Review:
Can't Even, by Anne Helen Petersen
| Publisher: |
Houghton Mifflin |
| Copyright: |
2020 |
| ISBN: |
0-358-31659-6 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
230 |
Like many other people, I first became aware of Anne Helen Petersen's
journalism when her Buzzfeed article
"How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation" went viral.
Can't
Even is the much-awaited (at least by me) book-length expansion of that
thesis: The United States is, as a society, burning out, and that burnout
is falling on millennials the hardest. We're not recognizing the symptoms
because we think burnout looks like something dramatic and flashy. But
for most people burnout looks less like a nervous breakdown and more like
constant background anxiety and lack of energy.
Laura, who lives in Chicago and works as a special ed teacher, never
wants to see her friends, or date, or cook she's so tired, she just
wants to melt into the couch. "But then I can't focus on what I'm
watching, and end up unfocused again, and not completely relaxing,"
she explained. "Here I am telling you I don't even relax right! I
feel bad about feeling bad! But by the time I have leisure time, I
just want to be alone!"
Petersen explores this idea across childhood, education, work, family, and
parenting, but the core of her thesis is the precise opposite of the
pervasive myth that millennials are entitled and lazy (a persistent
generational critique that Petersen points out was also leveled at their
Baby Boomer parents in the 1960s and 1970s). Millennials aren't slackers;
they're workaholics from childhood, for whom everything has become a
hustle and a second (or third or fourth) job. The struggle with
"adulting" is a symptom of the burnout on the other side of exhaustion,
the mental failures that happen when you've forced yourself to keep going
on empty so many times that it's left lingering damage.
Petersen is a synthesizing writer who draws together the threads of other
books rather than going deep on a novel concept, so if you've been reading
about work, psychology, stress, and productivity, many of the ideas here
will be familiar. But she's been reading the same authors that I've been
reading (
Tressie McMillan Cottom,
Emily Guendelsberger,
Brigid Schulte, and even
Cal Newport), and
this was the book that helped me pull those analyses together into a
coherent picture.
That picture starts with the shift of risk in the 1970s and 1980s from
previously stable corporations with long-lasting jobs and retirement
pensions onto individual employees. The corresponding rise in precarity
and therefore fear led to a concerted effort to re-establish a feeling of
control. Baby Boomers doubled down on personal responsibility and
personal capability, replacing unstructured childhood for their kids with
planned activities and academic achievement. That generation, in turn,
internalized the need for constant improvement, constant grading, and
constant achievement, accepting an implied bargain that if they worked
very hard, got good grades, got into good schools, and got a good degree,
it would pay off in a good life and financial security.
They were betrayed. The payoff never happened; many millennials graduated
into the Great Recession and the worst economy since World War II. In
response, millennials doubled down on the only path to success they were
taught. They took on more debt, got more education, moved back in with
their parents to cut expenses, and tried even harder.
Even after watching our parents get shut out, fall from, or simply
struggle anxiously to maintain the American Dream, we didn't reject
it. We tried to work harder, and better, more efficiently, with more
credentials, to achieve it.
Once one has this framework in mind, it's startling how pervasive the
"just try harder" message is and how deeply we've internalized it. It is
at the center of the time management literature:
Getting Things Done focuses almost entirely on individual
efficiency. Later time management work has become more aware of the
importance of pruning the to-do list and doing fewer things, but addresses
that through techniques for individual prioritization.
Cal Newport is more aware than most that
constant busyness and multitasking interacts poorly with the human brain,
and has taken a few tentative steps towards treating the problem as
systemic rather than individual, but his focus is still primarily on
individual choices. Even when tackling a problem that is clearly
societal, such as the monetization of fear and outrage on social media,
the solutions are all individual: recognize that those platforms are bad
for you, make an individual determination that your attention is being
exploited, and quit social media through your personal force of will.
And this isn't just productivity systems. Most of public discussion of
environmentalism in the United States is about personal energy
consumption, your individual carbon footprint, household recycling, and
whether you personally should eat meat. Discussions of monopoly and
monopsony become debates over whether you personally should buy from
Amazon. Concerns about personal privacy turn into advocacy for using an
ad blocker or shaming people for using Google products. Articles about
the growth of right-wing extremism become exhortations to take
responsibility for the right-wing extremist in your life and argue them
out of their beliefs over the dinner table. Every major systemic issue
facing society becomes yet another personal obligation, another place we
are failing as individuals, something else that requires trying harder,
learning more, caring more, doing more.
This advice is well-meaning (mostly; sometimes it is an intentional and
cynical diversion), and can even be effective with specific problems. But
it's also a trap. If you're feeling miserable, you just haven't found the
right combination of time-block scheduling, kanban, and bullet journaling
yet. If you're upset at corporate greed and the destruction of the
environment, the change starts with you and your household. The solution
is in your personal hands; you just have try a little harder, work a
little harder, make better decisions, and spend money more ethically
(generally by buying more expensive products). And therefore, when we're
already burned out, every topic becomes another failure, increasing our
already excessive guilt and anxiety.
Believing that we're in control, even when we're not, does have
psychological value. That's part of what makes it such a beguiling trap.
