Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

A BEST BOOK OF THE FALL AS SEEN IN: Apartment Therapy • Book Riot • Business Insider • BuzzFeed • Daily Nebraskan • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • Fortune • Harper’s Bazaar • HelloGiggles • LinkedIn • O Magazine • Time Magazine\n“[A] razor sharp book of cultural criticism . . . With blistering prose and all-too vivid reporting, Petersen lays bare the burnout and despair of millennials, while also charting a path to a world where members of her generation can feel as if the boot has been removed from their necks.”—Esquire\n“An analytically precise, deeply empathic book about the psychic toll modern capitalism has taken on those shaped by it. Can’t Even is essential to understanding our age, and ourselves.”—Ezra Klein, Vox co-founder and New York Times best-selling author of Why We’re Polarized\nAn incendiary examination of burnout in millennials—the cultural shifts that got us here, the pressures that sustain it, and the need for drastic change\nDo you feel like your life is an endless to-do list? Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram because you’re too exhausted to pick up a book? Are you mired in debt, or feel like you work all the time, or feel pressure to take whatever gives you joy and turn it into a monetizable hustle? Welcome to burnout culture.\nWhile burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, in Can’t Even, BuzzFeed culture writer and former academic Anne Helen Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation, born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic expectations of the modern workplace, and a sharp uptick in anxiety and hopelessness exacerbated by the constant pressure to “perform” our lives online. The genesis for the book is Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed article on the topic, which has amassed over seven million reads since its publication in January 2019.\nCan’t Even goes beyond the original article, as Petersen examines how millennials have arrived at this point of burnout (think: unchecked capitalism and changing labor laws) and examines the phenomenon through a variety of lenses—including how burnout affects the way we work, parent, and socialize—describing its resonance in alarming familiarity. Utilizing a combination of sociohistorical framework, original interviews, and detailed analysis, Can’t Even offers a galvanizing, intimate, and ultimately redemptive look at the lives of this much-maligned generation, and will be required reading for both millennials and the parents and employers trying to understand them.\nAmazon.com Review\nAn Amazon Best Book of September 2020: In 2019, Petersen published a Buzzfeed article titled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”—the article has been read over seven million times. Clearly the subject of burnout touched a nerve with the generation that coined the phrase “adulting is hard,” as well as with those who love to taunt them. Not as light as the title makes it seem, Can’t Even is a serious and sobering look at how former generations—specifically the Boomer generation—have failed millennials and set them up for burnout. She writes: “Millennials live with the reality that we’re going to work forever, die before we pay off our student loans, potentially bankrupt our children with our care, or get wiped out in a global apocalypse.” Petersen examines all areas of millennial lives: work (there’s particular attention and heft paid to this section), education, internet and tech culture, relationships, parenthood—specifically motherhood—and leisure time. The research is intriguing and fresh, with several references to just-published books such as Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee or Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. In her Author’s Note, Petersen calls COVID-19 “the great clarifier,” and invites readers to read every section of the book with this in mind—work is harder, parenting is harder, our addiction to our phones is worse than ever. A mill