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Anne Helen Petersen QUOTES

Anne Helen Petersen QUOTES

1 " 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? "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

2 " [Burnout] isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

3 " 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. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

4 " The Williams sisters had something else: each other, and their absolute dominance. "

― Anne Helen Petersen

5 " But every step of Williams’s career has been shadowed with the sort of resentment that emerges whenever someone unsettles the status quo in an effective and unapologetic way. Put differently, when she stirred the pot, a whole lot of bullshit rose to the surface – and her refusal to try to perfume its smell has made her unruliness all the more potent. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

6 " Unlike other players – who arrived at the sport because their class and place in society afforded them the possibility – the Williamses fought their way in. Any victory from that point forward would not be out of luck, or proximity to privilege, or pedigree. It would be through sheer strength, work, and will. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

7 " But that lie – whose purpose was to allow white people to continue to think they weren’t racist, even when their actions and words indicated otherwise – was one in which the Williams sisters, like their father, refused to participate. They rejected the idea that they would assimilate to the white codes of the tennis world. Instead, they posed the question of their difference over and over again – in every clack of their densely beaded hair, in every powerful serve. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

8 " 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. That "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

9 " The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon—and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

10 " 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. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

11 " 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. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

12 " Which is precisely why I wanted to write this book: these unruly women are so magnetic, but that magnetism is countered, at every point, by ideologies that train both men and women to distance themselves from those behaviors in our own lives. Put differently, it’s one thing to admire such abrasiveness and disrespect for the status quo in someone else; it’s quite another to take that risk in one’s own life. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

13 " We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system - of American capitalism and meritocracy - or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

14 " The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

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

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

16 " One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think,” he said. “We could just retain information so much easier, and most importantly, we had great reading comprehension, which is 90 percent of school assignments. Once I got to college, I realized how little I really know about studying and effectively learning and thinking rather than just reading and knowing. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

17 " To turn black women into objectified others was to underline their difference; they may be beautiful, but they are of another kind, separate from the dominant understanding of attractiveness. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

18 " Most of us would rather read a book than stare at our phones, but we’re so tired that mindless scrolling is all we have energy to do. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

19 " It took burning out for many of us to arrive at this point. But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

20 " 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. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman