Anne Helen Petersen is Holding Up a Mirror
It’s smokey on Lummi Island, in the San Juans, off the coast of Washington state, where Anne Helen Petersen and her partner, the New York Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel, and their dogs, Peggy and Steve, are getting away for a while. It’s smokey all over the West. Portland is registering the world’s worst air quality. Ten percent of Oregon is under evacuation alert. The top half of The Oregonian’s homepage is filled with harrowing stories about the wildfires, the bottom half with stories about the pandemic and racism.
On Twitter people are issuing their takes: The fires are worse thanks to climate change. The fires are worse thanks to poor forest management. Science doesn’t know what’s happening. On Instagram, people are posting photos of apocalyptic skies, dirty air filters, double masks.
And right now, when it feels like everything is burning, Petersen is getting ready to publish her book on burnout.
It was only in January 2019, just a year and change ago, that Petersen’s Millennial burnout article went viral on BuzzFeed. Her article hit a nerve and was viewed a gazillion times because it captured so many things that were making work and life hard for Millennials: the bad economy, the erosion of security at work, crippling student loan debt, expensive housing, the never-ending news cycle, even unreasonable expectations to perform your life on social media. But now it seems almost quaint that we thought things were bad then. Petersen’s original article included a personal anecdote about errand paralysis. Now look at us, in the thick of a reckoning with climate change, racial injustice, and a pandemic that, as Ed Yong, another Millennial writer, put it in The Atlantic has seeped “into every fault line in the modern world.”
One of those fault lines is America’s toxic culture of work—a system that Petersen deconstructs in terrific detail in her new book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2020), which is being released on September 22. Petersen is here to remind us that, in fact, things were deeply shitty even before 2020. She’s here to hold up a mirror: Here’s how we got here; let’s choose not to go back.
How AHP burned out
For Petersen, this book, and the article that kicked off her exploration of Millennial burnout, is personal: The better part of her career, the better part of her life, has been oriented around work, and that ultimately led to the burnout she experienced in 2018, when she was well into her 30s.
“It’s actually pretty hilariously Millennial that, like, I didn’t see it as a huge problem until I recognized it in my own life—right until it was personified and individualized,” she said over a Zoom conversation from Lummi Island.
It started when she was a child, growing up in small-town Idaho, raised by a doctor and a teacher who was a stay-at-home mom until Petersen was in the fourth grade (her parents later divorced, and her mom went on to get her master’s and teach again). Her parents enrolled her in Girl Scouts and piano lessons, and encouraged her to cultivate an intellectual, adult-style life. In the book, Petersen talks about her mom’s rule that she alternate reading Baby-Sitters Club books with books of more substance. This pattern continued in high school, when she attended French immersion summer camp in Minnesota and took cheerleading very seriously. And it grew in college and graduate school, particularly during her Ph.D. program, which she hustled to finish before her funding ran out. Like many people in her competitive career tracks, first as an academic and then as a journalist, everything was “just so deeply rooted in: Am I going to get a job?”
““It’s actually pretty hilariously Millennial that, like, I didn’t see it as a huge problem until I recognized it in my own life—right until it was personified and individualized.””
In grad school, Petersen and her best friend had a mantra that encapsulated her relationship with work: “Everything bad is good, and everything good is bad.” Working all the hours? Good. Going to a bluegrass show? “Oh, this feels good,” she remembered thinking. “It’s obviously bad.” (That same friend just fled the Oregon wildfires by driving to Montana to stay in Petersen’s house.)
Things didn’t change after she got her Ph.D. and entered the terrible job market. “I just thought that was going to be the rest of my life,” she said. “There was no outside of that posture toward work.” She eventually got a position in the film studies department at a progressive school on a dairy farm in Vermont, where the students were challenged to think differently about the meaning of work. The teachers, meanwhile, were always on the clock, giving lessons during the day and chaperoning the dorms at night. “It did not cultivate any sort of healthy boundary between work and the rest of your life,” Petersen said.
Later, as a visiting professor, she felt a terrifying sense of insecurity and unintentionally began to build herself a life raft to yet another precarious career by taking on low-paying writing gigs in her field of study, culture. In 2014, she landed a full-time job at BuzzFeed, where she became part of the always-on news cycle. For the next three years, she worked at a breakneck pace: traveling across the country on the campaign trail, starting the first iteration of her newsletter, publishing two books. During that time, she also moved halfway across the country.
One memorable week in 2017, she covered the mass shooting at a Baptist church in Texas, and then set out to write another traumatic story about the women who escaped Warren Jeffs’ polygamous sect in the Southwest. She describes the feeling in her book: “The work was vital and exhilarating—which was exactly why it felt so hard to stop.” But she still found herself on the verge of breaking into tears talking to her editors, and overwhelmed with everything. “I felt numb, impervious, just totally…flat,” she writes.
Her editor was the one who pointed out that maybe she was burned out. She decided to write about it.
Writing her way out of burnout
As a writer, Petersen likes to look at things horizontally, examining the broad context of what’s happening in society and how and why structures function the way they do, and vertically, looking at the history that brought us to the present moment.
““A reckoning with burnout is so often a 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.””
