"Such Great Expectations"

"By writing an economic genealogy of the boomer generation, she grounds her argument about millennials in an intergenerational transference of class anxiety, demonstrating the historical aspect of contemporary exhaustion. Petersen shows that rather than fighting for social justice and work protections, many boomers responded to changing material conditions by 'doubl[ing] down on what they could try to control: their children.' By surveying a range of raced and classed respondents, Petersen connects the bourgeois core of boomerism to millennial malaise and finds 'busyness,' 'concerned cultivation,' helicopter parenting, and other optimizing practices at the heart of the intergenerational link. This rat race to raise the most successful generation led to the elimination of leisure from many aspects of childhood, breeding insecurity and instilling precarity in the efforts to pass down middle-class status. One generation’s aspiration becomes another generation’s anxiety."

Rithika Ramamurthy at the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at Anne Helen Petersen's Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.