Book Review — Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen

Cultural journalist Anne Helen Petersen takes me on an emotional journey exploring the trauma and regrets of our shared generation

When I first heard about this book dedicated to the historical chronology and sociological travails of my own generation (“Generation Y”), I jumped at the chance to read it. While slightly flawed in places, Anne Helen Petersen’s extensive research provides a path forward for those of us Millennials who want to savor generational pride while avoiding the trap of gratuitously putting down other age groups.

Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation offers up 254 pages of cerebral socioeconomic analysis interspersed with powerful personal narratives (including several from the author herself).

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

To gain insight on why Millennials are so misunderstood and scapegoated, this compendium of all things Gen Y helps the layperson make sense of those complex dynamics.

First, let me get a few minor nitpicks out of the way. The author does employ some grammatical and linguistic deficiencies that I find to be rather distracting. For example, she consistently keeps “millennials” and “boomers” in all lowercase (even though they are proper nouns), along with the politically correct habit of likewise keeping “white” (racially) in all lowercase (while rightfully capitalizing “Black”). Petersen also makes up numerous words that disrupt the book’s flow with their awkwardness, such as “overwork” (as a faux-noun), “middle-class-ness” (couldn’t she have just said “middle-class existence”???), and “millennialness” (just call us “youthful”!!!).

However, these criticisms of mine are far outweighed by the rich substance of the material that Petersen documents. The fact that she is a fellow Millennial herself just causes me to feel greater kinship with her, as the reader.

STYLE / FORMAT

With a snappy introduction and an extensive epilogue of notes and citations, Anne Helen Petersen guides us on a journey back into the early-1980s up through the present day. Her intro gives us a preview of the roller coaster that has harnessed Generation Y — mortgages, astronomical rent, long-term care, child care, student debt, climate change, racial disparities, endless “to-do” lists, and economic depression topped off by exhaustion and burnout. Her most important point, here, is how the negative stereotypes of us Millennials are really only based on a select subset of our overall Millennial population.

Chapter 1 — while Petersen holds Baby Boomers and Traditionalists (aka “The Silent Generation”) accountable for teaching Millennial children or grandchildren to be excessively driven and ambitious in our careers, we also must have compassion for the pressures that our own elders faced from their own parents and grandparents. For years, GenXers and Millennials were helpless to refuse Boomers’ critiques; but then, Zoomers (aka Gen Z) popularized the “Ok, Boomer” meme (actually, it was New Zealand legislator Chloe Swarbrick). However, there were many forward-thinking Boomers who pursued self-improvement while protesting segregation, patriarchy, and the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Ultimately, the mid-1970s saw the earliest cases of economic outsourcing while Americans became jaded over Watergate. Shortly thereafter, a critical mass of Boomers embraced Reaganomics and the free market. Pooled risk and safety nets became associated with perceived laziness, pensions were swapped for 401Ks, and the burdens of professional training shifted from employer to employee. GI-Gens (aka “The Greatest Generation”) had passed down the myth of “bootstraps” and personal responsibility to their Boomer children, who then adopted a survival of the fittest mentality as the more conservative Baby Boomers became yuppies who eschewed fulfillment in favor of pragmatism in their careers. Meanwhile, middle-class Boomers struggled to remain in the middle class…passing down those same pressures to their own soon-to-be Millennial children.

Chapter 2 — Petersen narrates the trend of “helicopter parenting,” drawing from sociologist Annette Laureau’s case studies during the early-1990s. Essentially, parents overreacted to the perception of increased danger, even though data showed it to be in decline. Throughout this chapter, Petersen interweaves her own memories and experiences from growing up as a 1980s kid.

Chapter 3 — while recommending the work of journalist Alexandra Robbins, the author documents how Millennials became the first generation to be viewed as “walking résumés” and “human capital.” Our success became measured via credentials, dues-paying, social connections, résumé-building, and cultural knowledge. We were raised by adults who abandoned “permissive parenting” in order to commoditize sports and music. The structure of schools for Gen Y students rewarded those who were overachieving, deferential, neurotypical, and athletic. Throughout the chapter, Petersen tells the stories of individual Gen Y students who stressed themselves out with overexertion to package their lives for colleges (especially as graduate degrees rose in prominence).

Chapter 4 — in this chapter, Petersen looks at the conflicting pressures on Millennials to find jobs that are simultaneously well-paying, full of prestige, passion-inducing, and “cool” by reputation. As a result, employers have learned how to emphasize so-called “passion” in order to compensate for a lack of fair wages. Yet, as unionization and worker solidarity decreases, Millennials are conditioned to sacrifice such mythically fulfilling occupations in favor of those that provide more financial stability.

