“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.”
― Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion
― Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion
“[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.”
― Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
― Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
“When you don’t know what to do, you travel. You go out and see. You have to rattle the bed, shake yourself out.”
― To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
― To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
“I guess I don't believe you can have it all. I don't believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all...You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want'" (175).”
― Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
― Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
“There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact: no mother has the radical, lifelong freedom that is essential for my happiness. I will never know the intimacy with, or have the impact on, a child that a mother has. Losses, including the loss of future possibilities, are inevitable in life; nobody has it all.”
― Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
― Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
Anna’s 2025 Year in Books
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