Can't Even - Anne Helen Petersen

Intro

• The pandemic amplifies the dynamics highlighted in the book
• Working all the time became the ultimate task
• Burnout = reaching exhaustion, when you don’t think you can go any further, and continuing on; never getting sense of accomplishment from achieving a goal
  • “…combines an intense yearning for this stare of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained…”
  • “It’s the flattening of life into inf never-ending to-do list…”
• Millennials = born 1981-1996, largest generation
  • Raised to believe that working hard → rise up through systems of meritocracy and capitalism
• Important to look at millennial burnout beyond the middle class white experience
• This is not a personal problem, but a societal one → solutions must be structural, too!

1. Our Burnt-Out Parents

• 1950s-60s = for middle-class boomers, age of active government, labor laws, growth of middle class, compression of income distribution
• 1970s = anxiety that “things getting better in America” was over, declining trust in govt, financial precarity
  • Shift from risk-sharing practices (unions, pensions, Social Security, training on the job) to individual responsibility

2. Growing Mini-Adults

• Concept of concerted cultivation → ideal parenting strategy: schedule and train your kids in every aspect of their life to optimize them for eventual work; parents prioritizing children over everything
  • Esp for upper class, constant supervision, helicopter parenting
  • Complete lack of unstructured time → missed out on lots of learning for the real workd
• Kids ended up defining themselves completely by ability to work and succeed → no sense of personal taste; guilt over having any free time
• Fear of downward mobility in socioeconomic status

3. College at Any Cost

• College seen as best possible option to achieve/maintain the “American Dream”
  • “The education gospel” → schooling makes society more democratic and equitable

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptual use themselves as walking college resumes.

• Being valuable in American society = being able to work → constant treadmill of building your resume, pushing for the next position, until (maybe) you achieve a secure place in the middle class
• White American parents do basically the same thing as much-demonized Tiger Moms, just cloaked in the rhetoric of “happiness” and “reaching your potential”

4. Do What You Love and You’ll Still Work Every Day for the Rest of Your Life

• Additional expectation that you have to be super passionate about your job → masks the reality of labor, and also that your job is not your whole life
  • Built on myth that passion → profit, everyone that has succeeded did so with hard work and drive
• Adam J. Kurtz on Twitter: “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.”
• Employers market entry-level positions with “cool job” factor rather than reasonable pay, benefits
• Raised to perform hope labor — un/undercompensated work (internships, fellowships) in hopes that future work will follow
  • Particularly true in academia: a “hope labor industrial complex”
• Following your “calling” → roots in Calvinist religion; makes rejecting or failing at a job into a moral failire

How Work Got So Shitty

• The precariat: new expanding social class of temps, adjuncts, freelancers, gif employees (contingent laborers)
  • No stable salary or benefits… overall precarious economic and class status → hypervigilant for bad luck that can sink them to poverty
  • In contrast to the salaried, more secure salariat, which is continuing to drift into the precariat
• Shift from big government → free market accompanied by recommendation by external consultants for corporate downsizing to raise stock value, become more agile— at the expense of employees
  • Temp labor framed as voluntary side gig instead of necessary attempts to make a living wage
  • Analogous to Uber, freelancing, gig economy today after Great Recession
• Trend fueled by private equity driving decisions for companies → prioritize short term spikes in profit over long term stability
• Fissured workplaces: any job not directly related to profit (janitors, data input, etc.) handled by subcontractors
  • Less responsibility for workers’ rights, less opportunity for upward mobility
  • Don’t have to deal with unions
  • Other strategies = franchising, outsourcing labor
• Capitalism left to its own devices is not benevolent — requires government and union regulation to be worker-friendly
• Companies doing things differently, offering decent, stable jobs with benefits and dignity → Costco, QuickTrip, Trader Joe’s → show that there is another feasible option!

How Work Stays So Shitty

• Rise and glorification of overwork
  • Overall, culture that suggests the problem isn’t the current economic system or exploitation by companies— it’s us
• Normalization of workplace surveillance
  • Open offices; tracking every minute of work with trackers, monitors, digital time clocks
  • Very little stability in hours → can’t even get another job
• Fetishization of freelance flexibility
  • Ex. in journalism, small little websites published work by freelancers, people writing on the side, for free → help them get an audience, but this ended up driving wages down for journalists at major media companies
  • Uber— at first drivers not only were not considered employees, but even seen as customers (the app itself a platform connecting two sets of customers)
  • Constant anxiety over the fact that every minute you spend relaxing could be monetized

Technology Makes Everything Work

• Digital exhaustion, the attention economy
• Despite how aware we are of our phones ruining our lives, of the intent of alerts and notifications, we can’t disconnect (in part bc just necessary for lots of functions now, too)

• Three factors of the Internet particularly conducive to burnout:

  1) Millennial-oriented social media— esp Instagram → constantly promoting your personal brand, no time for solitude

  2) News— constantly trying to catch up, never be complacent; the world becomes another aspect of “work”

  3) Tech that spreads work to the rest of our lives— starting with email, then other forms of media → digital leisure becomes digital labor

  • With shift to remote work, more time spend producing evidence of working than actually working… often times doing all this to justify to ourselves more than others that we deserve our job
• Tech itself is not the problem, but it enables the “continuous failure to reach the impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves.”

What Is a Weekend?

• Leisure derives from Latin licere: to be permitted, to be free
• Current leisure rarely feels restorative…
  • “Do I read fiction bc I love to read fiction, or to say that I have read fiction?”
  • Go for runs bc I like to or because it’s a “productive” way to discipline my body?
• The wealthy have servants and helpers (themselves extremely overworked) to allow them to work even more
• Popularity of structured activities and services as part of leisure on weekends → requires other people to work at these times
• Theory of aspirational class → subset of Americans feels as though they must consume all forms of culture, both highbrow and lowbrow, and make sure others know about it
  • “Episodes, podcasts, even sporting events come to feel like checklists.”
• Monetization of hobbies once for leisure
• Burnout is more than addiction to work— its alienation from the self and desire:

If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know 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?

The Exhausted Millennial Parent

• Parenting burnout ← American society still arranged as is every family has a caretaker who stays home, even as this becomes less and less common
• Affects moms and dads, but more so moms: as women began to take on equal amounts of work outside the home, the same did not happen for work in the home
• Infinite standards of best parenting practices, impossible to meet them all (ex. debate around breastfeeding), often because of demands of work (very intertwined with race and class)
• Why haven’t we enacted affordable, universally-available childcare?
  • Two reasons: men don’t value domestic labor as labor, and men control most of our legislative bodies & corporations