3.5 stars ( )

Ironically, regularly posting updates to goodreads was a self-demonstrating example of turning hobbies into work so here I am, writing an update as I finished the book early this morning. (and trying not to feel guilty taking 20 days to read a relatively short book...!)

Can't Even expands on Anne Helen Peterson's viral longform essay for Buzzfeed, "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation", dividing into chapters by theme (education, the various ways work has become shitty/the 'love what you do' myth/parenting/etc.) with plenty of anecdote from Millennials across geographic and class spectrum. As a reminder, we're the age cohort between 1981 and 1996, so while we've been painted as "lazy and entitled young people" for the last twenty years, we're grown adults trying to keep our heads above water after weathering multiple economic downturns in our adult lives.

In general, Can't Even is a good primer on the ways in which capitalism has fucked over society and how we've turned everything from our hobbies to our child-rearing into work, which compounds into exhaustion. She's cautious to not provide flimsy suggested solutions at the end, as these are things that we can't necessarily fix on the individual level and require structural changes.

I'd strongly recommend reading cited sources for further information on labor (I read [b:Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary|37003174|Temp How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary|Louis Hyman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513007876l/37003174._SY75_.jpg|58855306] two years ago and recognized the arguments in the chapter on the gig economy). Also, AHP has a newsletter named "Culture Study" which also looks at this among other topics like celebrity culture and what it indicates.
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As a millennial,, reading Can't Even was a very cathartic experience. This is a defining work about a generation burdened by a capitalistic system that doesn't work for them. I've experienced much of what Anne talks about in this book: the desire to escape my hometown through college, no matter the cost; the lost of my love for various hobbies and artistic pursuits because I was pressured to monetized them; crushing student loan debt; the burden of juggling multiple minimum wage jobs; etc. And I'm better off than many of my peers!

This book is a wake up call to make sure we participate in the democratic system in order to elect officials who will make sweeping changes to make work and living better. ( )

I honestly felt burnt out reading this book about millennial burnout. It read like an overall composition of left leaning communities on reddit. If one has read any of those communities, it is okay to skip this book. It had a lot of draw but doesn't bring anything new to the table. It is well understood that our societal bonds are drained, the lack of a "third place", and rising inequality are sources of burnout. My main dislike is the broad, short textbook-like anecdotes from the author interviews. That is alright for maybe a news article but I would prefer a long form story in a book versus aggressively jumping from paragraph to paragraph about different people. That said, overall commentary like this is still significant in the space. I would label myself as a zilliennial. Growing up reading and watching these millennial rants has influenced my time, money, and career decisions. This book is a bit cynical but I am optimistic for our future in some impractical, American way. ( )

3.5* I felt this one especially the bit about having a cool job that you’re passionate about and showing off the best sides of everything on social media I feel so many people I know fall into this. ( )

Best for:
All of, us collectively, as a society, who are fed up with the expectations that we just work work work.

In a nutshell:
Author Petersen explores how the Millennial generation has been put into basically a really shit situation.

Worth quoting:
“This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one — and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.”

“Just because middle-class parents decided that a certain style of parenting is superior doesn’t mean it empirically is.”

“By cloaking the labor in the language of ‘passion,’ we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.”

Why I chose it:
Although I’m a Xennial, I can definitely relate to the feeling of just being completely exhausted by the world and the expectations of all of us.

Review:
Author Peterson has written an interesting and important book, though in the end, I’m not sure it is telling us anything we don’t already know, at least those of us who are paying attention.
This book was written before the ‘Great Resignation’ became a thing, which makes it quite prescient.

She starts by looking at how we got here - essentially the values and pressures put on people by their parents. She’s not blaming the previous generation exactly, just discussing how their lives were different than the lives of their children. It reminds me of something I’ve read elsewhere - Boomers love to belittle Millennials for demanding ‘participation trophies,’ but the Boomers are the ones who taught them to expect those trophies - so why are the Millennials the ones being derided?

From there, the book focuses on what so many of us know - how for many of us, our lives have been a constant hustle. Get the best grades you can while also playing a sport, learning an instrument, and volunteering so you can go to a good university. Get the best grades there, along with perhaps some unpaid work experience (though only for those who can afford that), and then get a job. Which will pay you very little, and take up so much of your time that you have no time for living.

So yeah, folks are burnt out.

Peterson explores a variety of things that contribute to this: the digital age forcing work into every aspect of our lives; parenthood and how much energy that requires; unfair and unequal division of labor.

