Book Review: "Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation"

Anne Helen Petersen's new book is a powerful defense of one of the most-maligned generations.

I’ve been an admirer of Anne Helen Petersen for some time, ever since she started writing for BuzzFeed. She was an exemplar of what one could accomplish with a degree in film studies, and I eagerly devoured first her various articles on BuzzFeed (her lengthy essay on Armie Hammer was one of my favorites), as well as her books, including her most recent, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. 

Now, I’ll be the first one to say that I’ve always had a rather ambivalent relationship with my generational location. Given that I was born in 1984 and grew up in a rural area, I always felt more of an affiliation for Gen X, especially since most of my cousins fell into that cohort. And, of course, there was also the fact that millennials have proven to be perfect scapegoats for every social ill imaginable. In fact, it’s become very easy (for some people) to make fun of millennials, whether it’s taking a jibe at them because of their alleged predilection for eating avocado toast (no really, it’s happened) or the claim that they’re orchestrating the downfall of some supposedly beloved cultural institution or practice (everything from homeowning to dating and sex). As one of the most populous generations currently living in America, it’s easy to see why we’d make such a convenient punching bag, since it absolves other generations, particularly those that preceded us, for having to take accountability for any of their own actions. 

As Petersen points out, however, the truth is that millennials are the generation that has born the brunt of historical forces that were at work long before they were born. They came of age after the economic transformations of the 1980s and 1990s--to say nothing of the 2000s and 2010s, with the Great Recession and its aftermath--had stripped away and demolished many of the employment certainties and social safety nets that had been so essential to building a strong and stable middle class. Thus it is that many millennials have found themselves working in the gig economy, often having to patch together a bare living and often without such essentials as health insurance.

What’s more, they also grew up in an age in which social media became ever more ubiquitous, saturating everyday life and, just as importantly, structuring how one lives that life. While social media was supposed to make all of us feel more connected to one another, in fact it became just another aspect of work. Given that millennials were always having to work in some form or another, they were (and are) encouraged to monetize their passions, so that their Instagram becomes not a visual record of one’s loves and hobbies, but is often a means of building up one’s brand so that it can be leveraged for financial gain. Just as importantly, we’ve become addicted to the mere act of scrolling, even though it makes us feel worse, and even though being plugged into the news 24/7 takes a tremendous emotional toll.

The problem is wider than just labor and social media; it’s also in how parents are encouraged to structure every hour of their children’s days, to make sure that everything they do is geared toward the goal of getting into the best college so that, of course, they can get the best jobs. The problem, as Petersen points out, is that there aren’t nearly enough jobs to go around for all of these new college (and graduate school) graduates, which leads to, of course, more participating in the gig economy and more burnout. It’s a vicious cycle, one that seems to have no end. 

The result of all of this is that millennials, particularly those living in America, exist in a constant state of exhausted alienation, from themselves, from others, and even from their own desires. Petersen skillfully blends together her own experiences as an older millennial who grew up in a rural area with first-person accounts from a number of other members of our age cohort, and while it can be exhausting to read how worn down so many of our fellows can be, it’s also a call to arms, a reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way and that, as the largest voting bloc, we do in fact have the power to change things. 

One of the things that struck me particularly powerfully as I read Can’t Even was how much it described my own life. Like many other (older) millennials, I graduated college just as the Great Recession hit, and while I was fortunate enough to have a decently-paying job, it wasn’t the sort of thing that I wanted to do full-time. I returned to graduate school in 2009 and stayed there for almost a decade, earning an MA and a PhD in the progress. However, as soon as I graduated I found myself facing just the situation that Petersen outlines. I struck out on the academic job market, and I am thus trying to make a go of it by being a freelance writer. Like the many subjects she interviews, I sometimes have difficulty “turning off” my work, and I also struggle to make ends meet (though I’m fortunate to be with a partner who has a full-time job as a tenured academic and is willing to help subsidize my fledgling writing career). There’s something both satisfying and depressing about seeing your own experience reflected in the testimony of others.

Ultimately, Petersen doesn’t really have any solutions to offer for the current state of affairs, other than to say that there aren’t any easy ones. The problems that millennials face are not entirely of their making, and yet they’re the ones who continue to bear the brunt of them. There’s no question that we are living in tumultuous times, particularly now that the pandemic has, as she puts it, made everything even shittier and more difficult, exacerbating the structural issues that make life in America (and her book is very much about America, as some reviewers have mentioned) as miserable as it is. However, it’s precisely because the issues are structural that we must, as Petersen says, build consensus and continue to agitate for systemic change. Anything else will merely keep us all mired in the burnout mentality.

And that cannot go on forever.