PanSlateIn some ways, the book itself feels like an artifact of resistance culture: yet another call to an undefined action, swathed in a pretty cover. There’s even matching swag ... Coming at the close of a different book, a passionate-if-vague rallying cry might have left me feeling personally galvanized ... Instead, the main feeling I had reading Can’t Even was one of annoyance. Like the viral essay that came before it, Can’t Even insists that burnout is an affliction that is most likely to affect you based on what years you were born, as opposed to, say, the result of some intersection of generational wealth, gender, subjugation to racism, and, yes, the particular level of technological surveillance hell under which your job takes place ... In sections where she uses the first-person plural—we millennials—her portrait of the millennial becomes clear, and it’s cartoonish ... so much of this book is focused on things that are goals, not essentials. And I couldn’t help but feel that the reason burnout seems so salient now might simply be because white people like Petersen—who were promised that we would not only be economically and socially secure but also successful—are facing a future in which we’re less successful than our parents were ... We’re simply not as helpless as this book makes us out to be.
