Millennials are often characterised as fickle, lazy and entitled, said Sian Cain in The Guardian. But in Can’t Even, the US journalist and academic Anne Helen Petersen suggests that they are in fact victims of “burnout”. This book, expanded from a BuzzFeed essay that went viral in 2019, suggests that millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) feel overworked and undervalued, “overstimulated” but “alienated” – and permanently anxious, as the prospect of solid jobs and of other social protections enjoyed by previous generations seems to recede. For Petersen, “burnout” doesn’t signify total exhaustion so much as a “state of emotional paralysis” brought on by feeling overburdened, said Eleanor Halls in The Daily Telegraph.