A review by anndahlquist
Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

informative medium-paced

4.0

This book was actually highly interesting and had a lot more research and cited sources than I usually see in books like this. Not what I was expecting, in a good way. I may be a bit biased because of my own negative feelings about buzzfeed and clickbait. Or maybe I'm jaded because I pick up books in this genre only to be disappointed by cliches and long checklists of how to be less burnt out by burning yourself out more, or look at me and how amazing I am because I am the exception to all of you other losers and it's so so easy if you just spend more money on my "expertise". But this book was compassionately informative and gave real and easily understandable breakdowns of the circumstances that landed us in our current predicament. And it isn't because we aren't working hard enough or don't want it badly enough. No. It's because the systems we were promised would reward us are broken. Refreshingly, this book does NOT offer an easy solution or a list of self improvement tips to get ahead. No, as the author states in her closing paragraph, "it's not enough to try to make things better for ourselves. We have to make things better for everyone." and I think that this is an essential shift that needs to happen. It's not me against the competition, it's us against the systems that are exploiting us and perpetuating this burnout. 
This book was published in 2020, and in the introduction the author does acknowledge that the circumstances of 2020, namely the global pandemic, were not addressed in the text.