#anne helen petersen

[jacobwren]

"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

[luxe-pauvre]

When I first posted about this article last week, my friend Ryanne — a brilliant sociologist — left a comment that’s stuck with me. “What I think is most insidious about this content is not that most of us are gonna feel compelled to be “trad wives,” she said, “but that feeds that inkling that we should always be doing something more for someone else.” And that’s where all of this content intersects, whether it’s coming from stay-at-home-girlfriends or #tradwives, whether it’s consumed by secular heathens or the already converted. To embody ideal femininity is to serve others at all times, of course — but it is also to aspire to self-annihilation. The absence of desire, the absence of needs, the absence of resistance as you hollow out the self and replace it with the desires and needs of others.

Anne Helen Petersen, #TradWife Life as Self-Annihilation

[exhaled-spirals]

« It’s very lovely that Dálen [inventor of the AGA stove] decided to find a way to relieve housewives and housekeepers from the burden of fire keeping. Yet when men see women performing the intense labor of care work, they often seem to think they’re seeing a problem that needs solving. The problem is “care work is labor intensive,” and their solution is often, “Here is an invention that will make it more efficient for women to do care work.” The inventions are nice, but care work is always labor intensive and rarely efficient, even with a radiant heat stove. You know what would help women more than any invention? A critical mass of men willing to do care work. »

— Anne Helen Petersen, in her Culture Study substack

[jojoware]

Tom Cruise doesn’t like women. Neither does Miles Teller. Channing Tatum likes women. So does Ryan Gosling. Brad Pitt used to like women but doesn’t anymore. Leonardo Di Caprio only likes them occasionally. Bradley Cooper doesn’t, George Clooney does. Matt Damon doesn’t, Ben Affleck only does in that one scene in the J.Lo documentary. Marlon Brando didn’t, Montgomery Clift did. Paul Newman didn’t onscreen but did IRL. Cary Grant did, John Wayne definitely, definitely didn’t. Will Smith pretends like he doesn’t but I’m not convinced. Mark Wahlberg absolutely does not, but Daniel Day-Lewis does. So does Paul Mescal.  -- A Unified Theory of Glen Powell by Anne Helen Petersen

[aquietglow]

I was charmed by this look at why he's become an internet boyfriend recently.

[skiagrafia]

It’s all very paradoxical: that the ability to constantly communicate has made us bad communicators, that instant access to all forms of entertainment would leave us with so few touchstones, that surveilling kids doesn’t necessarily make them safer, that the absence of limitations also often means the absence of creativity — and that the particular form of abundance we’ve fetishized can feel so sad, so unspeakably sterile.

—Anne Helen Petersen, The Sterile World of Infinite Choice

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

By Anne Helen Petersen.

Design by Ben Denzer.

[suvarnarekha]

the best hobbies are the ones we suck at and have no aspirations to master whatsoever. period.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

We are weary, and defeated, and furious. We need a fucking moment to mourn. But then — we have to fight. We have to fight even when we’re losing. We have to fight for a future we may never see. We have to protect each other, even when it comes at great personal cost. We have to fight because the alternative is unimaginable. They feed on our exhaustion. They expect our capitulation. They rely on us behaving like them: willing to ignore or cause others’ suffering to preserve our own power. They hate us, and they think we will learn to hate ourselves, too. But they also underestimate us. We are stubborn and unruly, annoying and persistent, bitter and terrified. And unlike them, we are not animated by fear or cruelty. We are audacious in our faith that a better world is possible. That faith is not rational, and the last eight years has consistently rattled it. But it endures, as it has endured for hundreds of years. We must not be the ones to lose it.

Anne Helen Petersen

[m-a-salter]

this is not a post about peter capaldi

It is a post about Tabitha Carvan's book, This Is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch, which I recently devoured. It is a sneakily profound book about patriarchal society's double standards around pleasure and enthusiasm, and if you have ever worried about whether your interest in [insert pop-culture enthusiasm here] was weird/pathological/in-any-way-problematic, I urge you to read this book.

I have never felt more seen and understood; in some of the quotes below I have made some minor substitutions such that the sentences are now 100% about me:

“I wanted to keep looking at [Peter Capaldi]! —but I also wanted to avoid ending up at a Not-Traditionally-Good-Looking-Yet-Extremely-Attractive-Celebrities Anonymous meeting, sitting next to some Steve Buscemi fan, having to declare I was an addict.”

“My friends and family often send me mentions of [Peter Capaldi] they've found online, thinking—ludicrously—that I wouldn't have seen them already.”

“…[R]evisit the memory of what it was like for you when you first found fanfiction. A little while ago, I saw a news story about a woman living in a New York apartment who discovered an entire other, hidden apartment behind her bathroom mirror, and isn't that just what it's like? A completely new thing you never knew about, which was there the whole time. And then all of a sudden, you have so much more space to move around in than you ever realized.”

“Coming out as a [Capaldian] is easy. Since the inside of me is almost entirely [Peter Capaldi], it's simply a matter of drip-feeding it to the outside. I start by casually dropping [Peter Capaldi] into conversation, at a rate of one mention per every five hundred times I think of him. Then I reply to people's text messages with [Peter Capaldi] GIFs, deploying a mere fraction of the images of him saved on my phone."

“And I know self-declaration is a far cry from self-determination, but at least it's a step up from self-care, the substitute aspiration we've been sold. That was the conclusion reached by the writer Anne Helen Petersen too. After researching her book on burnout, she reported that ‘skincare routines, pedicures, sweet treats, elaborate vacations, even massages—none of it feels as good as actually figuring out something you like to do, and then doing it as if no one was watching, and no one ever will, and it will never, ever find a place on your résumé.’”

“...[S]omething trivial, like a crush on a celebrity, can have unexpected, maybe profound, consequences, not in spite of being trivial but because it is. Because it's fun, because it doesn't matter, because it's purely for you, because it feels stupidly good. Because the joy of it expands. It seeps into other parts of your life, transforming it, and you, in ways that do matter—a lot.”

[taylortruther]

There’s a culture critic named Anne Helen Petersen who studies pop culture. She literally discussed why everyone’s obsessed with Travis and Taylor on her podcast this week (Culture Study Podcast) and they do bring up the traditional dating norms in heterosexual relationships and you’re totally right.

They also kinda touched on Taylor being 34 and not married and what that means about all of this which I thought was interesting. I’m still listening to the podcast (it’s over an hour long lol)

but Taylor having such a feminine job (popstar!!) with Travis being a legit football player is definitely factoring in. It’s like the beckhams

fjdaskl it's so fun that you are explaining ahp to me because i am like her #1 stan i feel. i love her. and yes, i do think she had some good insights into the relationship, but she hasn't gone quite deep enough but i expect the podcast - and future studies - will go further into it. i think she's extremely insightful about these types of things and how they reflect the current culture.

agree that there is a lot of layers to their gender roles coming in: their physical appearances, their jobs, what they represent as icons/what their "roles" are according to society (taylor being like... uber-girl, travis being an uber-boy, in a very all-american high school prom king and queen way), the archetypes, and so on.

i think a lot about how some reporter pointed out - talking about lavender haze, i believe - that many people view women as girls until they get married and have kids. and taylor, being legally single and child-free, challenges that belief regularly because she is so powerful, so successful, and so honest about her life.

like, i do think it's kind of awesome to see a 34-year-old woman be single and child-free while thriving. we don't see that enough and it has real consequences for people. expecting women to only be happy with a man and child puts pressure on them to find a partner, stick with a shitty relationship, not be their full authentic selves on their own, not make their own money, etc. - and it also makes the fact that women are underpaid, vulnerable to financial and other kinds of abuse, etc. less pressing to society because, frankly, those things benefit men and their power retention.

[noodledesk]

We ask women to self-annihilate in subtler ways. In sexual experiences, for instance, those who are socialized as girls learn young that our desires and discomforts– from the pain we feel in sex, to learning to push through gagging while giving head, to having sex taken from us—that’s all meant to be secondary to the pleasure we give male figures in our lives. And then if we become mothers, we find, well, here we are again: the kids come first, the husband comes first, subsume your body and hang in there. Today, we are also inundated with all this parenting advice, which is mostly built on the largely unquestioned supremacy of attachment theory— that, too, tells us to speak this way, contort our bodies that way, feel another way, lest we will traumatize our kids forever. 

Amanda Montei, “American Motherhood Felt Like That: Like a Plan Devised by Men” - Interview with Anne Helen Petersen from Culture Study

[gecko-s-greenhouse]

a thread about my shithole job

when i asked my therapist about workplace trauma and how to move forward from it, she suggested setting some time aside to feel my feelings and journal about it. so that's what i'm going to do, because i'm determined to move on from all the ways that i was mistreated at that shithole job now that it's been 5 months (lol).

for context, my first job out of my PhD was at a tiny startup of fewer than 10 employees. i felt lucky to land the job because the biotech job market was in a bad place at the end of 2022 (it's worse now at the end of 2023), and luckier still because the company sang a (lying) tune about company culture that i bought into. the job ranged from okay to a total dumpster fire and i'll get into the details below, and then after 5 months, i was unceremoniously laid off. (alternately, my entire team of 2 was unceremoniously restructured.)

and because i signed a non-disparagement agreement to get my severance, i can't tell you the company's name. i assume not all of these issues occur at other companies,

topics that i want to cover:

my own timeline of events.

company retreat.

what i wish i had said to my shitty ex-manager when she fired me.

cult of personality.

how to create a healthy work environment. (the short version: consume any/all media that anne helen petersen puts out)

dating among the c-suite.

"i'm not here to make friends."

qualities of a good manager.

respecting time off.

i regret not taking more time off.

what does giving employees an honest chance look like?

valuing humans over success; failure is always on the table.

and others that i'm sure will spring to mind.

today's topics:

company retreat.

for context, about 2 months into my time at this company, we went for a 3 day/2 night ski retreat.

the invite went out after i had accepted the position, but before i had started, so i felt like this was "mandatory fun" and forced team bonding time that i had to attend (even though the text of the email said no pressure!), so i accepted, but made clear from the beginning that i am not a skiier and would not be joining the downhill skiing activities.

come the week of the event, work was a flaming shitshow. we were in our first sprint week at this startup, and two new hires were visiting from oot so we had to entertain them and make it seem like work was chill even though we were working overtime.

actually being on retreat was fine, i guess? we did cabin activities, they went skiing and i did other snow stuff. it was awkward but manageable. the CEO covered activity fees for only the downhill skiiers, so i, notably not in this group, had to pay my own way for tubing, skating, and snowshoeing all by my lonesome.

i now regret not asking for my activity fees to be covered also.

we get home, and the CEO sends out a group photo. that was taken at the top of the ski mountain.

let that sink in for a moment.

ask yourself, who was not included in the picture?

and to make matters worse, i was never, at any point during this retreat, invited to be in a group photo.

that was the first time i cried over this shithole job, and the first time that i told myself that i wasn't going to care anymore. (first time? because i wasn't good at holding myself to it.) startups want their employees to be part of a shitty family, and i was no longer having it.

to make matters worse, when i was being hired, the CEO had fed me a lying story about how "we're not like other startups" and want to focus on employee well-being over the other cultish aspects of stereotypical startup culture.

what i wish i had said to my shitty ex-manager when she fired me.

i don't appreciate being patronized. the first thing she said to me was, "this may come as a surprise, but..." haha no, this was not a surprise in any way, shape, or form. i've known that you wanted to fire me from that joke of a performance review* (more on this later) a month ago, right up through this meat grinder of a so-called "second chance" you've given me. i guess i am only surprised that you fired me right in the middle of a field trial where i'm a member of the team of two that handles every sample that comes through.

just because you don't like what my data says doesn't mean it's bad data. 'nuff said.

if you're restructuring, why can't i be absorbed into another function of the company? why do you have to look me in the eye, lie to me and tell me that you think i'm a great scientist, but apparently not one who can learn how to contribute to other functions that i am fully capable of doing and you know it?

what's this bullshit about "effective immediately"? (don't @me about MA at will employment, i know the law but i'm talking here about decency, which i guess is a foreign concept to you.) shouldn't i be given a couple days to tie up loose ends, tell you how to find my shit, and say a non-rushed goodbye to those of my colleagues who i did come to like? and ESPECIALLY because i had requested several days of pto THAT YOU HAD APPROVED starting literally the next day? this feels like a move for YOU, so you don't have to look at me any more than you have to after you made this decision.

also, in the state of massachusetts, it would be polite to lay people off with enough lead time that they can acquire health insurance in a timely manner. assembling the necessary documents takes time, and the last day to sign up for the next month's coverage is the 23rd day of the prior month. lesson learned: negotiate a severance package that includes health coverage. again, i understand that decency is a foreign concept to you.

what gives you the right to play games with people's lives? this thought really took shape as my nutbag ex-manager continued to arbitrarily fire people, including one on an O1 visa. consider my situation: i had been at this company for 5 months and got laid off. any decent manager looking in would see this and immediately recognize that the problem is with the company (funding?) and the management rather than with me, a young scientist who hasn't even been given the standard amount of time to fuck up learn the ropes (1 year) before being shown the door. alternately, what gives you the right to brand me as someone who behaves poorly? (because that's the only other reason a stranger would think that i was laid off so quickly?) for example, my friend and former colleague, upon finding out that i lasted only 5 months at the company, immediately asked if the company was having money problems, but he's someone who knows me and knows that i'm not a jerk, but that's not immediately obvious to a stranger. what gives you the right?

you are running your company into the ground. i don't care if your science is impeccable (it's clearly not based on my data), but it's clear to me that your company is going to fail if you keep treating your employees like this. the consensus among former employees of the company, both the ones who were laid off and the ones who left of their own volition

i hope you fail. i will gleefully eat my popcorn WHEN it happens.

also, i want my stuff back. (i wouldn't have forgotten it if you'd given me more notice!)

to be continued.

also, am i supposed to talk about my feelings too? overwhelmingly angry that at an incompetent inexperienced and scared manager treated my life/career/future as a gigantic joke to her, but also disappointed in myself that i signed on in the first place, and sad to have lost a year that i could have otherwise spent building my career to this total nonsense. bad times all around.

[kenyatta]

Overwork culture is the ideology of the “right” to work at its most perverse. It may monetarily advantage a handful at the top, but the societal damage is tremendous. Most of our acute societal ills are directly tied to poverty, and as numerous studies and pilot programs have shown, could readily be ameliorated by the very simple step of giving people money, whether through programs like the child tax credit (a tremendous success) or UBI (read a great, nuanced explainer here). But there are second-tier problems that spiderweb around overwork — problems related to community-building, child and eldercare, community wellness, overall health outcomes and plain-out happiness and satisfaction and civic engagement. Turns out it’s incredibly hard to build community, to forge social safety-nets, to agitate for larger social change, to even give and receive care when you’re dedicated, willingly or not, to the culture of overwork. Maybe this doesn’t sound familiar. Maybe you told overwork culture to fuck off during the pandemic or a decade ago, maybe you live elsewhere and have always considered it a sort of pathology. But maybe some it — the struggle to find the time to do anything but work and raise your kids and recover from work, the philosophical support of unions but a struggle to see the need for one in your workplace, a general inurement to overwork culture — feels comfortably real. Maybe you feel like you’ve woken up and realized that you’re pretty bad at community, bad at leisure, bad at rest, bad at sustaining friendship….bad at most things, really, that aren’t work. At that, you’re an expert. And in that case, it’s worth asking yourself, again and again, until you can stare the answer straight in the face: at what cost, and for whose benefit?

The Wages of Overwork - by Anne Helen Petersen