Can't Even Quotes

“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. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“[Burnout] 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.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system - of American capitalism and meritocracy - or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think,” he said. “We could just retain information so much easier, and most importantly, we had great reading comprehension, which is 90 percent of school assignments. Once I got to college, I realized how little I really know about studying and effectively learning and thinking rather than just reading and knowing.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“Most of us would rather read a book than stare at our phones, but we’re so tired that mindless scrolling is all we have energy to do.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“A reckoning with burnout is so often the reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centeredness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“It took burning out for many of us to arrive at this point. But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“We’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying This is too much, and we call that conditioning “grit” or “hustle.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being. Adulting therefore becomes a verb.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“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.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“It's always been implied that if you fail to succeed, you aren't passionate enough. But I no longer invest in work emotionally. It isn't worth it. I learned that every single person is expendable. None of it is fair or based on passion or merit. I don't have the bandwidth to play that game”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“Rest doesn’t just make workers happier, but makes them more efficient when they’re actually on the job.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“I find myself returning to one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received about how to actually reduce burnout: Think not just about how to reduce your own, but how your own actions are sparking and fanning burnout in others.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“Poor parents don’t “arrive” at burnout. They’ve never left it.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“Just because inequality is not as dire does not mean that it is not felt.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“Work hasn’t changed. Workplaces still act like everyone has a wife at home. Everyone should be the ideal worker and not have to leave to take care of a sick kid. If one family struggles to balance it all, it’s a personal problem. All these families with the same problem? That’s a social issue.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“The story of middle-class ascendancy is all about individual hard work. And no one wants to lose any of the hard-won benefits of that work, which helps explain the popularity of the Personal Responsibility Crusade amongst boomers and their parents. Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“The idea of a pension was not, and is not, extravagant. It's premised on the idea that some of the profits you help produce for a company should not go to stockholders, or the CEO, back back to longtime workers, who would continue to receive a portion of their salary even after they retire. In essence, the worker committed years of their life to making the company profitable; the company then commits some extra years of its profits to the employee.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“All the decisions and multitasking that are already hard to juggle when you’re well-nourished and have a safe and consistent place to live become immeasurably more difficult”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“As she amassed more and more, she noticed a trend in the way the authors of the letters—almost always mothers—were framing their family’s lives: as an endless, packed, frenetic stream of busyness. She began to realize that they were, in fact, competing:“It’s about showing status,” Burnett told Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed. “That if you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life.”12 Busy-ness, in other words, as a very certain sort of class.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a deeply compelling case for ignoring all of the impulses toward productivity and perfection that have come to imbue our lives, leisure, and otherwise. That means doing, well, nothing—at least nothing that is conceived of as value-making under capitalism.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, will never buy a home, and are terrified of what a medical catastrophe could bring, so long as you can still blend in with higher incomes in a social setting.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos, where you go on that vacation. It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“In The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Elizabeth”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“The difference, then, is that those servants made it so that they didn’t have to work—not so that they could work more.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion