Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

I’m reminded often of what I was told while studying for the GRE, which holds true for so many types of standardized testing: It’s not a test of your intelligence, but a test of your ability to take this particular test. And what each particular test is testing for, over and over again throughout our childhoods, is our capacity to perform work in its rawest form: to be presented with a series of problems and a rigid set of constraints in which to solve them, and to accomplish the task uncritically, with as much speed and efficiency as possible. But the curious thing about these tests, at least in America, is that a student’s results can always—with the right amount of money, and connections—be supplemented.