Woven throughout Can’t Even is a sharp critique of boomer parents and employers. And for many people, the things causing it could be addressed in therapy. Turning childhood into a pressure cooker of activities and achievements is no doubt part of the story. Maybe the early boomers but I graduated from college in the late 1970s and the job market was awful. Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2020. Slate has relationships with various online retailers. Library Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. “Do what you love,” despite what many young people have been told, is horrible advice. ... and I’m probably going to buy several other copies over time for so many others: friends, foes, family, randos on the street. It's super good, a little mysterious, and very, very charming. “It’s our base temperature,” she wrote in the essay. But does she, really? Coming at the close of a different book, a passionate-if-vague rallying cry might have left me feeling personally galvanized, eager to recommend Can’t Even to everyone I know. Earlier the author notes, in passing, that millennials “have stopped going to religious services in massive numbers”; many are trading in organized faith for political agitation—which, if Ms. Petersen’s portraits are any indication, is not delivering a life rich with meaning and substance. The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. Aren't we all doing our best to—cringe—keep on adulting? Part of the author’s goal is to push back on stereotypes about millennials, but “Can’t Even” often confirms them. Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry That essay, published in January 2019, went megaviral. Still, “How Work Got So Shitty” is the best chapter because it offers a clear evolution on how pay declined as expectations and surveillance at work rose. ; “Millennials are burned out” is a rejoinder to “Millennials are lazy,” or, as Petersen puts it, a response to the “boomer refrain” of “stop whining, millennials—you don’t know what hard work is.” To argue directly against the idea that millennials are lazy, you first have to accept that it is an evidence-based argument based on a meaningful pattern of millennial behavior, rather than, perhaps, an ad hoc insult sputtered through the haze of someone’s own exhaustion and need to feel superior. Author Anne Helen Petersen might blame such everyday lethargy on the effects of “late capitalism,” which I—as a member of the “millennial” generation—am particularly subject to. An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing. This is the best supporting evidence for the argument that millennials are indeed more burned out than anyone else. Petersen received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she focused on the history of celebrity gossip. It is tragic that our debt load is so large and we are struggling but really?! In the book’s concluding chapter, “Burn It All Down,” Petersen delivers a call to action. Fortunately, Petersen doesn’t offer any “hacks” or “tips” to pare back our busy lives. Plus, although Petersen does her due diligence in representing a diverse group, she also notes that “many of the behaviors attributed to millennials are the behaviors of a specific subset of mostly white, largely middle-class people born between 1981 and 1996.”. GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR The result for too many Americans is insurmountable student debt, an erosion of job security, the rise of the gig economy, the fetishization of freelance work, a lack of leisure time and a trend toward “competitive martyrdom” in parenting. By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. As in her 2017 book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Petersen proves herself to be an incisive cultural critic, though she also notes there’s not much of a solve for the current generation’s woes. RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 2020. If social media or the gig economy touch your life in any way, there’s something to chew on here. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 22, 2020), A tremendous contribution to our understanding of society today, Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020. Seventeen interviews with the sitting president inform this book, as well as extensive digging that yields not so much news as confirmation: Trump has survived his ineptitude because the majority of Congressional Republicans go along with the madness because they “had made a political survival decision” to do so—and surrendered their party to him. In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. All rights reserved. | RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2020. Can'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. She introduces Caitlin, a woman who identifies as biracial and grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. Petersen briefly lays out the solution: We can unite in our resistance to the way things are. In the end, Can’t Even feels cathartic no matter your age. • Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. As she wrote in her original piece, “The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there’s no solution to it. The overarching trend of upward mobility has finally reversed itself, smack dab into the prime earning years of our lives.” Petersen provides an appropriate amount of historical context—especially regarding demographics, economics, and labor issues—from the Great Depression to the present, which allows readers to clearly see the shift people have undergone in their thinking about what constitutes success or happiness. What I got out of it was that America’s version of capitalism has evolved in the last 40 years to make untenable demands on citizens, millennials in particular. Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, Exceptional: Build Your Personal Highlight Reel and Unlock Your Potential, Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most, Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism, Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics. ‘Can’t Even’ Review: The Burnout Generation A book-length inquiry into why millennials find themselves afflicted by paralysis, distraction and anxiety. ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES Bob Woodward, by “We shouldn’t be this worried, this terrified, this anxious, about everything,” she writes. • Bob Woodward It’s also the chapter in which I learned what consultants do—figure out how to reduce jobs and lay people off! You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Or are they saddled with low-paying jobs, the constant pressure to ‘perform’ online and a growing distrust in institutions that have failed them? Petersen conducted thousands of interviews with millennials across the race, gender, socioeconomic and ability spectrum, and her findings center on the idea that regardless of those factors, millennials are experiencing a unique type of burnout, caused by a perfect storm of the gig economy, the monetization of hobbies, the internet (Instagram, specifically) and the pressure to always be moving, seeing and being seen. Also found the section about how career can take over and become your entire identity to be thought provoking. .orange-text-color {font-weight:bold; color: #FE971E;}View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look. • (Yes, access to therapy is uneven and expensive—this is another way that burnout differs meaningfully by class.) The author invokes political scientist Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” (2000), which described the unraveling of the American social fabric, and she’s right that the “Elks Club, the volunteer fire department” and other institutions are in trouble. Petersen drives home the point that our current problems are not personal but societal—and yet, when a millennial cannot afford health insurance or a down payment on a house, it’s judged as laziness. It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds! I worked myself into the ground at a hard job that promised long term rewards. Ibram X. Kendi, by We’re simply not as helpless as this book makes us out to be. Though her days of swimming, T-ball, art class and other extracurriculars are far behind her, the effects of her overstimulated childhood remain: “As an adult, I’ve realized I get stressed when I’m not doing something,” Caitlin says. In articulate and persuasive prose, former Buzzfeed senior culture writer Petersen delivers a cogent explanation of the millennial landscape, incorporating in-depth research, interviews, and her own experiences to define the problems that millennials face as they attempt to live up to high, occasionally near-impossible expectations.

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