There’s so much in here and I think a lot of people would benefit from reading it. And while there are loads of reminders in there about the lives we all live individually, Peterson make a point to not offer specific solutions. There’s nothing here that a better time management method will fix - this is a problem with our society. Demanding people work eight or more hours a day, five days a week, commute 2 or 3 hours a day, raise children, with insufficient pay and very little support is a society that needs to be overturned at a systemic level.
We collectively need to take control back from the people who think its just fine for us all to work ourselves beyond exhaustion.

And until then, we definitely need to stop judging other people who might not go to university, or who might not parent the way we would, or who are living their lives in ways that we might not (but perhaps that we wish we could). The system is fucked up and people are doing their best to survive it.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep & Recommend to a Friend ( )

I didn't really need to read this since I'm living it, but sometimes it's nice to have your experiences validated.

A lot of typos, though (of the extra word in a sentence variety). :( ( )

Anne Helen Petersen (an "old millennial" by her own definition) elucidates the problems millennials face and how our individual solutions to them (work harder, work all the time, make it work) lead to burnout, because it is a societal issue - but IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

The current form of free-market capitalism, in which consultants work with companies to figure out how to make the most money the fastest, and in which the stock market is completely divorced from the economy's effect on most workers, has led to a desperate struggle for most millennials, who emerged into the job market just before, during, or just after the Great Recession. People are now responsible for shouldering the (ever more expensive) education and training, and college degrees are no longer a guarantee of a good job and a middle-class life. Government-mandated workplace protections and unions have both been largely stripped of their power, so workers, instead of being in solidarity with each other, compete in a culture of presentism, where it's assumed that whoever works the most works the best. Carrying crushing student debt and financial anxiety, many are delaying or opting not to have children (the U.S., of course, does not provide paid parental leave, and daycare is expensive).

All of this when evidence shows that people are more efficient and effective workers when they work less and rest more. (A few companies, like Trader Joe's and Costco, offer their employees regular schedules and good benefits, but most don't.)

Petersen doesn't offer solutions, except to say that they must be systemic and holistic - in other words, not something individuals can conquer on their own through meditation apps or bullet journaling. We need real change - protection for laborers (including "essential" workers, who are treated as disposable, and unpaid caregivers), The idea that workers - not CEOs and shareholders - should benefit from their own labor should not be so unthinkable.

See also: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud (same author), Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, additional book list below

Quotes/Notes/Sources

This isn't a personal problem. It's a societal one. (xxvi)

...boomers are, in many ways, responsible for [millennials]... (2)

[in the 1970s]...after decades of prosperity, things in America seemed to be getting markedly worse. (5)

National Labor Relations Act 1935; Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

Middle class kids become mini-adults earlier and earlier - but as the rise of "adulting" rhetoric makes clear, they're not necessarily prepared for its realities. (33)

When one's value depends on the capacity to work, people who are disabled or elderly, people who cannot labor full-time or who provide care in ways that aren't paid at all or valued as highly - all become "less than" in the larger societal equation....To be valuable in American society is to be able to work. (51)

When students are working, what they're working on is their own ability to work....This is an incredibly utilitarian view of education, implying that the ultimate goal of the system is to mold us into efficient workers, as opposed to preparing us to think, or to be good citizens. (52)

The desirability of "lovable" jobs is part of what makes them so unsustainable: So many people are competing for so few positions that compensation standards can be continuously lowered with little effect. (70)

virtue/capital: wealth = hard work, hard work = wealth (90)

"contingent" labor - the precariat (96)

Does a company run better when its employees are happy and provide a livable income for their families? When its profit margins are larger? (100)

Ultimately, temp work was so thoroughly feminized, and effectively trivialized, that little thought was paid to whether or not it was exploitative. (102)

These work situations [instability, irregular scheduling, lack of benefits] don't just exacerbate burnout, but feel designed to create it. (113)

(~1946-1969) Unions and government regulation forced companies to treat the humans who worked for them as...humans. (113)

This is how precarity becomes the status quo: We convince workers that poor conditions are normal; that rebelling against them is a symbol of generational entitlement; that free-market capitalism is what makes America great... (115)

"...an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system." (Jia Tolentino, 128)

The goal of surveillance might be productivity, or quality control - but the psychological effects on workers is substantial. (130)

That's what happens when you don't have options: You have no negotiating power, or power of any sort, at least when it comes to the workplace. (136)

