Humainologie creative dialogue team practice with book synopsis and Zoom link

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Henry David Thoreau

“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation…in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.” - Bertrand Russell

Don’t forget about the possibility of writing a short poem for tomorrow. My synopsis of the book by Anne Petersen is appended below; and here once again is the Zoom link for our creative dialogue team practice tomorrow Wednesday October 21, starting at 6:30 PM.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81944290869?pwd=LytWaVlkVmNuR1d3Y3lMRVRieVRmQT09

Meeting ID: 819 4429 0869

Passcode: 940266

Zoom soon,

Arthur

Book: Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (Anne Helen Petersen, 2020)

“Millennials” are, by the Pew Research Center’s definition, those adults who were born between 1981 and 1996 https://pewrsr.ch/3deClaa Those born after that interval have been given the designation “Generation Z.” The culture is always in a state of flux, and one reason that researchers have developed definitions of specific “generations” (baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964; generation X, born between 1965 and 1980 etc. https://bit.ly/3o3hTyg ) is simply to give structure to their studies of these changes in the culture. In this book, Anne Helen Petersen describes how prioritizing today’s corporate profits over long-term growth and stability of a company and the well-being of its employees, has been associated with deterioration in the quality of life for so many Americans. She describes ways in which millennials themselves are supporting a dysfunctional socioeconomic system, experiencing burnout, while day after day their life slips away and fulfillment eludes them; and they think that they themselves are at fault, that things would improve if only they would work harder…when it’s the socioeconomic system that is chiefly to blame.

“Burnout” can be defined as “a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.” Petersen recognizes that it has been experienced by other generations as well, and she touches on challenges faced by other generations, as well as the challenges associated with being black or with being women. She refuses to offer advice to individuals on how to cope with burnout. Instead, she writes in her conclusion (entitled “Burn It Down”) “We can recognize that it’s not enough to try to make things better for ourselves. We have to make things better for everyone. Which is why actual substantive change has to come from the public sector – and we must vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for it tirelessly.”

In the early twentieth century, the middle class did not really exist. The population was more rural; and there were some very rich families and individuals. The urban middle class was barely at sunrise, and pensions were unheard of. By the mid-1930s, however, the Great Depression had changed politics and culture. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave legal protections to workers forming a union; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 improved conditions for the worker for example by requiring additional pay for overtime and other favorable conditions of employment. What followed, in the years after World War II when the economy was growing rapidly, was “the closest to equitable distribution of wealth that [the United States] has ever seen.” It was sometimes referred to as “the Great Compression.” This was the work experience of many of the parents whose children became “the baby boomer generation.” The security was unequally distributed, of course. For example, deprivation due to racism was rampant, as was gender discrimination. And yet because of that security many middle-class boomers in their childhood and teenage years enjoyed unprecedented security. Those encouraging socioeconomic conditions and the political culture that had given birth to all this security “lasted just long enough for people to believe that it could last forever” and then, with the 1970s and 1980s, it came to an end.

As the socioeconomic conditions around them began to deteriorate, some of the boomers would join protest movements. The civil rights movement and the women’s movement had already begun to increase the job competition from people of color and women, exacerbating white male anxiety. “And all of this took place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the resignation of Nixon, and generalized disillusionment with the government at large.” Many turned inward; “The Me Decade” was one descriptive term for part of what was happening. Not surprisingly, however, “it also manifested as a rightward shift in their politics: the embrace of Reaganism and ‘market-oriented thinking,’ also known as the idea that the market should be allowed to work things out without government intervention, as well as union busting and massive cuts to public programs that accompanied it.” Petersen recounts this history in her Introduction and in Chapter 1, “Our Burnt-Out Parents.”

In Chapter 2, “Growing Mini-Adults,” she turns attention to the millennial generation itself, including her own experience growing up in a town in north Idaho, father chose a career in medicine, mother worked to support him, then the author’s parents divorced when she was sixteen. By then, she had experienced a mix of the supervised childhood (which for many millennials took an extreme form, with very little time for free play) and a more traditional childhood playing unsupervised with other neighborhood kids (which she thinks helped her avoid burnout for as long as she did). The more rigorous structured childhood, referred to as “concerted cultivation” by one researcher, aimed to optimize every part of a child’s life “to better prepare them for their eventual entry into the working world.” For many boomer parents this was the meaning of “good parenting.” In Chapter 3, “College at Any Cost,” Petersen describes how children would be expected to excel in school, to devote their attention to getting a college degree, and how this was associated with not only a failure to develop social skills but also a failure to develop creativity. The resumé had to look great, but a lot of it represented time spent simply to make the resumé look great. “If you need a good resume to get into college and the resume is filled with accomplishments that are largely hollow – then what, ultimately is college for?”

In Chapter 4, the author describes how millennials “graduated” into a job market which out-sourcing and temps and other measures had made a wasteland – with the old idea of a steady 9 to 5 job fading into history. Millennials coped and even supported the trend by thinking the old system was “uncool” and you should be doing what you love (for example through contract work, in which the big corporation you work for has no responsibility for your working conditions, your benefits, your pension). Employers actively looked for applicants that were following their “calling,” meaning they would work for very little pay, no benefits, and so on. Eventually, one by one, some millennials lost their passion about doing what they loved, and decided it’s a job, not a “calling.”

In Chapter 5, “How Work Got So Shitty,” we learn about the consultants who helped make it that way, the temp agencies, the subcontracting, and the “fissuring” of the workplace so that for example the sexual harassment that takes place in fast-food outlets is not the responsibility of that outlet to deal with. And yet there are companies that prove it does not have to be that way, companies that provide “jobs with decent pay, decent benefits, and stable work schedules” and still achieve “excellent profits and growth.” The companies mentioned are Costco, Quik Trip, and Trader Joe’s. Other evidence indicates that a 4-day work week can lead to increases both in productivity and in job satisfaction among employees.

Technology interrupts our lives. “Midway through writing this book, I went to the woods.” On rare occasion the author has been away from the technology, the texting, iPhone, and so on and on – and experienced a rejuvenating “boredom” – and leisure. As described in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, we are losing social connections, especially those outside the family. In Chapter 9, “The Exhausted Millennial Parent,” we learn that working moms still shoulder 65 percent of childcare responsibilities. We subsidize local business development and fund public schooling, so why not subsidize affordable, universally available childcare? We must think not only about how to reduce our own burnout, but also about how our own actions “are sparking and fanning burnout in others.” To make things better, “you have to act, vote, and advocate for solutions that will make life better not just for you …but for everyone.”

Can’t Even enables the reader to step back from their own attitudes and see them in the larger framework of changes in such attitudes over generations. I am persuaded by the author’s emphasis on voting for political leaders who will work to change the system, and I would also emphasize our own personal responsibility to make changes happen all around us, every day. Change must happen both at the grassroots level and at the level of political leadership.