We live in a cultural landscape ripe for burnout. In Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen engages in compelling cultural analysis to argue why millennials are not lazy or entitled (as they have wrongly been labeled), but rather people who are exhausted after being raised by burnt-out parents to be “walking resumes.” As adolescents, millennials were encouraged to be stressed, sleep-deprived, and over-extended, trying to create a perfect college application so they could get a secure job that they would love (or so they were promised). For boomers, good parenting meant passing down an elusive, simple ideal that no matter the cost, hard work pays off and leads to success and fulfillment.
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