Best Quotes from Can't Even by Anne Helen Petersen with Page Numbers

If we’re as special, and unique, and important as we were told we were throughout childhood, it’s no surprise we refuse to shut up when our lives don’t make us feel that way.

Boomers were, in many ways, responsible for us, both literally (as our parents, teachers, and coaches) and figuratively (creating the ideologies and economic environment that would shape us).

The problem, and why it’s often hard to think of them charitably, is their inability to tap that experience in order to empathize with their own children’s generation.

This criticism emerged forcefully in 2019: the year boomers were projected to cede their status as the largest generation to millennials.

The criticisms of boomers can feel like an indictment of a generation determined to take care of their own.

To understand millennial burnout, then, we have to understand what shaped—and, in many cases, burnt out—the boomers that made us.

It will surprise no one that the tendencies Wolfe described and softly lampooned in his article were actually those of the professional middle class.

They helped elect leaders, like President Ronald Reagan, who promised to 'protect' the middle class through tax cuts.

The advantages of the Great Compression were not equally distributed; the protections fought for by unions did not extend to the millions of workers.

But the idea of personal responsibility has persisted: If you plan well and start saving when you first started working, theoretically you should be fine.

“As an adult, I’ve realized I get stressed when I’m not doing something.”

“I feel guilty just relaxing.”

“I didn’t think about the other benefits, such as the discipline to remember to practice, or the importance of learning to play in public.”

“I think their focus was on making sure there was a roof over our heads and food on the table.”

“I saw from an early age how work can grind you up and spit you back out, as well as the benefits of leisure time.”

“One of the reasons I was able to avoid burnout as long as I did can be directly traced to the amount of ‘natural growth’ I experienced.”

“The psychological impact of post-divorce downward mobility...is multilayered.”

“It is also a broken covenant.”

“Most burnt-out millennials I know have arrived at that point of calling those expectations into question.”

“I just knew that lawyers and doctors had a lot of money.”

"When teenagers inevitably look at themselves through the prism of our overachiever culture, they often come to the conclusion that no matter how much they achieve, it will never be enough."

"Just because everyone around you believes in the gospel doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true."

"The pressure to achieve wouldn’t have existed without the notion that college, no matter the cost, would provide a path to middle-class prosperity and stability."

"If you can just get on the path, that good, stable job is in sight!"

"The only route to success involves working to the point of—and then through—physical pain."

"One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think."

"The idea that underlies contemporary school is that grades, eventually, turn into money, or if not money, into choice, or what social scientists sometimes call ‘better life outcomes.'"

"It’s easy to see those resume-building behaviors as destructive when they’re consistently validated."

"Ultimately, it’s difficult to see how college is meant to be about education when it’s actually about 'jumping class strata.'"

"For the vast majority of millennials, getting a degree hasn’t yielded the middle-class stability that was promised... It’s just the same thing it always was: more work."

"Doing what you love 'exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them."

"If you love your job, and it’s so fulfilling, it 'makes sense that you’d want to do it all the time."

"A good job is one that doesn’t exploit you and that you don’t hate."

"I’ve always wanted my work to be my whole life, but now I feel like a good job is something that doesn’t require me to work more than forty hours on a regular basis."

"The reality of the job search lays bare the contradictions, half-truths, and poorly constructed myths that motivated millennials through childhood and college."

"When that cool, lovable job doesn’t appear, or appears and is unfeasible to maintain for someone who’s not independently wealthy, it’s easy to see how the shame accumulates."

"It makes quitting a job that relentlessly exploited you feel like giving up on yourself, instead of what it really is: advocating, for the first time in a long time, for your own needs."

"The rhetoric of 'Do what you love' makes asking to be valued seem like the equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct."

"When everyone in the workplace conceives of themselves as individual contractors in continuous competition, it creates conditions prime for burnout."

"Instead, the quest to find and win 'lovable' work created an atmosphere of ruthless competition; feeling personally passionate and fulfilled by work takes precedence over working conditions for the whole."

The precariat is not the vision of the working class held by many Americans.

They are angry at and are anxious about the broken promises of the American Dream, but they keep grinding to try to position themselves closer to it.

Workers aren’t getting lazier, or worse at multitasking. We don’t lack grit or ambition.

