They Lied to Us

When I was growing up, all the adults around me seemed to offer the same life advice, “Work hard, go to a good college, graduate with a ‘useful’ degree, and it will all work out.” Mixed in there was also some messaging, as subtle as it was, about finding “the one,” settling down, and having a family. It was a formula I was assured would bring me all my heart’s desires, and would not fail. And, so, being the trusting person that I am, I followed the plan. I worked hard to “overcome” my disability (there is no such thing, but that’s a story for another time); I attended one of Ohio’s top ranked public university; I graduated with high honors with a BS in Education; I settled down with my kind and loving partner; We started a family… and it didn’t all work out as promised.

Sound familiar? If so, then you might have grown up as a middle-class white Millennial too. In her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen explores this generational phenomenon, and how the messaging we’ve received over our lifetime has led Millennials to a constant state of Burnout. Here are some key quotes and questions I took away from Petersen’s book (p.s. please excuse the excess of quotes – this book really did speak to me)…

Quotes

• It’s not just the American Dream that’s broken, it’s America… that’s a deeply discombobulating realization, but it’s one that people who haven’t navigated our world with the privileges of whiteness, middle-class-ness, or citizenship have understood for some time. p. xvii
• Every day, we all have a list of things that need to get done, places where our mental energy must be allocated first. But that energy is finite, and when you keep trying to pretend that it isn’t – that’s when burnout arrives. p. xvii
• Increasingly – and increasingly among Millennials – burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition. p. xx
• Millennials live with the reality that we’re going to work forever, die before we pay off our student loans, potentially bankrupt our children with our care, or get wiped out in a global apocalypse. p. xxii
• [Speaking of Boomers in the 70s] Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them. p. 15
• Surrounded by perceived threats and growing uncertainty, middle-class boomers doubled down on what they could try to control: their children. p. 20
• ‘Concerted Cultivation’ p. 25
• For some Millennials, helicopter parenting wasn’t an over-reaction to class anxiety. It was the appropriate, measured reaction to real, not perceived, threat, and systemic racism. p. 35
• Boomer parents were worried about all the things parents are always worried about. But they were also deeply anxious about creating, sustaining, or “passing down” middle-class status amidst a period of widespread downward mobility – priming a generation of children to work, no matter the cost, until they achieved it. p. 37
• Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. p. 47
• There are so many reasons for Millennial burnout. But one of the hardest to acknowledge is the one Ann Faces down every day: that the thing you worked so hard for, the thing you sacrificed for and physically suffered for, isn’t happiness, or passion, or freedom… it’s just the same thing it always was, event when it gets dressed up in the fancy robes of the education gospel: more work. p. 65
• “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.” – Adam J. Kurtz p. 69
• [Speaking of the ‘Great Recession’] “Millennials got bodied in the downturn. [They] graduated into the wort 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.” – Annie Lowrey p. 77
• Amongst my peers, I’ve noticed a generalized “come to Jesus” moment regarding job requirements and aspirations: They no longer want their dream job – they just want a job that doesn’t underpay them, overwork them, and guilt them into not advocating for themselves. p. 88
• 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. p. 92
• Left to its own devices, capitalism is not benevolent. p. 113
• There’s a startling disconnect between the ostensible health of the economy and the mental and physical health of those who power it. p. 114
• We’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying “this is too much” and we call that conditioning “grit” or “hustle.” p. 128
• When we look back on the period following the Great Recession, it will be remembered not as a time of great innovation, but of great exploitation, when tech companies reached “unicorn” status (valued over $1 billion) on the acks of employees they refused to even deign to label, let alone respect, as such. p. 141
• Which underlines the current conundrum: shitty work conditions produce burnout, but burnout – and the resultant inability, either through lack of energy or lack of resources, to resist exploitation – helps keep work shitty. p. 147
• [Speaking about the rise in connectivity through smart devices] They make it increasingly impossible to do the things that actually ground us. They turn a run in the woods into an opportunity for self-optimization. p. 152
• That’s how social media robs us of the moments that could counterbalance our burnout. It distances us from actual experiences as we obsess over documenting them. It turns us into needless multitaskers… it erodes what used to be known as leisure time. And perhaps most damagingly it destroys opportunities for solitude. p. 164
• [Speaking of Instagram] And it’s become so intertwined with my performance of self that I fear there’s no self without it. That’s an exaggeration, maybe. But the prospect of relearning who I am – and who others are – remains daunting. I’m already exhausted, I tell themself. Where would I find the energy to do something that hard? p. 165
