My Selection — Can’t Even

Anne Helen Petersen gives us an honest glimpse into the trauma and oppression faced by Gen Y (“Millennials”)

Culture writer and journalist Anne Helen Petersen has written extensively about an array of issues related to pop culture and politics alike. She has an astute skill at assessing celebrities and the ways in which they are piped into (or fail to be) the pulse of their audiences.

Previously, I wrote an expanded review of her 2020 book entitled Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. As Petersen drives a comprehensive historical analysis of how Millennials arrived at our dejected and pariah-like status, here are some of her most astute passages and quotations:

The name “[M]illennial” — and much of the anxiety that still surrounds it — emerged in the mid-2000s, when the first wave of us were entering the workforce. Our expectations were too high, we were scolded, and our work ethnic too low. We were sheltered and naïve, unschooled in the ways of the world — understandings that have ossified around our generation, with little regard to the ways we confronted and weathered the Great Recession, how much student debt we’re shouldering, and how inaccessible so many milestones of adulthood have become. Ironically, the most famous characterization of [M]illennials is that we believe that everyone should get a medal, no matter how poorly they did in the race. And while we do, as a generation, struggle to shed the idea that we’re each unique and worthy in some way, talk to most [M]illennials and the thing they’ll tell you about growing up isn’t that they conceived of themselves as special, but that “success,” broadly defined, was the most important thing in their world…We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system — of American capitalism and meritocracy — or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late[-]2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken. We’re the first generation since the Great Depression where many of us will find ourselves worse off than our parents.

She analyzes the common stereotypes people have of Millennials:

The stereotype of the oversurveilled, overprotected kid is that they grow up to be weak and lazy. But in my experience, the [M]illennial trait of “laziness” has a lot more to do with economic security — either the family’s actual security, or total insulation from precarity as a child or in adulthood. The laziest [M]illennials I know are the ones who’ve been saved from the consequences, economic or otherwise, of every mistake they’ve made. But that’s still just one small sliver of the actual [M]illennial population. Most who grew up middle class and overprotected also grew up to be hypervigilant about maintaining or obtaining class status…So many [M]illennials end up defining themselves exclusively by their ability to work hard, and succeed, and play it safe — instead of their actual personal tastes, or their willingness to take risks, or experiment and even fail.

Her encapsulation of the workplace pressures that Millennials face:

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. There’s always someone just as passionate to take your place. Benefits packages can be slashed or nonexistent; freelance rates can be lowered to the point of bare sustenance, especially in the arts. In many cases, instead of offering a writer money for content that goes on a website, the writer essentially pays the website in free labor for the opportunity for a byline. At the same time, employers can raise the minimum qualifications for the job, necessitating more school, another degree, more training — even if that training may or may not be necessary — in order to even be considered.

Petersen shatters the myth of Millennials being ungrateful freeloaders:

“Millennials got bodied in the downturn,” Annie Lowrey wrote in [T]he Atlantic. They “graduated into the worst job market in eighty years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple of years living in their parents’ basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages”…No job, after all, means no ability to save — for a home, for retirement — or invest. Some [M]illennials went back to school to weather the storm and emerged, two or six years later, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt — and job prospects hardly improved. Those forced to move home were also forced to endure anxious discourse, from our own parents and the media, that we’d never leave: aimless and lazy, instead of weathering an economic cataclysm entirely out of our control.

Her skepticism toward people who make blanket criticisms of Millennials:

When someone says [M]illennials are lazy, I want to ask them: Which [M]illennials? When someone says we’re entitled, I do ask them: Who taught us we should be able to do work that we love? We were told that college would be the way to a middle-class job. That wasn’t true. We were told that passion would eventually lead to profit, or at least a sustainable job where we were valued. That also wasn’t true. Entering into adulthood has always been about modifying expectations: of what it is and what it can provide. The difference with [M]illennials, then, is that we’ve spent between five and twenty years doing the painful work of adjusting our expectations: recalibrating our parents’ and advisors’ very reassuring understanding of what the job market was with the realities of our own experience of it, but also arriving at a wholly utilitarian vision of what a job can and should be. For many of us, it took years in shitty jobs to understand ourselves as laborers, as workers, hungry for solidarity.

Petersen comments on the unequal male/female distribution of domestic work by observing:

As Darcy Lockman puts it in [“]All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership[”], “Reports of the modern, involved father have been greatly exaggerated.” The culture of fatherhood has changed, but that doesn’t mean that fathers, even those committed to equality before the arrival of children, are enacting it in the home…There are a myriad explanations for this unequal distribution of labor: Men aren’t as good at multitasking, men don’t breastfeed and thus can’t take the sort of caregiving role in early infancy; women have unrealistic expectations for how men should complete tasks. Lockman methodically breaks down — and disabuses readers of — each notion. Men are not “naturally” bad at multitasking, for example. Men are conditioned not to have to be multitaskers; women are conditioned to be multitaskers. “Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective — what’s the power angle on this — often explains things,” the neuroscientist Lisa Eliot tells Lockman. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.” Which isn’t to entirely fault men. Like women, most [men] have few models of truly equitable partnerships. Once patterns of caregiving (and “expertise” in that care) are established, it’s extremely difficult to alter them.

Near the end of the book, Petersen offers the following advice for Millennial parents who are struggling to figure out how to survive while raising children:

Parenting is never going to be free of worry, or comparison, or stress. But there can be significantly less of all of those things. To make that happen, we have to admit that it’s not enough to have progressive ideals about parenting. Our current iteration of patriarchal capitalism destroys those ideals, no matter how earnest or deeply held, and replaces them with their regressive opposite: dramatically unequal distribution of domestic labor, generalized undervaluing of women’s labor, and jobs engineered to favor those unburdened with primary childcare responsibilities…Think not just about how to reduce your own [burnout], but how your own actions are sparking and fanning burnout in others. That’s useful advice for any male partners reading this chapter, but it’s useful for everyone, no matter how burnt out you find yourself, and regardless of your status as a parent. 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, or people who look and speak and act like you and have families like yours — but for everyone.

You can review a holistic assessment of Anne Helen Petersen’s socio-historical overview and proposed solutions by reading her book in full.