Anne Helen Peterson: “What else is there but my ability to work?”
Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses images, videos, and other fragments from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.
When Anne Helen Petersen’s article on millennial burnout dropped on Buzzfeed in early January 2019, it immediately sent shockwaves through the Twittersphere, and eventually the wider internet. As a journalist and former academic, Petersen has a knack for looking critically at, yet writing colloquially about, cultural phenomena—getting at the larger trends, truths, and impacts of things like MLMs or the Chip and Joanna Gaines effect. Her burnout article was the apex of that: A breakdown of our collective breakdowns, our fatigue and paralysis and the low-lying and constant existential dread that we knew wasn’t exactly normal but had come to feel so, and why a whole generation was feeling so deeply left behind. My friends and I talked about it in frenzied tones on Gchat and Slack, and after a few days even those who weren’t “very online” had read it. It was a truth bomb, the kind of thing you read and think: Holy shit, and yes, and finally. Among friends and peers there was a sense that finally someone had given words to what we were all feeling. Finally, someone had told us we were not alone. Finally, someone saw us.
That blockbuster piece was followed by related deep-dives (Petersen on burnout across backgrounds and student loan debt; Tiana Clarke on Black burnout) and so much discourse that Petersen ended up on a mini press tour about burnout which for her sparked… more burnout. For the first half of 2019, everyone around me was talking about how sick and tired we all were, and trying to remedy it—mostly through “self-care.” But the problem wasn’t that we were individually overworked or that we needed to take a vacation. It was, and is, that our political and economic systems have been scrubbed of the safety nets that had protected generations before us (notably those pre-boomer) from such deep exhaustion and futile scrambling; ironically, it was our parents’ generation who’d done the damage. This is the subject of Can’t Even, Petersen’s