[Over 8.8 million jobs eliminated during the Great Recession...the jobs that returned weren't the same kind as before, but "contingent" or "alternative" or "gig"] (137)

[Freelancing] means complete independence, which in the current capitalist marketplace is another way of saying it means complete insecurity. (139)

The gig economy isn't replacing the traditional economy. It's propping it up in a way that convinces people it's not broken. (144)

...social media robs us of the moments that could counterbalance our burnout....it distances us from actual experiences....it turns us into needless multitaskers....it erodes what used to be known as leisure time. (164)

Our leisure rarely feels restorative... (182)

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would work only fifteen hours a week [due to increased mechanization and automation and resulting productivity]. With abundant time and leisure across the classes, society would flourish. Democratic participation would go up...as would social cohesion, familial bonds, philanthropic and volunteer work. (183)

...the easiest way to signal that you were working harder and were more essential to the company than [other employees] was to work longer....
Even as actual productivity continued to rise, year after year, companies continued to reduce paid time off. (185)

In the modern workplace, it seems that everyone [on a salary]...is so anxious about proving their value that we neglect a veritable cornucopia of evidence that better work is almost always achieved through less work. (188)

...American society is still arranged as if every family has a caretaker who stays home, even as fewer and fewer families are arranged that way. (209)

...we continue to treat this social issue as a personal issue. More specifically, a mother's issue. (220)

Affordable, universally available childcare...would be revelatory...So why hasn't it happened? ...Men still don't value domestic labor as labor, and men predominate our legislative bodies and the vast majority of our corporations. (240)

The causes are systemic. Which is why the solutions have to be holistic. (241)

Other books/sources mentioned:

Annie Lowrey / The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennials-are-new-lost-gener...

Emma / The Mental Load / "You Should've Asked": https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

Jia Tolentino / The New Yorker

Temp by Louis Hyman
The Good Jobs Strategy by Zeynep Ton
The Job by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Free Time by Benjamin Hunnicutt
The Overworked American by Juliet B. Schor
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
The Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg
Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte
All the Rage by Darcy Lockman
Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan
The Playdate
Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris ( )

An attempt at a sweeping scan at the many systems that have stymied the attempt at a balanced life for almost all of the millennial generation. There was plenty that I identified with, including the pressure to work constantly and the bizarrely overpriced but increasingly necessary university degrees, and plenty that is not in my experience, i.e. parenting and being a gig worker. But it was clear that finishing this book and moving it to publication was rushed, and I think it suffered a bit as a result. I would have liked some more in the conclusion that sums up how we "un-fuck" the systems because it is increasingly urgent as younger folks become adults and need to inherit something more promising. ( )

Although I expected a whining polemic about how tough millennials have it, I was wrong. This serious book presents lays out an intense indictment of our social and political systems and the impact on all of us, while focusing on what has gone so wrong for the young people, who only wanted to achieve what their parents had. The author states that burnout at work and at home are endemic now due to dependence on devices and on unfairly demanding employers. There's intense condemnation of gig work, employer-dependent health insurance, insane college debt, the cost of home ownership, and on the lack of paid parental leave. Refreshingly, an acknowledgement of the even more severe problems for people of color is emphasized.

Quotes: "If you don't think that each of us matter, and not just because of our capacity to work, if you think that's too radical an idea, I don't know how to make you care about other people."

"In essence, the worker committed years of their life to making the company profitable; the company then commits some extra years of its profits to the employee. Before the Great Depression, the American Way was abject insecurity, which is why it can feel so mind-boggling that anyone would willingly return to that American way again."

"I have high career aspirations and my heart still beats to the rhythm of productivity, but I am also so very tired."

"If a child is reared as capital, with the implicit goal of creating a "valuable" asset that will make enough money to obtain or sustain the parents' middle class status, it would make sense that they have internalized that a high salary is the only thing that matters about a job."

"The promise that the free market would fix everything was a persuasive one in the '80s and the '90s, but left to its own devices, capitalism is not benevolent. Most history shows the complete divorce of the best interests of the corporation from the best interests of most employees."

"We've conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying "this is too much" and we call that conditioning "grit" or "hustle".

"American society is still arranged as if every family has a caretaker who stays home. Men still don't value domestic labor as labor, and men predominate our legislative bodies and the vast majority of our corporations. They don't treat contemporary parenting - the cost, the burnout - as a problem, no less a crisis, because they cannot, or refuse to, empathize with it. " ( )