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The Real Reason Millennials Are So Burned Out
Anne Helen Petersen’s new book, ‘Can’t Even,’ is a scathing rebuke of the system that pushed us past the point of exhaustion
Reading Anne Helen Petersen’s viral essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” in early 2019 felt simultaneously like having a mild panic attack and a religious epiphany. Petersen described behaviors that felt deeply relatable to me, a hilariously underpaid and overworked twentysomething woman suffering from extremely dumb errand paralysis and a bone-deep exhaustion that left me unable to do much more on weekends besides melt my brain by binge-watching Buffy. Petersen named the condition that burdened her, me, and a ton of young people I knew: Put simply, we were fucking burned out. She went a step further by declaring that this was not a temporary affliction for our generation. “It’s the millennial condition,” she wrote.
In her new book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, out September 22, Petersen runs with her essay’s conclusions and expands on why exactly millennials found themselves pushed past the point of exhaustion. Our generation — born from 1981 to 1996, currently ages 24 to 39 — has been the butt of the joke for years. It’s easy to see why: We were perceived as self-centered, coddled, lazy…
