Anne Helen Petersen Quotes

Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined.

It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

It’s as if each of these women is constantly igniting the line of acceptable behavior: you don’t know where it is until she steps over it, at which point it bursts into flames.

Rest doesn’t just make workers happier, but makes them more efficient when they’re actually on the job.

She should be assertive but not bossy, feminine but not prissy, experienced but not condescending, fashionable but not superficial, forceful but not shrill. Put simply: she should be masculine, but not too masculine; feminine, but not too feminine. She should be everything, which means she should be nothing.

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

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.

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.

According to Pew Research Center, the youngest millennials, born in 1996, will turn twenty-four in 2020. The oldest, born in 1981, will turn thirty-nine. And population projections suggest there are now more of us in the United States — 73 million — than any other generation.

It’s a tendency that reflects the age-old understanding that (white) men can contain multitudes, while members of every other group are pitted against themselves, as if there can be only one show about black families, or queer dudes, or, in the case of Broad City and Girls, young women.

Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The impetus wasn’t on the company to provide stability but on the workers to amend their attitudes toward the absence of it.

hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, will never buy a home, and are terrified of what a medical catastrophe could bring, so long as you can still blend in with higher incomes in a social setting.

Organizations of every size and shape are always trying to figure out the most desirable, most effective perks their budgets allow, when the easiest one is right there in front of them. They can give their employees the immeasurable gift of a schedule and flexibility that will permit them a world away from work and lift the psychological burden of that second family from their shoulders.

A healthy work culture creates the circumstances for all employees to do their very best work. But a sustainable, resilient one understands and eagerly invites them to have lives outside it.

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors — ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough — encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee — and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD — to become a doctor in your field of knowledge — is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching — the only thing they feel equipped to

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.