Catherine’s Reviews > Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation > Status Update

“We are performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve our job. ... At heart, this is a manifestation of a general undervaluing of our own work: many of us still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.”

“‘everything bad is good, everything good is bad’ — a mantra I threw around with my friends during grad school to describe the perverse alchemy of overwork, in which drudgery feels ‘great,’ and actually pleasurable activities become indelibly lined with guilt.”

“The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon – and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the ‘honor‘ of performing it.”

“What you’re doing when practicing your times tables or taking a standardized test or writing an essay isn’t learning, but preparing yourself to work.”