While drafting this review, I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with
Robert Sapolsky on poverty and stress, and one of the points he made is
that, when mildly or moderately bad things happen, believing you have
control is empowering. It lets you recast the setback as a larger
disaster that you were able to prevent and avoid a sense of futility. But
when something major goes wrong, believing you have control is actively
harmful to your mental health. The tragedy is now also a personal
failure, leading to guilt and internal recrimination on top of the effects
of the tragedy itself. This is why often the most comforting thing we can
say to someone else after a personal disaster is "there's nothing you
could have done."
Believing we can improve our lives if we just try a little harder does
work, until it doesn't. And because it does work for smaller things, it's
hard to abandon; in the short term, believing we're at the mercy of forces
outside our control feels even worse. So we double down on
self-improvement, giving ourselves even more things to attempt to do and
thus burning out even more.
Petersen is having none of this, and her anger is both satisfying and
clarifying.
In writing that article, and this book, I haven't cured anyone's
burnout, including my own. But one thing did become incredibly clear.
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. We gravitate toward those
personal cures because they seem tenable, and promise that our lives
can be recentered, and regrounded, with just a bit more discipline, a
new app, a better email organization strategy, or a new approach to
meal planning. But these are all merely Band-Aids on an open wound.
They might temporarily stop the bleeding, but when they fall off, and
we fail at our new-found discipline, we just feel worse.
Structurally,
Can't Even is half summaries of other books and
essays put into this overall structure and half short profiles and quotes
from millennials that illustrate her point. This is Petersen's typical
journalistic style if you're familiar with her other work. It gains a lot
from the voices of individuals, but it can also feel like argument from
anecdote. If there's a epistemic flaw in this book, it's that Petersen
defends her arguments more with examples than with scientific study. I've
read enough of the other books she cites, many of which do go into the
underlying studies and statistics, to know that her argument is
well-grounded, but I think
Can't Even works better as a roadmap and
synthesis than as a primary source of convincing data.
The other flaw that I'll mention is that although Petersen tries very hard
to incorporate poorer and non-white millennials, I don't think the effort
was successful, and I'm not sure it was possible within the structure
of this book. She frequently makes a statement that's accurate and
insightful for millennials from white, middle-class families, acknowledges
that it doesn't entirely apply to, for example, racial minorities, and
then moves on without truly reconciling those two perspectives. I think
this is a deep structural problem: One's experience of American life
is very different depending on race and class, and the phenomenon that
Petersen is speaking to is to an extent specific to those social classes
who had a more comfortable and relaxing life and are losing it.
One way to see the story of the modern economy is that white people are
becoming as precarious as everyone else already was, and are reacting by
making the lives of non-white people yet more miserable. Petersen is
accurately pointing to significant changes in relationships with
employers, productivity, family, and the ideology of individualism, but
experiencing that as a change is more applicable to white people than
non-white people. That means there are, in a way, two books here: one
about the slow collapse of the white middle class into constant burnout,
and a different book about the much longer-standing burnout of being
non-white in the United States and our systemic failure to address the
causes of it. Petersen tries to gesture at the second book, but she's not
the person to write it and those two books cannot comfortably live between
the same covers. The gestures therefore feel awkward and forced, and
while the discomfort itself serves some purpose, it lacks the insight that
Petersen brings to the rest of the book.
Those critiques aside, I found
Can't Even immensely clarifying.
It's the first book that explained to me in a way I understood what's so
demoralizing and harmful about Instagram and its allure of cosplaying as a
successful person. It helped me understand how productivity and
individual political choices fit into a system that emphasizes individual
action as an excuse to not address collective problems. And it also gave
me a strange form of hope, because if something can't go on forever, it
will, at some point, stop.
Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for
struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the
endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply
into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little
savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We're a
pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves.
Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.
Nothing will change without individual people making different decisions
and taking different actions than they are today. But we have gone much
too far down the path of individual, atomized actions that may produce
feelings of personal virtue but that are a path to ineffectiveness and
burnout when faced with systemic problems. We need to make different
choices, yes, but choices towards solidarity and movement politics rather
than personal optimization.
There is a backlash coming. If we let it ground itself in personal
grievance, it could turn ugly and take a racist and nationalist direction.
But that's not, by in large, what millennials have done, and that makes me
optimistic. If we embrace the energy of that backlash and help shape it
to be more inclusive, just, and fair, we can rediscover the effectiveness
of collective solutions for collective problems.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Fifteen years have passed since I started my career in IT which is quite some time. I've been playing with computers for 25 years now, which makes me quite knowledgeable about the field, for sure.However, while I was fully prepared to bargain with computers, I was not prepared to do so with humans. The whole career management thing was unknown to me. I had no useful skills to navigate within the enterprise organization. I had to learn the ropes the hard way, failing along the way. It hurt.Almost ten years ago, I had the chance to meet a new colleague Alexis Monville. Alexis was a team facilitator, and I started to work with him on many non-technical levels. He taught me a lot about agility and team organization. Working on this set of new skills changed how I envisioned my work and how I fit into the company.
Alexis Monville
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