She does both of those things in her book: putting her experience and the experiences of the dozens of other Millennials she interviewed in the context of the cultural forces that shape their lives. She also explains how we got here: how the Boomers’ approach to parenting created a generation of miniature adults, how changes in the economy and public policies eroded safety nets and made work more precarious, how higher education got unbearably expensive, how the job market got so shitty, how leisure time disappeared and social media became work, and, finally, how expectations of raising the next generation created a culture of what New York Times writer Claire Cain Miller calls the “relentlessness of modern parenting.”
Petersen also examines gender, race, and class, but her main focus is detailing the systemic forces that overlay the lives of Millennials, which she describes as the first generation since the Great Depression who are worse off than their parents. “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,” she writes. “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.”
Reading how Petersen describes burnout gave me a visceral feeling of anxiety: “It’s the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot that happens to have bodily functions, which you do your very best to ignore.” I found the way she describes the recognition of burnout even more unnerving: “A reckoning with burnout is so often a 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.” I scribbled down that quote, and now I can’t remember if the italics were hers or mine.
““My situation before was like, ‘This is just life; there’s nothing wrong with this. It became so normalized that I didn’t have any space to think about, like, this is a really messed up way of doing things.””
Petersen said writing her book was therapeutic. Sure, she made some changes in her life—she deleted Facebook and her personal email from her phone, and she used airplane mode so she wouldn’t “scroll meaninglessly”—but those were life hacks, not cures for burnout, which takes a much deeper kind of change.
Writing about it, exploring what she was feeling and why, and how the same forces were doing the same thing to her generational peers, helped her put a label on a condition she didn’t even know she had. “The real utility of the article was just allowing myself to see myself clearly,” she said. She hopes her readers have a similar experience. “My situation before was like, ‘This is just life; there’s nothing wrong with this,’” she recalled. “It became so normalized that I didn’t have any space to think about, like, this is a really messed up way of doing things. Or if I did, I’d push those thoughts away or make a joke out of it instead of trying to grapple with it in a real way and be able to talk to other people about it. So, yeah, I hope that it allows us to see ourselves more clearly and then also gives us the language to have a conversation about it.”
In August, Petersen left BuzzFeed to start her own project with Substack, Culture Study, where she writes about how culture influences us and how we influence culture. I was curious to hear why she left BuzzFeed. I thought she would say it was because BuzzFeed had a culture of burnout, and that she had misgivings about working for a media outlet notorious for churning out content 24/7, which can contribute to burnout more broadly. I was wrong. “Because of COVID-related cuts, and because of work-share, which our union has negotiated, there just wasn’t enough infrastructure to actually get work through the pipes,” she explained. “So I was publishing very little; I was writing something once every four or five weeks.” She left in part because she wanted to work more.
Working for herself has been liberating: Her profit-sharing business model with Substack gives her financial security but also more control over what she covers and how she goes about covering those things. Substack gave her a base amount of money for a year, plus she gets 15 percent of the subscriber dollars. After the first year, she gets 90 percent of the subscriber dollars. Just a couple months in, she already has more than enough paying subscribers. “I could go back and be like, Substack, I don't need your money anymore, let me just take this money,” she said.
This arrangement benefits readers, too: She offers a free subscription to anyone who can’t afford it, no questions asked, and the annual subscription is affordable: For $50, you get access to her newsletters, which come out a couple times a week (she also has a free newsletter on Sundays), and she invites her subscribers into online conversations about the things on her mind and what she should cover. She’s not just doing journalism; she’s creating community.
She needs to cultivate her personal brand, but she’s no longer yoked to specific metrics that require clickbait headlines. Nor is she tied to a writing formula: catchy lead, nut graf, context, the rest of the story. She’s playing around with styles, gathering testimonials and publishing them without adding much of her own “connective tissue.” It reminds me of the style of oral historian Studs Terkel.
I mused that her writing feels fresher. “Not getting edited?” she joked. Then added: “I feel unleashed in a way that feels really great.”
She’s doing more work than she did before, but it’s not the burnout-inducing kind of work, or at least, when it is, she knows it will end: Work will ease up once the book-promotion cycle has ended. She describes her collective work (she’s developing some other media projects that she can’t talk about publicly yet) as a more connected portfolio that integrates with her life. “It’s not like: Here’s the stuff I’m working on for BuzzFeed, and then here’s all the other stuff in my life,” she said. “Now they seem to be interweaving more seamlessly, and that feels powerful and fresh and motivating.”
“There’s a risk that some will read Petersen’s story as a parable about the American Dream. But that would be a dangerous interpretation. Petersen worked hard to beat a broken system, and her gift to those who are still struggling within that system is to document all the ways the system is screwing us over.”
She’s also de-centered work in her life, and because she doesn’t have kids and isn’t traveling for work during the pandemic, she has more time. “Usually on Friday, I work very little, and on other days, I’ll be like, ‘OK, I did the work that I need to do for today. It’s 2 p.m. I’m done.’” She can take midday naps and read nourishing fiction. “I try to do what my body tells me to do,” she said. She tempers work with her “bad garden,” morning walks with Peggy and Steve, and a fierce dedication to pop culture (she finds solace in TikTok and her almost nightly ritual watching Law and Order: SVU).