Chapter 5 — the author further explores the history of how temp workers gave companies an excuse to marginalize unions, and this served as a model for the precariat displacing the traditional working class. A new working-class subcategory arose, known as the salariat, deteriorating worker conditions even moreso. This trend began as deregulation hit throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of consultants encouraging more downsizing and outsourcing — thereby creating short-term profits and stock surges. Such policies are what took down newspapers and companies such as Toys ’R Us, resulting in increased sexual harassment within the fast food and hospitality industries. When people claim the gig economy is a “lifestyle choice” for Millennials, many members of our generation adopt a sense of self-loathing.

Chapter 6 — Petersen examines how perceived incentives such as free food and company car rides normalize scab wages, all while Millennials proceed to make themselves sleep-deprived, desensitized to busywork, and numb to personal surveillance by our employers. Both the Obama and Trump Administrations inflated employment numbers by classifying part-time positions, temp jobs, and short-term gigs as being part of the overall tally of “new jobs.” The rise of freelancers has upended traditional workplaces, causing a domino effect of destabilization across industries.

Chapter 7 — here, she advances the premise that phone & email apps remind Millennials of all the things we’d rather be doing; these devices waste time, overcomplicate tasks and spur superficiality. Our generation distinctly remembers a “Before”/”After” dichotomy related to digital overdependence. Social pressure and dopamine release have fueled our addictions to such technologies. Many Millennials are now abandoning Facebook entirely, or strictly using the platform for private/secret groups. By contrast, Instagram has maintained its popularity, but the platform remains problematic as it fuels self-loathing through unfair comparisons…spawning jealousy over other people’s life experiences.

Chapter 8 — Petersen discusses how graduate students, post-grad candidates, and working professionals of the Millennial generation are deprived of leisure time. This is a similar dynamic to that faced by pre-industrial farmers. Salaried work increased amidst the economic destabilization of the mid-Twentieth Century, pitting workers against one another in a Darwinian race to prove their worth to employers. As productivity blossomed, companies cut benefits (including paid vacations) and workers had no choice but to accept it. This workaholic culture consumed Boomers and Xers, and so Millennials came to internalize it. The TV series Mad Men provides a glimpse into how disconnected “knowledge-workers” at the top have become from lower-wage workers.

Chapter 9 — this final chapter packs in the most intergenerational exploration, as it revisits how Baby Boomers created a burnout culture through increased surveillance of their children. Fears of sexual predators and downward mobility drove this change in priorities. Historically, Black and Brown single moms had shouldered the double obligations of domestic home responsibilities alongside workplace obligations; once this culture shock began to hit White middle-class women, they made similar sacrifices so their husbands wouldn’t feel emasculated.

Due to these burdens, many Millennial women learned multitasking skills from their Boomer moms — but that also came with internalized regret when they put off life ambitions in favor of raising families. A lot of these Millennial women decided to avoid repeating their mothers’ mistakes, giving themselves more choices even if it meant “having it all” at high financial expense to themselves. Petersen makes the argument that women subject other women to these patriarchal judgments as much as, if not more than, men subject women to it. She also references gender/media researcher Ann Burnett’s theory on the “cult of busyness,” exacerbated by social media jealousy.

Finally, she draws from psychologist Darcy Lockman’s writings about how the culture of fatherhood tends to place lower expectations on fathers than the culture of motherhood places on mothers. Women are conditioned to be better multitaskers than men, rather than men somehow being inherently worse multitaskers. Heterosexual men don’t ask how they can improve, and their wives don’t ask them to improve, but this is due to the outdated notion that domesticity must involve a wife being “the boss” while her husband is “the employee.” These factors, along with simmering rage, have led to the “leisure privilege” enjoyed by men. Although wealthier Millennials still feel this burnout, they’re only able to temporarily alleviate these symptoms; by contrast, for those in poverty, it’s unyielding.

Petersen closes by imploring Millennials to avoid repeating the mistakes of our Boomer parents, as we proceed to pack the schedules of our own Alpha (aka “Gen AA”) children with playdates intended to secure economic and social connections. Some go so far as to design kids’ birthday parties with themselves in mind, while legislative misogyny prevents subsidized child care. In her epilogue, Petersen writes about her own experience choosing not to have kids. She encourages our generation to create cultural shifts and sensible policies so these patterns of burnout can be broken.

Can’t Even delivers an honest look at Millennials, as a group, facing ongoing hurdles related to job security, mental health, and emotional disharmony. It’s a “must-read” for anybody who wants to truly understand Generation Y beyond the clichéd tropes of participation trophies and avocado toast.