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.

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.

One of the refrains of the current moment is “I don’t know how to make you care about other people.” And one of the most straightforward solutions could be giving people the time and mental freedom to actually care about things that aren’t themselves and their immediate families.

This example from the retail world should be instructive: if you have only enough employees to barely get the work done as is, you’ve engineered a scenario in which employees may have theoretical permission to take time off, but understand that they’ll shoulder the burden of that time off in some way. Either they try to keep doing part of their work while on leave, a colleague takes on an even larger work burden, or a portion of essential work goes undone, slowing everyone on a team.

A reckoning with burnout is so often a 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?

As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again.

Sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting” — a

Scandal is amplified when a star’s actions violate not only the status quo but the underlying understanding of that star’s image as well: when

When you conceptualize diversity as something you add onto an existing monoculture, chances are high those employees will always feel as if they were somehow on the outside of it. And when you treat DEI as a module to complete, you can blind yourself to the way your company fails to integrate its ethos into basic, day-to-day operations.

Their bodies, words, and actions have become a locus for the type of inflammatory rhetoric usually reserved only for political figures.

As Darcy Lockman puts it in All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, “Reports of the modern, involved father have been greatly exaggerated.

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.

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

Through this lens, unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. 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.

All the decisions and multitasking that are already hard to juggle when you’re well-nourished and have a safe and consistent place to live become immeasurably more difficult