Petersen offers an insightful treatise on the 'burnout generation' that is a far cry from the essentialist portrayals of both generations that dominate the current discourse. Rather than dissect who is to blame for the plight (and it is a plight, histrionics aside) of millennials, Petersen offers a moving discourse on why the kids are not alright and, even more importantly, why they are not, despite how they’ve been characterized, the spoiled, lazy, feckless generation ... Petersen’s conversations with adult millennials are moving and unsettling ... The moments when Can’t Even grapples with the burnout that has now become the hallmark of the millennial generation are insightful and leave the reader hungry for more ... a must-read both for millennials and the generation that made them.
Burnout is a one-word descriptor that Petersen argues is capacious enough to encapsulate an entire generation’s crisis—even if it affects individuals and groups in wildly different ways ... Over the course of nine bleak chapters, Petersen seeks to show, basically, how much worse things are for millennials than even they might realize ... Although Petersen’s synthesis of the existing literature is cogent and clear, and although her anecdotal reporting nicely complements the studies she cites, little of what she writes is new or surprising. What is new is her argument that all of this—the need to work constantly, which began for millennials in childhood and never stopped—can be summed up with a diagnosis of 'burnout.' Our generational affliction is more than poverty or precarity; it is endless fatigue. Can’t Even is convincingly argued, but it raises a question: Is a psychological diagnosis really appropriate for such a varied, and fundamentally economic, affliction? ... Does the pressure a BuzzFeed writer feels to constantly post on social media and Slack really stem from the same condition that makes so many fast-food workers so tired and harried that 79 percent literally burn themselves, according to one 2015 study cited by Petersen? ... In spite of these critiques, Can’t Even is a powerful book. Petersen ably blends scholarship and reportage, but her most important intervention is her relentless empathy.
It is my sincere hope that millennials will read Can’t Even ... well-researched ... a sharp critique of boomer parents and employers ... readers don’t need to be personally burnt out for Can’t Even to resonate. If social media or the gig economy touch your life in any way, there’s something to chew on here. Fortunately, Petersen doesn’t offer any 'hacks' or 'tips' to pare back our busy lives. Instead, she advocates for societal self-reflection and an assessment of our values to spur change: Do we really want to live this way?
... a brisk, impassioned addition to an emergent mini-genre of journalistic nonfiction: books that rigorously describe and critique a single manifestation of late capitalism ... Petersen is quite clear that readers do not have the power to save themselves from burnout. Eliminating it will be 'a structural battle,' which means 'the only way to move forward is to create a vocabulary and a framework that allows us to see ourselves — and the systems that have contributed to our burnout —clearly.' This is a smart and attainable goal and one that Petersen succeeds in identifying ... relies heavily on personal testimonies that come from a diverse but still white-skewing group of interviewees who are nearly all women. Odd as it is to write this phrase, the male perspective is sadly absent here, which has significant implications in terms of race and class. For instance, Petersen never considers the effect of police brutality on Black men's burnout, or burnout in communities where traditionally male jobs — coal mining, say — have dried up. She is also prone to overfocusing, in various guises, on 'the 'obnoxious' task of maintaining appearances,' which, while onerous and a sure source of burnout, may not have merited more airtime than, say, the burnout-inducing effects of worse-than-obnoxious tasks like feeding children while living in a food desert ... Petersen might remind me here that '[t]here's no burnout Olympics' — true, but it bears noting that better research and prioritization would have strengthened Can't Even as both a portrait of burnout and a call for solidarity. Still, the book is effective, if imperfect, in both roles, and its flaws may serve to invite more writers into the necessary conversation Petersen has begun. She plainly hopes so. Burnout, Petersen argues, will end only with sweeping labor-policy changes, meaning that it will end only when we 'vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for [reform] tirelessly.' Can't Even offers more than enough motivation to cast such a vote.
…Ms. Petersen has, it seems, constructed an entire worldview around being irritated by small errands … Her diagnosis may be overbroad and unconvincing, but Can’t Even can serve as a guide to a class of American adults who are replacing life’s mediating institutions with careerism and political activism, to no great result … Ms. Petersen is a shrewd observer of other trends as well … Less credible is Ms. Petersen’s story about the economy … Ms. Petersen’s claim that millennials are worse off than past generations is also complicated by today’s wildly higher consumption levels, which makes comparisons difficult … Part of the author’s goal is to push back on stereotypes about millennials, but Can’t Even often confirms them … offers no policy solutions to the millennial life of overwork and overstimulation … Blaming, as this book does, capitalism, Donald J. Trump, management consultants, patriarchy, Instagram—all of that, and nearly everything else, is easier than facing up to the significance of one’s own choices.
... Petersen—to use a phrase popular with millennials—'brings the receipts' ... If you are feeling frustrated, wondering how you’re going to be able to keep it together, you may find some solace in Petersen’s book. It argues persuasively: You’re not alone, and there are things to do be done about it.
... meticulously researched study of burnout among millennials ... Petersen is at her best when drawing a line through history, showing how previous generations thrived within a framework of protections in the workplace and wider society, then dismantled them all while pushing the myth of the self-made man: hard work means success ... The sections on leisure and social media, and why millennials can feel exhausted by rest, are astutely observed ... For many, myself included, Petersen’s book will lead to excoriating self-reflection ... Can’t Even is extremely enlightening – I can only hope that millennials, and Americans, won’t be the only ones to read it.
In 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.
The 'burnout' described by Petersen’s book is a matter not just of financial insecurity, but also of disappointed expectations. Middle-class millennials were helicopter-parented through countless exams and CV-boosting activities by anxious mums and dads. They spent their summer holidays not at the beach, but undertaking badly paid or unpaid internships. If they eventually won the prestigious jobs they sought, they found that the pay scarcely covered the rent in the big cities where those jobs were located. The archetypal millennial in popular culture is a panicking overachiever ... Petersen’s book is a readable, well-researched guide to a generation.
Regardless of the camp you’re in, you’re bound to find new insights ... 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 ... The book was written—obviously—before COVID-19 exacerbated many of these issues (specifically, the precarity of work, the absence of universal healthcare and the ever-mounting childcare crisis). 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' ... In the end, Can’t Even feels cathartic no matter your age. After all, aren't we all susceptible to the pitfalls of of FOMO, side hustles and thirst traps? Aren't we all doing our best to—cringe—keep on adulting?
Petersen’s book is a readable, well-researched guide to a generation ... But neither does Petersen offer platitudinous solutions, railing against the lifestyle-oriented sticking plasters millennials are usually sold ... Admittedly, it is easier to sign up to pilates classes than to dismantle capitalism, and readers may be left asking: 'Well, now what?' Still, identifying the problem is a necessary first step. Can’t Even – despite its unhelpfully whiny title – scotches the idea that millennials are just lazy. Instead, it looks at how we were sold the myth that if you work hard you can have it all, and so we worked really, really hard, through global economic crises, and still found we had less than our parents ... This is hardly a new formulation. But what is genuinely enlightening is the way Petersen lays out how economic changes ushered in by the boomer generation are responsible for work being so unstable these days ... There is a problem, however. Petersen’s original article felt timely, diagnosing a near universal experience. But this book has been overtaken by events. It suggests burnout is not just a result of chronic work stress, but also the way we approach parenting, socialising, social media and leisure as another kind of work to be optimised. Burnout comes from never really switching off. And this year, many of us got forcibly switched off. Forced to have nights in; forced to slow down ...In a bolted-on intro, Petersen invites readers to assume that Covid amplifies all her arguments. Inevitably, her descriptions of, say, the grind of office 'presenteeism' now feel out of date. Nonetheless, she is surely right that the pandemic will only add to the need for radical change. We may no longer be burned out, but we’re looking for lessons in how not to go back there ... a reminder to the burned out generation that things can be different.
Decentering the white middle-class millennial experience as the millennial experience is an ongoing and essential aspect of this project, Petersen writes. But she is a white middle-class millennial, and her frequent reliance on the plural “we” often hinders that decentering process ... a conflict arises between the universality of these issues and the unavoidable way Petersen ends up centering herself. More and more, her solutions to these structural issues end up sounding like ones that would best benefit another type-A achiever who desperately wants to find meaning in work. Some people might respond to burnout by switching jobs or moving to another city, but Petersen just wrote a book about it ... Petersen is no less bullish about her positions, but she’s more sanguine about the possibility of reorganizing the system from within rather than tearing it down altogether. Furthermore, she tends to write from a place of surprise that we’re in this situation to begin with ... She does a lot of related work to ease in those readers who might not be readymade radicals ... Few of the claims are novel (you could glean as much by scrolling through several months of Bernie Sanders’s tweets), but her dutiful approach is geared toward those who weren’t already aware or convinced of the circumstances swirling all around ... I want to stress how much I empathize, because I know a political awakening requires more than a list of facts. But as a reader, these types of generalizations are unsatisfying because they rely so heavily on trusting she has had a representative experience. Who are her friends? What’s the work they wanted to do? You don’t have to look far to find a social world of millennials who didn’t require decades to realize the American dream was flawed, internalized that lesson as teenagers and young adults, and adjusted their worldview accordingly ... unavoidably personal. Though every chapter incorporates multiple outside testimonies, most of which predictably underline whatever point she’s making, we almost always circle back to what she thinks, based on her life and experiences ... It’s her book, but it’s impossible to cultivate a position of objective expertise from such memoiristic subjectivity, especially given her rarefied work trajectory: academia to media, where she has built a sizable brand and audience ... Petersen’s book, rather than decentering its writer, makes her experience a heuristic and projects her assumptions onto the world.
Attempting to decenter the white, middle-class experience of young adulthood, this book explores how millennials of all backgrounds and income brackets suffer because of the gig economy they inherited ... Petersen is generous in divulging personal experiences and hopeful even at her most enraged. This galvanizing read reminds readers that what seems impossible is absolutely not, especially for a generation with so little to lose.
... articulate and persuasive prose ... 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 ... 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. This chronicle of changes is well worth reading, as the author explains so much about life in the age of Trump. Throw in the candid discussions by millennials—most of whom are burned out and can’t find satisfaction in their lives, even as they work diligently—and the book becomes an even more useful and insightful series of lessons ... A well-researched and -rendered analysis of why so many millennials feel overwhelmed despite their best efforts.
Though older generations mischaracterize America’s largest demographic group as lazy and selfish, millennials are actually working multiple jobs to pay bills in the modern gig economy as they watch the American dream slip away, Petersen contends. She weaves together personal reflections, profiles of other millennials, and a plethora of demographic information to addresses issues such as parenting, social media, college debt, and health care ... By turns exasperated, indignant, and empathetic, she supports her claims with strong evidence and calls on millennials to be a force for widespread social change. The result is an incisive portrait of a generation primed for revolt.
