Anne Helen Petersen Quotes

The idea of a pension was not, and is not, extravagant. It's premised on the idea that some of the profits you help produce for a company should not go to stockholders, or the CEO, back back to longtime workers, who would continue to receive a portion of their salary even after they retire. In essence, the worker committed years of their life to making the company profitable; the company then commits some extra years of its profits to the employee.

Femininity cloaked power and strength, made it more palatable, less threatening.

It’s one thing to be young, cherub-faced, straight woman doing and saying things that make people uncomfortable. It’s quite another – and far riskier – to do those same things in a body that is not white, straight, not slender, not young, or not American.

Williams’s trashiness is the opposite of the tennis image: to be sexy, to admit you have a body, to wear things that are flashy or sparkly, all of it flies in the face of the traditional tennis idea, which corresponds with that of upper-class America.

A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centeredness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are.

...a far more palatable - and, in many cases, more successful - form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom...they've built tremendously successful brands by embracing the 'new domesticity,' defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first century gentility.

But who needs romance when you have friendship with just as much texture and affection?

[T]hat’s the thing about American governmental intervention: When it’s effective, it’s enveloped in a narrative of “American ingenuity and hard work”; when it’s ineffective, it’s proof of the fundamentally immoral nature of government assistance.

The crafting of the face is a billion-dollar industry because there’s actually only one truly acceptable face to create: that of “the girl.” The girl’s face is always dewy, unblemished, and unwrinkled, her eyes bright, her forehead uncreased. “Womanly” hips and ass might be theoretically fetishized, but they’re desirable only when the rest of the body remains that of the girl.

The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being. Adulting therefore becomes a verb.

Getting rid of the monoculture isn’t just about hiring or promoting people. It’s about figuring out how to organizationally shift the locus of power and control away from those who’ve had it, without question, for so long. This is, in a sense, a radical change when it comes to power dynamics inside companies, and the process will likely create some sort of tension. But it’s wrong to think of these changes one-dimensionally — as a power grab, or an overthrow of an old regime. That kind of thinking is zero-sum, destined to fail, and not how inclusion actually works.

Just because inequality is not as dire does not mean that it is not felt.

A reckoning with burnout is so often the reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?

Feministing writer Jos Truitt puts it, “trans women are disrespected and treated terribly when they don’t pass, but if they do pass they’re called out for upholding the gender binary and cis standards of beauty. It is an impossible bind.”13

Millennials, by contrast, have internalized the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all that childhood optimization: doing work you’re passionate about, which will naturally lead to other “better life outcomes.