There’s a risk that some will read Petersen’s story as a parable about the American Dream: She worked hard, and she made it! She’s got her own media brand and a business that gives her financial security, creative freedom, and more agency over her life and work. But that would be a dangerous interpretation. Petersen worked hard to beat a broken system, and her gift to those who are still struggling within that system is to document all the ways the system is screwing us over.
She describes America as “obsessed” with work: On one side of the spectrum, the creative and white-collar industries—what Petersen called “portable jobs”—are pushing this message that “more work equals better work.” On the other side of the spectrum, the jobs that require a physical presence—which we now call “essential jobs”—are all about “how can we try to transform workers into robots as effectively as possible and treat them that way?”
Petersen imagines a world that rejects an orientation around “growth at all costs,” one that shares the benefits of capital with those who create it. Like what she has, but for more people, and without all of the painful work to make it happen.
‘It doesn’t have to be this way’
If I were a Millennial (which I’m not, by about five years) and prone to excavating the experiences of my life to draw out larger meaning, I might share this story: The week I spoke with Petersen was the toughest one I experienced during the pandemic. It was the tenth week of Australia’s second lockdown, and our house was a pressure cooker. Our twins were fighting by 8 o’clock every morning. My husband, who was taking the morning home school shift, often left to deal with work emergencies, so the kids busted through my office door every few minutes for help with something on Google Classroom. Unable to focus on work, I spent a lot of time scrolling through Twitter. That’s when I learned that my hometown was on fire.
For weeks, I had been holding my breath, waiting for the next fight, the next interruption, the latest bad news. Then I really couldn’t breathe. One night I ran out of air singing the kids the “Nighty Song.” The next morning, I called my doctor and got a prescription for anxiety pills. It dawned on me that I’m trying to medicate myself out of a situation that’s beyond my control.
And that’s Petersen’s point: We need to stop trying to solve systemic problems with personalized solutions. She condemns the quick fixes that are supposed to make life better. “Any easily implementable life hack or book promising to unfuck your life is just prolonging the problem,” she writes. The pandemic, job insecurity, the recession, terrible healthcare, climate change, racism, gender inequality, gun violence—they’re all poised to break us.
And yet, Petersen writes: “It’s doesn’t have to be this way.”
The ‘plastic hour’
When we spoke, Petersen had just finished reading George Packer’s piece for The Atlantic on the “plastic hour.” Packer borrowed the term from the philosopher Gershom Scholem, who described “crucial moments when it is possible to act.” Scholem (and Packer and Petersen) is talking about systems change: In a crisis, especially a crisis that everyone is experiencing at the same time, there’s a narrow window of opportunity for systems change.
Petersen’s book is a wedge propping open that window before it slams shut. Its pages memorialize the moment we’re in: “The overarching clarity offered by this pandemic is that it’s not any single generation that’s broken, or fucked, or failed. It’s the system itself.”
Petersen wants us to choose another path: to see the broken system, but not feel powerless to change it. To feel the outrage, but do more than just tweet about it. To fix things, but not just for ourselves. “If you want to feel less exhausted, less resentful, less filled with unspeakable rage, less ground down to the thinnest, least likable version of yourself, then you have to act, vote, and advocate for solutions that will make life better not just for you, or people who look and speak and act like you and have families like yours—but for everyone,” she writes.
Petersen took this photo of smokey Lummi Island, in Washington state, during the wildfire season in September 2020. Image courtesy of Anne Helen Petersen.
We can soldier on with individual solutions that make us feel better in the moment, or we can burn down the systems that are burning us. This is perhaps her greatest message to Millennials, and even Gen Xers like me: We need generational change. As Millennials finally assume positions of power—as parents, educators, employers, political leaders—they can’t settle in comfortably; they must use that power to make changes that will largely benefit the generation that comes after them. As Gen Zer Greta Thunberg told the UN Climate Summit in 2019: “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”
In one of her latest Culture Study posts, beneath a photo of an orange landscape set against an orange sky, Petersen begged her readers to imagine something better. “We don’t have to acclimate to dystopia,” she wrote. “We’re all so, so tired,” she went on. “But we have to take those last, precious stores of energy—and we have to move. Maybe that looks like organizing. Maybe that looks like voting, and making sure everyone you know is voting. Maybe it looks like opening yourself to wild reimaginations of how society could work. But it cannot look like this.”
In a few weeks, maybe a month, the firefighters will contain the fires. The air will clear, and the Pacific Northwest will transform back into the wonderland that it is. It’s possible America will elect a new president. In time, the pandemic will end. People will get back to the rhythms of work and school and social media and life. Or maybe they won’t. Anne Helen Petersen will be holding up a mirror, reminding us that “normal” is what got us here.
Anne Helen Petersen’s book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, is available for pre-sale now. Sign up for Culture Study at https://annehelen.substack.com/. You can donate to support those who lost their homes in the wildfires in Southern Oregon at https://www.mrgfoundation.org/rogue-valley-relief-fund1/. And don’t forget to vote!