To understand how work got this shitty for so many requires a significant detour into the past.

Left to its own devices, capitalism is not benevolent.

In the current iteration of capitalism, the vast majority of employees do not benefit, in any way, from the profits that the company creates for its shareholders.

It’s one thing for companies to declare that sexual harassment is not tolerated at their hotels; it’s quite another to actually dedicate the resources to substantiate the claim.

According to Zeynep Ton, ‘good jobs’ are jobs with decent pay, decent benefits, and stable work schedules.

Bad jobs are not a necessity to achieve significant profits. They are a strategy, a choice.

What Patty is describing is job security and satisfaction—a work scenario that doesn’t cause burnout but helps protect against it.

Sometimes I only know my schedule a few weeks in advance.

The instability and high pay of the consulting world fed on itself.

We tell ourselves all sorts of stories to justify our overwork.

No amount of hustle or sleeplessness can permanently bend a broken system to your benefit.

Your value as a worker is always unstable.

Freelancing is exhausting and anxiety-building enough.

The idea that we can build a society on this platform— with no protections— is fanciful.

Those people in the 'real world' were lazy anyway.

The phenomenon of the gig economy is the always-frantically-seeking-the-next-gig economy.

What worries me most is that this is just the beginning.

We know our phones suck. We even know the apps on them were engineered to be addictive.

They compel us to frame experiences, as we are experiencing them, with future captions.

Digital detoxes don’t fix the problem. The only long-term fix is making the background into foreground.

Disengaging from our phone means disengaging from life.

What these technologies do best is remind us of what we’re not doing.

The reality of millennial, internet-ridden life: I need to be an insanely productive writer and be funny on Slack.

When we fail to do so, we don’t blame the broken tools. We blame ourselves.

It’s an economy based on taking up residency in the interstitial moments of our lives.

The prospect of relearning who I am—and who others are—remains daunting.

In short: It makes money. That money comes from manipulating, sustaining, and beguiling our attention.

"Leisure, then, is time you are allowed to do what you’d like, free from the compunction to generate value."

"What mattered is that it wasn’t done to make yourself a more desirable match, to declare your societal status, or make some extramoney on the side. It was done for pleasure."

"It’s hard to recover from days spent laboring when your 'time off' feels like work."

"Better work is almost always achieved through less work."

"Rest doesn’t just make workers happier, but makes them more efficient when they’re actually on the job."

"A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live."

"You are not defined by your work; your value exists simply because you are."

"Doing nothing—at least nothing that is conceived of as value-making under capitalism—can help restore our sense of self."

"Even as leisure became more accessible, our ability to actually enjoy it has eroded."

"The best, most alive parts of ourselves are paved over by a ruthless logic of use."

Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear.

To make that happen, we have to admit that it’s not enough to have progressive ideals about parenting.

The common denominator amongst millennials, then, is that we’ve been inculcated with the idea of that failure can be chalked up to simply not trying hard enough.

It’s exhausting to be stigmatized by society, to navigate social programs intended to help that mostly shame.

Just because women have been liberated from many of the explicit forms of subjugation and sexism that accompanied domestic life, other forms continue to thrive.

You can’t fix parenting burnout by making time for Bible study or journaling in the morning, or by learning how to fight like an adult.

Parenting is never going to be free of worry, or comparison, or stress. But there can be significantly less of all of those things.

It breeds resentment and despair—particularly for women who placed stock in the idea of an equal partnership.

Instead of offering a legitimate show of community or problem solving, moms almost universally will try to one-up your source of parenting frustration.

If you want to feel less exhausted, less resentful, less filled with unspeakable rage, less ground down to the thinnest, least likable version of yourself, then you have to act, vote, and advocate for solutions that will make life better not just for you.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Just because we’ve reconciled ourselves to our current reality doesn’t mean it’s right.

We shouldn’t have to choose between excelling in work and thriving as individuals.

Parenting shouldn’t be a contest.

Leisure shouldn’t be this scarce.

We shouldn’t excuse any of these inexcusable realities in the name of old, broken myths about who we are and what we stand for.

We can unite in our resistance to the way things are.

We can recognize that it’s not enough to try to make things better for ourselves.

We can come to the spectacular and radical understanding that we are each valuable simply because we are.

Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.