Delulu and the politics of millennial and Gen Z feminism

The word has slipped from group chats to news feeds with the speed of any TikTok verdict of women. Delulu, short for delusional, arrived as a knowing wink toward women who dared to believe a situationship might blossom into marriage, or that a cold email might actually land a dream internship. The joke lands because it knows the rules. To be delulu online is to confess that you have been raised on romantic comedies and audition tape culture, and that you refuse to entirely give up the fantasy. The trend has become so familiar that it now functions as a kind of password for a generation that treats irony as a survival reflex.

For feminist readers, the appeal of the delulu mood sits in a more uncomfortable place than a simple laugh. Young feminists grew up watching girlboss aesthetics peak and crash, watching wellness influencers monetise the language of self-care, and watching the same outlets lecture them on ambition. The result is a generation fluent in both complaint and cringe, capable of dissecting a problem and participating in it within the same breath. That tension is exactly what makes the trend worth reading.

This is also a conversation playing out well beyond the anglophone internet. From Sydney share houses to Perth group chats, the language of manifesting, delusional romantics, and main-character energy has become a shared second dialect. The delulu mood travels because it speaks to a structural condition. Wages feel stagnant, climate anxiety is real, and the cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Surry Hills can rival a mortgage in a smaller European capital. The fantasy is filling a hole that policy has left open.

What follows is a closer reading of what the trend reveals about the feminist politics of millennials and Gen Z, especially in places where irony is the dominant emotional register and self-belief feels like an act of quiet rebellion.

The vocabulary of delusional optimism

Delulu belongs to a family of words that includes manifesting, gaslighting yourself into peace, and limerence. Each one offers a permission structure for hope. An adherent of self-help might call this positive thinking, but for younger feminists it is something stranger. It is hope that knows it is hope and commits anyway. That second-order awareness is part of the appeal. The phrase delulu is the solulu becomes a small creed that lets a woman dream about a promotion, a reconciliation, or a viral essay while openly acknowledging the odds. The dream survives because it is framed as a joke.

The vocabulary also does serious cultural work. To call your own hopes delulu is to pre-empt the mocking that the internet is ready to deliver. Young women have absorbed the lesson that earnestness on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and X is a liability. By labelling the dream delusional from the start, the dreamer controls the temperature of the room. The trend turns vulnerability into a punchline that travels through familiar meme templates, and in doing so, becomes a low-cost entry point into self-expression that any woman with enough courage can afford.

Parasocial romance and the limits of girlboss culture

Few spaces host more parasocial longing than the world of pop stars, athletes, and actors. K-pop idols, country singers, and indie actors have become objects of intense one-sided devotion, and delulu vocabulary has multiplied to describe it. Fans in Brisbane fandoms or Melbourne Discord servers write long Reddit manifestos about their favourite performers. The trend gives them a language for what used to be called obsession but is now treated as a meme genre.

The feminist question is whether this is harmless play or a rehearsal for the kinds of unbalanced relationships that older feminists critiqued in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Cleo. The first-wave obsession under the girlboss era pushed women toward perfectionist striving. The delulu turn pushes them toward meaning-making through fantasy. Both are coping strategies. Neither replaces the structural reforms that the previous generation fought for in workplaces, boardrooms, and parliaments.

Self-mythology as survival under late capitalism

To be delulu is to build a private mythology of oneself. You are the main character whose meeting with a stranger at a bar in Newtown is destined to be the opening scene. You are the writer whose rejected manuscript is one revision away from a publishing deal. The mythology is irrational, and that is the point. Under conditions of wage stagnation and a housing market that treats adults as tenants-for-life in places such as Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, irrational confidence is one of the few resources left.

This is where the trend brushes against older feminist debates about consciousness-raising. Second-wave feminists argued that the personal is political. The delulu generation takes that line further. The personal is fictional, and the fictional can still be political. A young woman who tells herself a romantic story about her future is rehearsing the belief that she deserves a future worth narrating. The delusion is not the problem. The structural conditions that make delusion feel necessary are the problem.

The Australian backdrop where the trend lives

Australian readers sit at a particular vantage point. The country has long prided itself on a tall-poppy-sceptical streak, and the delulu trend walks a similar line. A young woman in Perth who tweets about her law school ambitions risks being cut down by followers who treat ambition as cringe. A young woman in Hobart talking about her screenplay risks being told to be realistic. Tall-poppy scepticism has always policed confidence. The delulu trend answers that policing with a wink that refuses to obey.

The Australian media landscape also shapes the conversation. Local publications, podcasts, and TikTok creators have run pieces about why young women are exhausted by dating app culture, what the Albanese era says about ambition, and how the cost-of-living crisis has rewritten the rules of romance. The trend has landed here as a coping mechanism for a generation priced out of the housing ladder in cities such as Brisbane and Canberra. To dream out loud is to risk mockery. To dream with a meme attached is to soften the mockery.

Digital hygiene, online safety, and the eSafety question

The trend also intersects with the question of digital hygiene. Young feminists have become fluent in the language of boundaries, blocking, and curated feeds. Australian law has tried to keep pace through the eSafety Commissioner and the Online Safety Act, which gives users a formal channel to challenge serious online abuse. The legislative work is underway, but the cultural work is still being done in group chats and subtweets.

For many young women, the delulu joke is part of that cultural work. To joke about a parasocial crush is to defuse a feeling that might otherwise curdle. To laugh about a delusional work goal is to feel soft about a feeling that might otherwise shame. The trend doubles as a low-stakes rehearsal for the emotional literacy that feminist organisers have long asked for in classrooms, union halls, and community centres.

Race, class, and who gets to be delulu

Feminist analysis of the trend has to ask who gets to call themselves delulu without consequence. A middle-class woman can shrug off a daydream as quirky. A working-class woman, a woman of colour, or a queer woman living outside the inner city may find the same daydream treated as evidence of instability. The trend, like all trends, inherits the biases of the platforms where it circulates.

This is where the feminist critique sharpens. The trend reveals that the freedom to be irrational is unevenly distributed. A young Indigenous woman in regional Queensland carries different pressures than a young Anglo woman in Bondi. A young migrant woman in western Sydney juggles different obligations than a young woman in inner Melbourne. The trend flattens these differences when it is treated as universal. Reading the trend through feminist eyes means resisting the urge to flatten and picking apart the texture of class, race, geography, and gender that shape who gets to dream out loud.

Beyond irony toward collective care

The delulu trend offers a mirror, but a mirror is only useful if it reflects something the viewer can act upon. Young feminists have begun to read the trend less as a coping mechanism and more as a starting point. If the dream is worth defending, then the conditions that make dreaming feel delusional are worth changing. The trend has travelled from the group chat to policy forums, op-eds, and union discussions in cities such as Melbourne and Adelaide.

Some readers are finding the third way through feminist reading groups that guide the trend toward collective analysis. Others are building care circles and the slow work of organising that treats women as more than main characters. The trend is still funny. The trend is still sharp. The next move is to take the fiction seriously enough to demand the world behind it change.

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