Home > Author > Anne Helen Petersen
81 " 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. "
― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
82 " Many Hollywood stars have committed versions of the long suicide. Biographies of Clift posit that he drank because he couldn’t be his true self, because homosexuality was the shame he had to shelter within. But if you look at his own words, his testimonies about what acting did to him, you’ll see the culprit. His perpetual question to himself, as he once scribbled in his journal, was, “How to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable, and still alive?” For Clift, the task proved impossible. Clift once said, “The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.” He took himself to that precipice, but he fell straight in. And so he remains frozen in the popular imagination, circa From Here to Eternity—those high cheekbones, that set jaw, the firm stare: a magnificent, proud, tragically broken thing to behold. "
― Anne Helen Petersen , Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema
83 " In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a deeply compelling case for ignoring all of the impulses toward productivity and perfection that have come to imbue our lives, leisure, and otherwise. That means doing, well, nothing—at least nothing that is conceived of as value-making under capitalism. "
84 " Look squarely at your fatigue and remind yourself that there’s no app, or self-help book, or meal-planning scheme that can lift it. "