaps this explains why I find watching a wealthy woman leisurely cook breakfast so intoxicating. She has something I desperately want, and it has surprisingly little to do with money She has time—and oh-how-beautiful that looks at 3 a.m. while I'm trying to carefully plan my own limited time.
Paltrow is not alone in selling this particular fantasy. Jennifer Garner's Pretend Cooking Show offers another version, with its charming imperfections and beautiful kitchen. Joanna Gaines has built an entire lifestyle empire around the pleasures of cooking, decorating and making a house feel like a home.
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But there's also Meghan Markle.
Her Netflix series With Love, Meghan offers much the same fantasy. Beautiful surroundings, cooking, gardening, entertaining and the luxury of spending an extraordinary amount of time making ordinary things beautiful.
Yet Markle doesn't quite have the same effect on me.
I've been trying to figure out why and I suspect it has something to do with how the two women present what we should call their privilege. Paltrow seems perfectly comfortable being Gwyneth Paltrow. She's an Oscar-winning actress who went on to build Goop, and she knows she lives an extraordinary life. She doesn't seem particularly interested in convincing us otherwise.
Markle, on the other hand, seems determined to make her extraordinary life appear ordinary. Here is a woman who married into the British Royal Family and then got mad at the world for asking her to act like a royal, proceeded to physically leave the country in an effort to let go of her royal duties and now invites us into a world of homemade preserves and beautifully arranged flowers as if she's simply another woman who enjoys entertaining.
Maybe that is the difference? I don't need Gwyneth Paltrow to be like me or convince me that I can also be like her, and it seems like we're on the same page about that arrangement. Markle, on the other hand, is trying to tell me, yet again, that women can have it all. They can't so let's all collectively move on?
There is something rather revealing about an America in which wealthy women have turned the most mundane domestic activities into aspirational entertainment for women who spend much of their lives doing those same activities under considerably less pleasant circumstances. Cooking dinner is a logistical problem in my life. For Paltrow and Markle and others, on the other hand, cooking dinner in a beautiful kitchen with fresh vegetables from their gardens is a lifestyle. The difference is time, and the money that makes time available.
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I do wonder what it says about us that one of the great pleasures of modern womanhood is watching another woman have enough time to enjoy the things we barely have time to finish.
And perhaps that's the most depressing part of this whole thing. We've become so accustomed to having every minute of our lives accounted for that watching another woman spend an entire morning making breakfast feels like a luxury vacation.
Of course, the irony is that I'm watching all this at 3 a.m., when I should be sleeping, because apparently the only time I have to myself is time I steal from my own sleep.
And there it is. Gwyneth Paltrow has enough time to make breakfast into an Instagram event. I barely have enough time to watch her do it.
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