Book Review: "Can't Even" by Anne Helen Petersen

I have turned my nonfiction attention to a book about my generation: the millennials. Many books about the millennials state the same sorts of things including: how we grew up and are thus living pieces of the worst economic era since the great depression, how we are basically doomed from the beginning and the newer one is that now we are approaching the middle of our lives, our health is essentially failing us.

Anne Helen Petersen takes matters into her own hands to explain how our lives became so horrible and also tries to offer some basic solutions for it. I feel a bit on the fence about this book since the evidence is a bit shoddy and it's pretty badly written. Apart from that, it kind of just says the same things that the millennials have known to be true for a very long time. I'm honestly wondering who else is reading this book because if there is one thing we know as a generation it is that nobody cares about the millennials.

She starts of by analysing how the Pandemic Era basically showed us the inequalities that millennials were facing with a kind of walking proof. Millennials became more and more expendable and were going to become even more so once this era was over. The first thing I want to say about this is that though it is pretty good in terms of analysis, I would like to know who didn't know this already. It seems like a pretty surface layer critique of everything and is probably also a mass generalisation. Be that as it may, I like how I and the book are on the same side. However, the fact that this author is known to write for Buzzfeed means that I probably won't like the way this is going to be written.

A lot of this book seems to be personal anecdote instead of actual research. Yes, there are quotes and statistics thrown around but most of it is just relative to her experience or very carefully curated experiences which the reader must doubt the validity of since they so perfectly match the claims made by the author. Something that so closely matches the hypothesis is good, yes, but is shaky at best. How many of us have ever been in university only to realise that there are holes in our thesis? Yeah, I thought so. A 'professor' who manages to align all these things perfectly probably is not being entirely truthful about her research. And though I like the sentiment and would love to agree with it, validity of research is a question I cannot ignore.

I definitely agreed with the part which claims that the boomers essentially ruined the lives of the millennials not only as an economy but also as parents. We are primed for overachieving and burning out by everyday extracurricular activities and doing everything under the sun at school. For example: I would have extracurricular every day, I would have instrument lessons on the weekend and on top of that, I was part of the Christian charity group at school. Honestly, I didn't realise how much that would ruin me in the future and how little it would get me in terms of basically everything. I like the claims here but again, they are obvious. Overachieving millennial children grew up to be burnt out adults. It isn't a difficult thing to see for anyone in our generation.

Apart from this, we have comments about the work-life balance and how it was basically ruined for us millennials who were more than often asked to work for either a low wage or even, work for free. This exploitation of my generation is explored by the author in many different ways but as I approached the end of this short book I realised something: I've just read a book about the most obvious things in the world. And the offerings of solutions are not really solutions, they are just sticking plasters and don't work for everyone.

In conclusion, this book would be good if someone apart from the millennials were going to read it, but nobody cares about us enough to do so. And so, the book doesn't really serve much purpose apart from the author noting some quotes and statistics in what seems more like an autobiography with side studies rather than a nonfiction book which actually looks critically at an issue.