• Consuming news makes it feel like you’re doing something even if it’s just bearing witness. Of course, bearing witness takes a toll – especially when the news is structured to emotionally aggravate more than educate. p. 170
• Deep down, Millennials know the primary exacerbator of burnout isn’t really email, or Instagram, or a constant stream of news alerts. It’s the continuous failure to reach the impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves. p. 177
• Part of our problem is that we work more. But the other problem is that the hours when we’re not technically working never feel free from optimization – either of the body, the mind, or one’s social status. p. 180
• Since 1970, there’d been a steady, year-after-year increase in the amount of work Americans performed, and a dramatic decrease in average leisure time. p. 185
• When people do find the time and mental space to cultivate a hobby, especially if you’re “good” at it, then pressure to monetize it begins to accumulate. p. 197
• Back in 2000, the book “Bowling Alone,” written by the political scientist Robert Putnam, argued that American participation in groups, clubs, and organizations – religious, cultural, or otherwise – had precipitously dropped, as had the “social cohesion” that sprang from regular participation in them. p. 199
• In “Palaces for the People,” Erik Klinenberg suggests that part of the decline in social ties is rooted in our preference for efficiency… But, part of the problem, too, is a decline in social infrastructure: the spaces, public and private, from libraries to supper clubs and synagogues, that made it easy to cultivate informal, nonmonetary ties. p. 200
• I’ve forgotten not just how to wait, but even how to let my mind wonder and play. p. 204
• That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. p. 205
• Similar to the paradigm of overwork, [good parenting] equates exhaustion with skill, or aptitude, or devotion. The “best” parents are the ones who give until there’s nothing left of themselves. And, worst of all, there’s little evidence that actually makes kids lives better. p. 209
• Parenting burnout does not uniquely affect mothers. But because mothers continue to perform the vast majority of the labor in homes with a mother and a father, it affects mothers most. p. 209
• [Today’s mothers are] “free” to be pressured to be everything to everyone at all times, save herself. p. 210
• Between 1965 and 2003, men’s portion of unpaid family work rose from 20 percent to nearly 30 percent. But since 2003, that figure has remained stubbornly in place… women who work for pay outside the home still shoulder 65 percent of childcare responsibilities. p. 212
• Modern parenting has always in some way been about doubting your own competence. But never before has that doubt arrived with such force from so many vectors. p. 217
• ‘Competitive Martyrdom’ p. 221
• It’s the Millennial way: If the system is rigged against you, just try harder. Which helps explain one of the most curious stats of the last forty years: Women with jobs spend just as much time parenting as stay-at-home mothers died in the 1970s. p. 223
• ‘Role Overload’ p. 224
• It’s a particular sort of exhaustion to be poor. It’s exhausting to be stigmatized by society, to navigate social programs intended to help that mostly shame. A social worker once told me that he feels that American bureaucracy for aid is intentionally and endlessly tedious as a means to deter those who need it most. p. 232
• Some middle-class millennials grew up with packed schedules – but those pale in comparison to the way middle-class millennials now feel compelled to schedule their own children. p. 236
• Men still don’t value domestic labor, and men predominate our legislative bodies and the vast majority of our corporations. They don’t treat contemporary parenting – its cost, or the burnout that accompanies it – as a problem, let alone a crisis, because they cannot, or refuse to, empathize with it. p. 240
• You can’t fix parenting burnout by making time for Bible Study or journaling in the morning… or by learning how to fight like an adult… you can’t fix it with “self-care”… you can make yourself (temporarily) feel better, but the world will still feel broken. p. 242
• That’s an incredibly liberating thought: that what we’ve been taught is “just the way things are” doesn’t have to be. p. 251

Questions

• What messages did you receive in childhood about success and how to succeed?
  • Which of these messages have served you well?
  • Which of these messages are no longer based in reality?
• If you are a parent, what messages do you want to pass onto your children about success and how to succeed?
  • What messages are you passing on to your children?
• Are you feeling burnt-out?
  • If so, in what realm of your life is the burnout most prominent – work, technology, or parenting?
  • Where is the pressure coming from – society or yourself?
  • What would it take for you to stop the “hustle,” “disconnect,” and let your mind “wonder and play?”
• Where do you build social ties; where do you find community?
• If you are partnered, how is the domestic labor divided in your household?
  • Is the division equal?
  • Is the division equitable?

Thanks for bearing with me through all of that. Really, I can’t recommend this book enough. But, moving on, please note that I will not be posting in December. The holidays are always busy, and in an effort to combat my own burnout, I’ve decided to put down this blog for the month. I’ll return, however, in January with another mind blowing book; this one by notable psychologist and influencer K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning.