First Draft Episode #272: Anne Helen Petersen
September 22, 2020
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Anne Helen Petersen, freelance journalist and cultural critic with her biweekly newsletter, and author of nonfiction books Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema and Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, talks about her newest book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Anne Helen Petersen, freelance journalist and cultural critic who turned her viral article about millennial burnout into the new nonfiction book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation and is also the author of Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema, and Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman.
I loved what Anne had to say about the bewildering experience of going viral. Some ways that burnout overlaps with certain forms of depression. This book has the definitive explanation of "Okay, Boomer." How she went about trying to capture the texture of the many different ways of being a millennial. And how COVID factors into burnout. Something that she didn't get to get into too much in the book itself, because she turned in the final edits in March.
Today's show notes are packed with links to many of the articles that Anne has written in the past. So please be sure to check those out. Everything else we talk about in the episode can also be found in the show notes. And First Draft participates in affiliate programs specifically with bookshop.org. That means that if you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com, it helps to support the show and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you.
If you'd like to donate directly to First Draft, either on a one-time or monthly basis, you can do that at paypal.me/FirstDraftPod.
Track Changes, the First Draft mini-series that gets into every step of how your book goes from your laptop to the bookshelf, is now complete. You can hear the entire series, nine episodes plus four bonus episodes, at FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
And the publishing info party doesn't stop for subscribers to the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday, sometimes Friday, I share more of the information that I gathered in researching for this project, as well as industry updates and more original reporting. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Anne Helen Peterson.
Sarah Enni: So, hi, Anne, how are you?
Anne Helen Petersen: I'm great. So nice to be here.
Sarah Enni Yes. I'm so excited to chat today. I want to get into Can't Even and all of the great stuff, but for my podcast, I like to start a little bit farther back, way farther back, actually. I like to start with, where were you born and raised?
Anne Helen Petersen: I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then when I was three, I moved to Lewiston, Idaho, which is a town of about 30,000 people in North Idaho. It's a unique little place that is simultaneously like a lot of other places, but that's where I grew up.
Sarah Enni: Okay. And how was reading and writing a part of your childhood?
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh gosh, I was a voracious reader. The sort of reader who didn't really learn to read until they were five, but was telling people that they were reading at three because I had memorized books. And I never wanted to go outside because I just wanted to read. My mom would make me have like obligatory outdoor time and I would just take my book outside and read. And she would do something like force me to alternate my Babysitter’s Club books with something that wasn't a Babysitter's Club book. But I loved all genres from an early age.
And then writing, I think I started writing stories when I was in first or second grade. But I don't think I really got into "writing" writing in a concrete way until college. But I was a really devoted letter writer. And this, I think, kind of pinpoints my age in the millennial spectrum that I was still a devout letter writer through high school and through college and even after college.
So I was born in 1981, which makes me an elder millennial. But I would go to a lot of summer camps in the summer when I was in high school. And then I would become pen pals with everyone I met. And then even when I was in college, I would work at summer camps. And the only way that I corresponded with people, we didn't have cell phones yet and there was no like internet access at the camp, so I would write letters. I conducted many a torrid romance over letters sent every day.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. Well, you know, that's so interesting, and we can kind of get into this as we go, but that feels related somewhat to essay writing to me, writing about yourself.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. And also just the daily practice. Eventually that was transferred into blogging, but if you have this practice of sitting down and generating words, a lot of words, every day in a way that you're performing them for another person, which is what letter writing is doing. And also performing yourself and trying to paint a picture of your life and yourself for another person and your love for them or whatever, that is all writing. That's all personal essay writing right there.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love that. And you went on to grad school to get your PhD and then to work as a professor teaching media studies. I'm just interested in what were you studying specifically in school, and what drew you to media studies and what were you specifically teaching?
Anne Helen Petersen: I wanted to keep writing and thinking about the things that I had been writing and thinking about as an undergrad. And I happened to have a teacher who was my mentor when I was an undergrad, who really encouraged a more creative traditional essay writing. So, loved when I would do a flourish of an intro paragraph and that sort of thing, instead of the dry staid traditional writing that I would do in some of my other English classes for like an analysis of 19th century poetry.
So I think that I saw film studies, which was the class where that teacher was really encouraging of me, I saw that as a route forward. And that teacher also encouraged me to go on to grad school. Which I think, for better or for worse, is kind of a reproductive tactic of professors in college. You want to encourage people to do the thing that you do, right? Like it's something that gives you joy and satisfaction.
And it's hard these days because the situations that lead up to full-time employment at a college or university are incredibly different now than even they were for many of our professors. But that's what made me think, "Okay, here's the way I can keep thinking and writing is if I just go to grad school and then that will naturally lead to a job as a professor."
I think honestly, I was also just so scared of the job market. I had never really thrown a broad net in terms of job applications. Like I'd worked at a bagel shop in my hometown, and then I had worked at the camp that I had gone to. I hadn't experienced that precarity and I was terrified of it. And so that's how I got to grad school.
But in between there, I did experience the job market and I was a nanny because that was the only job that I really had skills for at that moment. And during that time, I spent a lot of time letter writing. I was still writing while the kids would sleep and also thinking about like, "Oh, well, this is what I don't want to do for the rest of my life."
Sarah Enni: I'm interested in media studies specifically. What was your lens on that? Or what were you exploring through teaching that?
Anne Helen Petersen: When I first got in I thought, "I should look at my applications for my master's program that I got into." Like, they are all about Western Lit, the portrayal of the West on film and that sort of thing. Which is not what I went on to study. The first class I took at the University of Oregon, where I went for my master's program, was a class called Female Stardom. And it just revolutionized my academic study.
I became fascinated by what's called Star Studies, which is looking at the image of a star or a celebrity, all of the discourse that surrounds them, everything that we say, all of the things that they've appeared in, everything that has been written about them, and trying to figure out how each of those stars fits into our larger ideological fabric. It either challenges it, or reinforces it, reconciles contradictions. I love Star Studies so much and that became the focus of my research.
And the corner that I carved out for myself was a history of celebrity gossip, which had not been really rigorously or historically situated in terms of a full-length dissertation or that sort of thing. And I loved it. People were like, "How can you get a PhD in this?" And I was like, "Well, it's like anything, right? It's a history."
But it also was a history that was maybe hard for me to market on the academic job market. It's something that can easily be perceived as frivolous, especially in more traditional departments. So it was a hard sell. Also I came out of my PhD when the academic market was so released in recovery from the economic downturn. And, to be honest, that job market has never recovered from the downturn and it's only gonna get worse from this point forwards.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna definitely get into that, but I do also want to ask how did you wind up in journalism? What path led you to Buzzfeed and to writing the kind of cultural critique that you've become known for?
Anne Helen Petersen: So when I was a graduate student, I was studying for my comprehensive exams. Which, at least in my program, involved gutting a book a day. So you'd sit down - this is during my summer - every day I had a book on my list. And I would sit down with it and try to glean all of the most important arguments about it, so that I could situate it within all the other books that I had been assigned as part of my reading list. And then I would eventually take these three exams in my subject areas.
And a lot of these books were about theory or about history. And I loved being able to think about like, "Oh, how does this theoretical concept or framework, or this historical antecedent, how does it relate to today?" And so I started this WordPress blog - this is like 2007, 2008 - and would make those connections on this blog. It was called Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style. Which is a title that holds over today in my beloved Facebook group.
But it was just like a geeky WordPress blog. It's hard to remember how common those were. Lots of academics and writers either had a Tumblr, if you were more cool, or if you were less cool, you had a WordPress blog, a free WordPress blog. Eventually I paid like, I don't know, $75 to get a more professional design from one of the places that sold templates, but I just loved writing and getting feedback.
And in the beginning, you could look at your stats and I could see that like, "Oh, 200 people read this post. That is amazing!" And eventually that writing, as I was in the final year of my dissertation, I started reading this site called The Hairpin. Which if you were a person who read The Hairpin, or The All, they were these little micro sites that popped up, again in the wake of the recession, that operated on a really small budget, really didn't pay much, but attracted a great commenting community. And a lot of esoteric writing that didn't necessarily have a place. A lot of academics who were kind of flexing that different muscle.
And I started writing these long, long pieces, like 8,000, 9,000 word pieces called Scandals of Classic Hollywood that were taking a lot of the research that I had already done for my dissertation, or for other academic work, and just try to situate it and filter it for a popular audience. And in the tone of the site, which was pretty jokey and indignant and funny and feminist, but also introducing these readers to these stars and these scandals and these ideologies and ideas about the past and how Hollywood had operated. I mean, I didn't have to make them compelling they were just naturally compelling, it's just that they're old.
So, I started doing that. I did it for free in the beginning. And then my brother who used to be a journalist before he became an academic, he was like, "You should really be getting paid something for this. You are writing 8 to 9,000-word thesis." And I was so nervous and I asked the editor at the time, Edith Zimmerman, I was like, "Um... is it possible to get paid a hundred dollars?" And she was like, "Oh yeah, of course." And I just thought that was fantastic, right? I had never been paid for my writing before, and I thought it was great.
And so I started doing that and doing a little bit more of it. Eventually I got a job at my alma mater, Whitman College, as a visiting professor. And so I was doing writing for the internet on the side, plus at The Hairpin, and then other places. Like I did a piece for The Believer on the history of the celebrity profile and how that changed in the 1960's and 70's. Or a different piece about like the rules of classic Hollywood and the star system for Virginia Quarterly.
But I never pitched, I didn't know how to pitch. I had no idea. I was lucky enough that because I had a main gig, I could just wait until people emailed me and were like, "Go do this." Or, "Would you be interested in doing this?" And basically any amount of money that they offered me, I thought was fantastic. It was all gravy.
And Buzzfeed... this is always so funny. People are like, "How did you get this job? How do you make connections?" I dated a guy for a little bit in Austin. And one of his friends is a woman who was kind of skeptical of me. She was part of the larger friend group. But wasn't jealous of it or anything like that, but just kind of skeptical, like wanted to check out who I was, what I was doing. And so she friend requested me.
And then even though that guy and I didn't work out, we still were friends on Facebook. And I read her work and she read my work. And then when she got a job at Buzzfeed, she was the one who was like, "Will you write something for us?" So it's one of those odd, weird connections that you make and you never anticipate becoming something else.
And I pitched an idea about writing about Jennifer Lawrence and the history of cool girls. Kind of situating peak Jennifer Lawrence, this was 2014, within this history of other stars that were very much like her in different time periods. Jane Fonda, early Jane Fonda, Carole Lombard, and Clara Bow. And the piece went viral in a way that, one of the first Buzzfeed long-form pieces to go viral, and essentially wrote my job description.
And my time as a visiting professor, like I had applied for the long-term faculty, tenure job and didn't get it. And I was just like, "Is my academic career over?" I was really mourning that, but then this other door opened. And to mix my metaphors, I had kind of unconsciously been building myself a life raft for some time and was ready to hop on it when it presented itself. So I gave my last final at my college, Whitman College, at the end of May, 2014 and then got on a plane to Brooklyn and moved to New York and started my career as a journalist the next day.
Sarah Enni: That's incredible. That's wild. And also really very funny to me to think that you had the experience of writing a viral long-form piece before it was even your job.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. Well, and just watching that. Someone now, I think the way that it went viral, it would be like, "Oh, that's doing okay." I wouldn't be that incredibly impressed with it, but when you've never had anything go viral, the first time it happens, it is such a bewildering experience. It's just like, "Wait! People are reading this, all over? They're Tweeting it. They don't know who I am. They don't have any reason?"
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's so funny. I want to kind of use that as a way to pivot to talking about the millennial burnout article. And we're talking about How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, which you wrote for Buzzfeed. I want to start by situating that though and ask you what led you to writing this piece? You get into it in the piece in Can't Even, but can you kind of contextualize for us what led you to thinking about burnout?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, so, okay. So I started at Buzzfeed in June, 2014. At that point I had been hustling. I went to grad school for six years, then worked in academia for three years and then went to Buzzfeed. And I think it was, when I wrote it, four years at Buzzfeed. And I basically had been working nonstop. Like I took some vacations, right? Especially I took vacations when I was at Buzzfeed, because unlike academia, when you really can convince yourself pretty easily just to work all the time, you could actually take days off at Buzzfeed. So every year I would take a two, three week vacation, which I realize is an extreme privilege. But I knew that was the only way for me to really turn off, was to physically leave the continent.
But still I had been just working nonstop. People at Buzzfeed would be like, "You work a ton. How did you get that work ethic?" And I'm like, "I work less now than I had in academia." And as a journalist, I think I ramped up in my productivity around the lead up to the election, that's when I really started covering more politics and doing more what we think of as traditional reporting, like going on the ground and talking to people.
I went to Standing Rock, which is the first time I had done a breaking news reporting situation. And then went to a lot of Trump rallies in the lead up to the election. But in my mind, like a lot of reporters, I was like, "I'm gonna exhaust myself now. I'm gonna put everything into this. And then the election is going to happen and then I'll have a respite." And that did not happen.
And again, like a lot of reporters, I thought that the way that I could be a part of what was happening and do my part, I guess, for lack of a better word. I couldn't protest. I couldn't donate to political candidates. That's not something that journalists do. But what I could do is report the shit out of everything, right? Like I could work so hard.
And I really did that for two and a half years. Just one story, the next story, you know, leading up to the midterms, my resolve was strengthened even more. And was kind of thrown between doing a big feature story on a candidate, to then getting called to go to a mass shooting in Texas, and then going to a story that didn't have anything to do with the news cycle but that was its own form of trauma.
Going to this tiny little town in Southern Utah, that was the center of the fundamentalist LDS movement and where a lot of the women who have escaped the FLDS have come back to try to figure out who they are and to rebuild their lives. So reporting on that for a week, which reporting on any sort of trauma, whether it's a mass shooting or with these women who have endured so much, the waves of it wash over you.
And after the midterm election, I just started getting so mad at my editors. I would write something and they're like, "Oh, this isn't quite right." And I'd be like, "What are you talking about?" And I would start crying sometimes on the phone because at that point I had moved out to Montana. And so our conversations would be on the phone or zoom or whatever. And it wasn't typical behavior for me. That is not usually my interactive style with them, with my managers and my editors.
And my editor said, "I think you're burnt out." And I was so mad. I was like, "How dare you?" The person I am, the way I define myself, is my capacity to not burn out and just to work all the time, that sort of endurance. And instead I was like, "I just can't do my errands." Like, "I'm just gonna figure out why I can't do my errands." As I started trying to research that, trying to research what I cheekily called errand paralysis.
I was like, "Oh, I am totally burnt out." And realized, not only is it my relationship to work, but it's all of these different parts of my life that I have internalized, behaviors that I've adopted, things that I've normalized about working all the time. And also just being scared of instability all the time.
And I just kind of developed this understanding of what burnout looked like, specifically for millennials, and try to place that over my life and my experience and try to figure out what was going on. So that's how the piece got written. And it was really cathartic to write. I thought of it as a personal essay, like a New Year's personal essay. I thought it would resonate with some people. And I had no, no idea, that it would do what it did.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And thank you for getting all into that. I was one of the, I think, millions of people who read the article and was very impacted by it. I've never written an essay that went viral. You have written some in the past, but then there is this, which feels like it was maybe a unique level of experience.
Can you just describe what happened with the article? And I'm gonna eventually lead to how this becomes a book or how people express to you that they're interested in a longer form of it. But what does it mean that this went viral? How did that look in your actual life?
Anne Helen Petersen: How do I describe this? So usually when you publish a piece, I open tweet deck and you tweet it and then you watch making sure that some people fave it and some people retweet it. And I always pressure my partner, who's also a journalist, so I'm like, "Can you tweet this? And then you just kinda watch it, right? But I, at this point in my career, try to have low expectations about what any piece is gonna do Because then you always surpass your expectations, or are satisfied with your expectations.
And so I just remember, I saw one journalist that I follow who was like, "This feels like a piece that people are going to be referring to for a long time." That was the first time that I saw a tweet that gestured in any capacity to any sort of bigger resonance. And I was like, "Huh, that's a really nice thing to say."
But gradually, I left the house and then came back and then looked at my traffic and it was wild. And the thing about having something like Buzzfeed is you have a capacity for amplification. Like if a piece that I wrote and just tweeted and people retweeted it a bunch, it still has a ceiling on how many people will ultimately read it. It's not gonna reach as many people cause my networks and my secondary networks are still pretty limited.
But Buzzfeed has these Facebook pages that millions of people follow and it's not just the Buzzfeed main Facebook page, it's also the Tasty page where they'll put something like that that is doing really well. They have these sorts of indicators in their internal stats that show like, "This is sharing super, super well. If we give it a boost on other pages, it will do even better." So it got that kind of site-wide massive amplification and that turned it into a completely different thing. I think the eventual figure is like 7.5 million.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Which is really remarkable. And, as you're saying, Buzzfeed has the ability to pull these levers for the article. But I'm sure there was massive organic... I think I heard of it because a friend sent it to me and I then branched out and sent it to everybody.
Anne Helen Petersen: There was a lot of sharing on different social networks, a lot of Facebook and Twitter shares and that sort of thing. But then there was a lot of what we call dark social, which is like, you can't see the stats. When you're looking at it there's just this dark area where it's like, "Someone shared this with someone else." They didn't click on it on a website. They didn't click on it through Twitter. They clicked on the link after either someone texted it to them, someone emailed it to them, someone G-chatted it to them, whatever, you know?
Sarah Enni: Amazing. I mean, it was really a remarkable piece and it was one of those pieces that are always so wonderful because they just opened the door for other conversations and gave you a vocabulary to have conversations that have been in need. Before we get into the specifics of what you're writing about and a little bit about the book, how did it become a book? Did you immediately understand that this was a platform you could use for that? Or how did that come about?
Anne Helen Petersen: So I wasn't thinking about it as a book. I mentioned this very briefly in the book, but I had been working on a book proposal, a different book proposal, because this is my third book. So at the time leading up to writing the burnout piece, I'd been talking with my agent about what my third book would be and had written a proposal. It was basically about toxic white femininity, which I still think is a pretty good idea. But it was just forced. It didn't feel organic. It didn't feel natural.
And I didn't think of this though, even in like the week afterwards, I didn't really think about it as a potential book expansion. And then a friend of mine at Buzzfeed just tweeted and was like, "I love watching when stuff like this happens and you're automatically thinking of what the book length piece is gonna be like." And that was truly the first time that the idea had gone into my mind of like, "Oh, this could be a book."
And I think my agent had been trying to be respectful of me by not saying, "Let's throw this other proposal in the trash can and do this book that's based on your viral article." So she hadn't suggested that. But then when I messaged her and was like, "What do you think about this idea?" And she's like, "Oh yeah, I could sell that today." So that's how that happened.
Sarah Enni: So you had all of the things in place, as you mentioned, you are an author, you've had books. So you had an existing structure to move forward with that. As I mentioned, my listeners are people who are writers and I'm interested, from your perspective, was it immediately obvious how this expanded into a book? How did you work out the proposal or think about what the expanded piece was going to look like?
Anne Helen Petersen: My training as an academic and as an historian, I knew that I needed to expand it both in terms of - I had gestured to this to some extent in the piece, but I needed to do a lot more of it - moving beyond my white bourgeois experience. So I knew that that would take interviews with other millennials, but also just doing a lot of broader societal situating. But there was just so much more about how we got here.
So a lot of what I was talking about in the original piece was like, "Here's what the experience of the millennial feels like." But not as much of, "Here's what happened to our parents that made us raise us in this way." Or, "Here's what happened when we were small children." And like, "Here are how the standards of child rearing changed." Or, "Here's what happened when we were in college." Or how the rhetoric around finding "cool passionate jobs" changed and that sort of thing.
So because I've done proposals before and gone through the process of that, there's space between what your proposal is and what the finished book becomes. So I knew that I could roughly sketch out what I wanted to do with the book in this proposal in a way that touched the buttons that I knew my editor would like, and that her boss would like, and that would make them want to buy the book. While also keeping space for adding more as I learned more and that sort of thing.
So I think that I knew I wanted the history. I wanted to expand in depth and I wanted to expand in breadth and also just wanted to do more, I think, with parents in particular. I knew that was something that a lot of millennials that reached out to me were talking about like, "Here's how this is all compounded by being a parent." And also as I continue to think more about my own burnout, just about leisure and how the news cycle makes everything worse and really specific stuff about how our phones and our relationship with digital technologies changes and exacerbates burnout.
Sarah Enni: So let's get into it. Let's get into Can't Even. If you don't mind, we've kind of talked a lot about what's in the book, but I'd love to have you just give us the official pitch for Can't Even.
Anne Helen Petersen: Can't Even: How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, it's trying to be a very accepting book. It's like a big hug that says, "I see you." And also trying to say, "This isn't something that is our fault or even our parents' fault necessarily, but there are all of these very tangible reasons why this feels the way that it does for so many people." So you can look back at our history, our very recent history, and see how it didn't use to feel this way. You can look at other countries and see how it doesn't necessarily feel that way there. And you also just have to draw a very straight line between our current iteration of capitalism and why we feel the way that we do.
So I try to look a lot at what happened to our economy over the course of the last 50 years, in particular. And how that changed our parents and also changed a lot of our parents' voting habits. But also look at specific portions of our lives that have been so influential. I think millennials, the what's called the "do what you love" discourse is so powerful. Just this idea that a lot of us grew up with like, "You should find something that you're passionate about and if you're passionate about it, it won't feel like work. And that'll be great." When in reality, at least in our current moment, passion is oftentimes an excuse to exploit people, right? The more passionate you are the easier it is to exploit you.
So I try to really dive into that but then also just things that have shifted over the course of even the millennial generation. So I think that as an elder millennial there's a wistfulness, I think, amongst us. Because we're old enough that we know even in our own lifetimes that it doesn't have to be like this. We can remember a life before phones. And a lot of us too, and I think younger millennials have some understanding of this, but I have such a memory of a free childhood, right?
An unsupervised form of childhood and a place where I was bored a lot. And that forced me to just really rely on my imagination and do things like write letters all the time. Or escape into these other worlds. And I think not only has that changed in our own lives, but we're very clearly seeing it changing in our kids' lives. So I think it starts with the parents. It's like our burnt-out parents and it ends with millennials as parents and tries to run the gamut that whole way.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. And just so that we're super clear as we move on and talk about this, when you talk about burnout, I appreciated that you positioned it as not exhaustion, it's like post exhaustion.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Can you just give us a clear definition of what you mean by burnout?
Anne Helen Petersen: The best way that I've heard it colloquially described is like you don't hit a wall, you hit the wall and then scale the wall, and then keep going. You labor, you work and perform your life to the point of exhaustion, and then you just keep going. It's like you're still running the marathon every day. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that there's very little form of catharsis in our lives. And there's very little delineation between work and leisure. There's very little time for leisure.
Parenting has become a form of work. Our internet lives have become a form of work. Our leisure has become a form of self-presentation and work and self-optimization and side hustle. So there isn't that period to actually refresh or to do nothing, right? To have the rest that makes it possible to re-engage with the world or to feel like, "Oh, I finished this thing and that's great. And now I'm starting a new thing." There's just not a lot of that either. It's just this long string.
And the other thing I think about with burnout and what I was definitely experiencing, and periodically return to, is that feeling that your entire life, even the things that you're supposed to be enjoying, even the high points, all of it has just turned into a flat "to do" list. And it's just a matter of getting through it. And that flattening, some of these characteristics either they overlap with characteristics of depression. And I think a lot of people who are burnt out are also oftentimes experiencing a form of depression. But I do think that they're not necessarily exactly the same.
Sarah Enni: And that was really helpful. I mean, we'll get into it, but there were so many things in reading the book that I was like, "Oh, that is something I have talked about in therapy." It was creating a narrative of all these different things that I have noticed and then concerned with in my own life and didn't connect explicitly. So it was like, "Oh, okay, this is really helpful."
You mentioned contextualizing it. And that's something that I thought was so wonderfully done and why I'm gonna buy copies for all of my friends and family at Christmas and force everyone to read it. And tell me how you feel about this, but I was like, "Wow, this is the definitive explanation of "okay boomer." This is what we can point to, to tell my parents' generation like, "This is why we're so mad when you say that we're lazy and entitled cause you're gaslighting us and you made us this way."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, it's not only the, "You made us this way," but it's also like, "You don't understand. You made us this way personally because you were our parents and our mentors and our teachers and that sort of thing. But also you created the societal conditions so that we can't have the same experiences you did." Right? The meme that I reference in the chapter on boomers about how boomer dad is like, "I worked my way through college. Why are these kids all taking on debt?" And like, "Why can't you do it like I did?"
And how systemically voting for legislators who defund public universities and colleges has made it so that college has become virtually unaffordable to anyone to actually work their way through college. Right? That is the result of voting patterns that really have shifted over the course of the last 30 years.
Sarah Enni: And there are notable leaders in our country right now who practice this kind of like projection, it's this feeling like, "Whatever you find annoying about someone else is often what you find annoying about yourself." Right? And to me, it seemed like an explanation of why people complaining about millennials is like, "Well, you're upset because you've made a world that is so unsatisfying and inconsistent and incompatible with America's sense of itself." You know what I mean? It's just this unworkable world that we live in. They've created it, and now they're so mad about it that they're venting to the people who have to deal with it kind of thing.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. I mean, I even think of something like Medicare for all, most boomers right now are aging into Medicare. They have Medicare, they have it. Why don't you want what you have for everyone? And I think sometimes we get stuck in this prison of like, "Well, I worked without Medicare for all of these years, so I don't want other people to have it." Instead of thinking about like, "How great would it be if I didn't have to have that struggle?"
And the other thing too is that it's not like it's this inherited thing with boomers. They had it harder, in most cases, they had it harder than their parents. And I try to go through this in the book. But "the greatest generation," so a lot of millennials grandparents. Depending on where you lived and what race you were, a lot of those people coming back from the war, even if you were working class, because of this halcyon economy, a great economy and labor protections and just different ideas about how regulation should work in America, people were able to gain the middle class en masse.
So "The American Dream" that we talk about, that is the dream, that is the postwar dream. So you had all of these people who for the first time in their life, oftentimes, were able to rise up from subsistence living in some form. And then their kids, the boomers, they grew up with this in their life, right? This is again the stereotype of being in the suburbs, having a steady life. You had a dishwasher and your mom didn't have to work. And they grew up in that and it lasted just long enough that it felt like it would last forever.
And then it starts to destabilize just as the boomers are entering the marketplace. And so instead of saying like, "How can we re-stabilize our economy in a way that reproduces what our parents had?" They made some decisions as a voting block and then moving forward as well. And the greatest generation helped make these decisions as well, that should be clear. They were key in voting in people like Reagan.
They made these decisions that further destabilize the economy. And so made it even worse for the boomer's kids, the millennials. And Gen X is in there too, I want to be clear. Gen X is in their suffering with everyone else as well. But I think that it is really fascinating to think about the psychology of this, that like, "How can we as millennials, in our current choices, how can we try to make things better for generations to come? Even if things were not great for us."
Sarah Enni: Right. Right. A shift in thinking. I want to ask about, and again, this is just cause I haven't read it laid out so specifically, but can you just really quickly talk about consulting and how that perpetuated a type of like short term maximized kind of... that was such a fascinating facet of what you got into.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh my gosh. Isn't that so interesting?
Sarah Enni: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh my gosh. So there's this really great book and I reference it extensively in the book, but it's called Temp. And it's by a historian from Cornell, his name's Louis Hyman. And in the book, he's looking really at the history of how temp work, the "tempafication" in the 1950's and sixties, which was originally basically saying like, "How can you as a workplace that is trying to treat their workers right, how can you get around that and hire temp workers you don't have to treat right?" Like, "How can you hire workers to fill in your gaps that you don't have to treat like workers?" To get around the unions and all that sort of thing.
And that strategy eventually leads to what we now have, which is this mass "tempafication" of work in terms of like subcontracting on every single level of the economy. Like Apple only employs a certain percentage of its workforce and everyone else is a subcontractor. Or even someplace like Google or Amazon, where you have this percentage of the workplace that is directly employed by the company. And then a huge percentage, like up to half of the employees, are actually not directly employed by the company.
And thus are not their technical responsibility and can be paid wildly different rates, can have different healthcare. They're really just like a second-class work force. But the way that that happens is through, oftentimes, through consultants who came into these companies and saw them treating their workers well. Giving them pensions and doing things like giving even a janitor the same benefits that a vice president would have. And they were like, "Okay, we see this as bloat. This is a bloated company. So how can we slough off the excess in these companies?"
And that was a consultant's job is they would come into companies, places where - this still is a consultant's job - you come into places that you don't have any relation to, right? You are not a person who lives in that town. You will not ever see that person that you advise to get laid off. You will never see them in church. You'll never have to have an awkward conversation. You'll never have to deal with the ramifications.
But you come in, you look at a business as like a math problem that you need to solve. And you figure out how to do the subtractions necessary to make a company leaner and thus more attractive for acquisition or on the stock market. All of the things that we have now come to understand is very standard levels of success, but were not always standard levels of success.
And again, that was possible because consultants were coming in and looking at these situations from an objective perspective that you could also call like a very cold and detached perspective that doesn't think of business as something that is integrated into actual human's lives or actual community's lives.
Sarah Enni: Right. And then, as you say in the book, the consultants themselves were overworked and worked to the point of exhaustion. And then left McKinsey et all and went to jobs where they replicated what they had just gotten burnt out of.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, totally. So it's like at these places where they would get hired, sometimes out of state schools but often times more prestigious schools, and there was so much competition. And you didn't have anything else to do cause you had just graduated from college and weren't married and were oftentimes traveling either by car or by plane to the place where you were consulting. And you'd stay in a hotel, like, yeah, you're just gonna work all the time.
So it creates this standard of overwork that they think like, "If I'm working this hard, that is what I can expect in these other companies. And if I see someone who's not working as hard as me, they're lazy and that's a person that can be laid off." And then oftentimes those people, once they do leave McKinsey or wherever, cause it's so cutthroat and competitive, they then get hired by those companies, right? And then they reproduce those standards of overwork and you see the exact same thing happen with investment bankers as well. So I think a lot of the standards of overwork can really be traced to those two professions and how influential they've become in American business.
Sarah Enni: And you don't explicitly make this leap in the book, but I want to just ask what you think about it. Cause the other thing that came up, in addition to my many therapy sessions that could have been aided by this book as context, I was also thinking about my deep and abiding terror and anger at Silicon Valley.
And when you're saying this - talking about consultants - I'm thinking about how now every 24 year old who built the society we live in today, 10 years ago, is now a parent and they're all writing these op-eds about how they wouldn't do it again. They didn't have the life experience to know what they were doing. How do you think about how that kind of relates to all this?
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, I do talk a little bit about, you know, there were these standards of overwork that were implemented by Silicon Valley in terms of like, the way that you incentivize overwork is like investment banking. You create these perks that keep people in the office and then you reward and recruit people who have the capacity to work like robots, to turn themselves into work robots.
But on a broader level, like the other day someone was asking me if I would go to a panel or something like that. And they were like, "We can only offer you $25. We're a startup." And I think that excuse of like, "We are a startup" covered up all sorts of bad labor practices, bad behavior in the workplace in terms of sexual harassment and just like vile, racist crap. All sorts of things because they're like, "Oh, we're just a startup. We don't have an HR department."
And then also created a world like something like Uber that refuses to conceive of its employees as employees. Instead lists them as independent contractors, which means that they have no rights as laborers and thus are just subject to all sorts of exploitation and abuse and just no safety net. That lack of a safety net is the number one cause of burnout. That's a Silicon Valley popularization.
The number of people who actually work full time in the gig economy is still a low percentage. But those standards of not thinking of your workers as workers, that normalization of distancing yourself from any sort of responsibility for the people who make money for your company, that has become an American standard. And I blame them for that.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah, and you mentioned in the book and in the original article, a student you had once who in a moment of despair said that what she wanted was a cool job that she was passionate about. And you do talk about how, in addition to Silicon Valley being like, "Live here! We'll feed you and do your laundry. And in exchange, you'll work a hundred hours a week."
And I'm a historian, so this is just my personal feelings about it, but they sort of asked everyone like, you're supposed to go work for a startup for a hundred hours a week, so you have to feel passionate about whatever they're doing. Like disrupting going to the movies or whatever it was. They sort of required you to then feel like that was meaningful in a deeper way. They sort of manipulated this quote unquote "passion." It just sort of distorted everything. Like you're saying, everything's a "to-do" list. When everything matters, nothing matters, type of feel.
Anne Helen Petersen:Right. When you're passionate about everything, then what are you actually passionate about? If passion becomes something that is like a hashtag that you put on a sponsored thing for your company, then is it actually passion, right? It dilutes that understanding of what passion actually is.
Sarah Enni: Which is confusing. When you ingest that over X number of years, then it just becomes really disorienting. Like, "What do I actually care about?"
Anne Helen Petersen: Right or, "What do I actually like to do?" And this is something that came up again and again in interviews. Millennials, especially those who have been career-minded since like age 11- which is a fair amount of middle class millennials - looking up... they get through their job, they get into a slightly more secure job. They have a relationship, they might be married, they might have a kid, they might have two. And then coming up for air and being like, "Who am I?" Like, "Do I have a personality? Do I have tastes? Do I know what I like? Do I know what I want to do?"
It sounds very similar to the classic midlife crisis of it's mostly associated with boomers, but a lot of it has to do with, if you get bound to this wheel of productivity, there's no time to figure out who you are and what matters in your life. And at some point you have a pretty existential crisis about that.
Sarah Enni: Right. You just mentioned the interviews, I do want to ask about that. The first piece you thought about it as a personal piece and were thinking about your experience, how did you think about doing all these interviews? And how did you purposely try to find people that represented different backgrounds and different experiences and age ranges? And how many did you do? I'm just so interested in that whole process.
Anne Helen Petersen: I really wanted to de-center myself. I think that to sell a book, you often have to center yourself in some way. Books like this, oftentimes, my editor and when you're selling and that sort of thing, they're like, "Talk more about yourself." There is this attraction to the personal, and I was obviously game for that. But then at the same time, I didn't want this to replicate a lot of those narratives about millennials. Which is when you talk about millennials, we're actually talking about white middle class millennials.
And so what I did is I used Google surveys, Google forms, and made them pretty elaborate. Each would focus on a different subject. So some were about high school, some were about gig work, some were about leisure, some were about parenting. I think there was five in total. And I just would form them as I was going through and writing each of the chapters and then use my networks.
So my Twitter following, I have a large Facebook group, but then also my page. And then I would ask the Buzzfeed main account sometimes to retweet me. And that technique actually reached a lot of different types of people. I mean, do not underestimate how many white women I heard from and that are not included in the piece. Right? For every person of color that responded, I would say that I have five responses from a white middle class woman.
But I just sought out the voices that responded that were not similar experiences to mine or similar demographics to mine. Whether that meant that they grew up in different places in the United States with different parenting structures, different races, different immigration status, there's just so many different ways to be a millennial. And so I wanted to try to get to that incredible texture in whatever way I could.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's super helpful. I appreciate you getting into the specifics of that cause for people writing books, it's like, "Did you do a hundred interviews? Were you on the phone for two years of your life?"
Anne Helen Petersen: Here's the thing is that I thought a lot about it. And I was like, "I could spend a ton of time trying to seek out people in the first place." But I often find that people struggle to articulate themselves in quite the way that they want to when they're doing a phone interview. Sometimes people are really, really great at it.
But maybe just because I also am a writer, I think a lot of people like having that blank space. It's almost like journaling, right? It's like therapy. You're given the space to talk about it and you don't have to worry in the immediate term how someone's responding to you. Whether they're nodding or typing faster, and it doesn't sound like they're typing at all. Like, "Is what I'm saying dumb?"
And the privacy too. There's just a feeling of privacy when you're filling out a form like that. And yes, I know that it's Google, but I didn't share any of that information with anyone. If someone was sharing something pretty intimate or vulnerable, or that could be hurtful to a parent or something like that, I was fine with them using a pseudonym.
It allowed me to read so much more from so many more people than if I was just doing one-on-one written transcribed interviews. And so I recommend it. I think some people really like having more control and doing the one-on-one interviews. But for me, I find that it's always a really generative way of finding people and what they have to say.
Sarah Enni: So you mentioned that you kind of came up with the questions as you were hashing out the shape of the larger book, but did any of the responses fuel a different take on things or change the shape of the book at all?
Anne Helen Petersen: I'm trying to think. I mean, a lot of the parenting stuff, cause I'm not a parent but I am close friends with a lot of parents. But I knew a lot of where I was gonna go with it. But some of just the texture of what they responded with. Like, I didn't think that I would just have women in that chapter, but the ferocity of the women who responded, it just felt like, "You know what? I don't want to have like a token guy being like, 'It's hard for me too!'"
Of course it's hard for male parents, but I think that women parents are just... American society is not orchestrated for American female parents who work. It's really, really hard. It's not easy. Even for people who don't work, it is not structured to make anyone feel good about anything.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. That chapter was really food for thought, for sure. I'm also not a parent but I was reading it and being like [big sigh], "Ahh, this is probably why."
Anne Helen Petersen: I know, you're like, "Oh no!"
Sarah Enni: You mentioned in the preface of Can't Even that the timing of the book means you weren't really able to add in thoughts or real time discussion of how COVID, or the pandemic or people staying at home and working from home, is impacting all of this. But I'm wondering kind of broadly, what have your thoughts been? I'm sure you've been thinking throughout all of this, about burnout in the COVID context.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm cursed. Because the last book I had this chapter about Hillary Clinton and the conclusion was like, "As president..." you know? Cause I turned it in a couple of weeks before the election and then the election happened and I was like, "Oh my god." And I had to refigure some of the stuff. This book, I finished the copy editing and the fact checking, turn it in after all of the edits I've gone through with my editor, and then the pandemic happens. And I'm like, "Well, I can't redo every chapter, but I can do this little forward and then use the opportunity of conversations like this to try to get at it."
And I mean, anything that I would have said at the time then in March, would have changed by now as well. The character of the pandemic has changed in so many ways. And everything that I talk about has basically gotten worse, right? The economic precarity, and the lack of safety net in all capacities is worse. The way that parenting responsibilities accumulate on millennial parents and the way that women are shouldering an unfair percentage of that load, whether they realize it or not, is worse.
The student loan debt and the future, like what people are thinking about in terms of like, "Should I go to grad school? What do I do with my life?" All of that is worse, right? Just every single part of it has, I think, become even more intense. Even something like I have this section about the news cycle and how the constancy of the news cycle, really just makes every form of our burnout worse.
And like it's only gotten worse, it's gotten worse and worse and worse. I just keep thinking that the news cycle cannot get any worse and it just keeps showing me new ways that it can. And the election is not going to provide a catharsis. It's going to get worse after the election in different and unexpected ways. But we're not gonna go back to a different way. Maybe eventually in a couple of years, there will be fewer tweets that wake us up in the morning, but nothing's gonna be like what I hoped the 2016 election would be, which was like, "Oh, I can relax for a little bit." That's not gonna happen for us and it's not gonna happen for parents. It's not gonna happen for people with their student loans.
The economy, no matter, even if they get a vaccine in the next two months, the economy is still gonna not be serving people in a way that makes them feel stable and secure and like they don't have to work all the time. That's not gonna change either. The one thing I have as a refrain in the book is like, "It doesn't have to be this way. We can do things as a society to change it, but we have to act. Through voting, through advocacy, through not shutting up about it in a way that can make that possible."
Sarah Enni: Right. And to that point, I was just wondering if you feel like reading it, even though it didn't explicitly include anything about the pandemic or what we've all experienced over the summer, and a broadening understanding of racist policies and how we're all impacted by the structural inequity, but it does feel like there's a lot more conversations about it. There's a lot more acknowledgement of it.
I think it's become completely, you absolutely cannot look away from it because of what's happened over the last six months. I mean, it's hard to say like, "Do you see that as a positive?" But do you think that there are more constructive conversations that are possible now because of what we've all seen?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. This is the thing, is that when you make something visible you can have a conversation about it, right? And when you have language to talk about what's happening, whether that language is the language of racial injustice or is the language of economic injustice, we need that language in order to talk about what is happening to us. And how it is happening on a societal and on a structural level, not just on a personal level.
It's not like the swag for my book. The swag is this planner that says like, "This won't cure your burnout." You cannot purchase items to fix our problem. This is a much bigger problem and we have to look at it in that way. And I think that what has happened over the last six months have shown us the cracks in the foundation are structural problems and we need to remedy them otherwise this project that is America is going to fall apart.
Sarah Enni: Right. Right. I mean, not to wrap up on that note, but I don't want to keep you here all day. I do like to actually end my interviews with advice. And I'd like to ask you for advice as a nonfiction writer. I write fiction primarily and the thought of writing a book that is so explicitly timely. I mean, as you mentioned, now twice this has happened to you that you were kind of racing the clock. What, if any, perspective do you have on that? It feels particularly brave to write a book that is very much meant for the week it comes out.
Anne Helen Petersen: I could not have predicted, well, you know what? I could have. I couldn't have predicted obviously a pandemic and a huge resurgence in Black Lives Matter, but I could have predicted some things were gonna happen that showed that life was not okay, right? That we can't keep doing it this way. And whether those things were a global pandemic or again, unprecedented demonstrations against racial injustice. No matter what, there were going to be things that continued to highlight these fault lines.
So I guess my advice would be like, "What's the thing that you cannot stop thinking about?" Like all roads lead to that thing. It's like the commonality, the theme song of your interests, the chorus. It's just, everything touches on it. Even if it might not be super explicitly, like it touches on it in some way. And I think that if you can figure that out, that's not gonna change. Because if it's the thing that you keep coming back to over the course of a year, that's not one news cycle worth of interest. That is a societal interest in this moment.
Sarah Enni: And if something's interesting to you for a year, how could it not be interesting to other people? I feel like it then passes the test. Like probably other people are also thinking about this, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. And the thing about selling a book, like an article has a shorter life stance. So you can really still stay topical. But the thing about selling a book is you can sell a bigger idea using a peg that is pretty contemporary. That is like, "Here is why we're selling this right now." Right? But that peg can shift as you write the book and it can adapt to that process. You're never gonna be as immediate as someone blogging on the news as it is. But people don't expect that of their books unless it's like some quickie book that someone's written about the Trump administration.
So as long as you can continue to move those pegs forward up until the point where you can't do it anymore, I think that, for me, gives me solace. It's never gonna be completely contemporary, but also if these are things that I keep writing about, and I keep thinking about them in the rest of my life - my non book writing life, my online writing life - that's gonna keep me anchored to it.
Sarah Enni: This has been such a fun conversation and I really appreciate all your time today and I can't wait for the book to come out. I really am gonna buy it and force my mom and my grandma and my aunt and so many of my friends to read it. It was very cathartic to read. So I appreciate it.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, this is such a great conversation. You ask such good question. So thank you so much.
Thank you so much to Anne. Follow her on Twitter @AnneHelen and follow me on Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni, and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). A quick and easy way you can support First Draft is to subscribe to the show wherever you're listening right now. And if you have a couple of minutes, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. First draft was recently named one of Apple Podcast's top 25 podcasts for book lovers. And I want to thank everyone who left ratings and reviews that drew attention to the show and made that possible. I am so grateful.
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Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks also to transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And as ever, thanks to you, okay zoomers for listening.
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