1. Annie Lowrey, “Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance,” Atlantic, April 13, 2020.
1. H. J. Freudenberger, “Staff Burn-Out,” Journal of Social Issues 30, no. 1 (1974): 159–65.
3. “Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: “International Classification of Diseases.” World Health Organization, May 28, 2019.
4. Richard Fry, “Millennials Projected to Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation,” Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018.
5. Erik Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (New York: Crown, 2018), 10.
6. Kristen Bialik and Richard Fry, “Millennial Life: How Young Adulthood Today Compares with Prior Generations,” Pew Research Center, February 14, 2019.
7. Tiana Clark, “This Is What Black Burnout Feels Like,” BuzzFeed News, January 11, 2019.
8. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Nearly Six Decades After the Civil Rights Movement, Why Do Black Workers Still Have to Hustle to Get Ahead?” Time, February 20, 2020.
9. Judith Scott-Clayton, “What Accounts for Gaps in Student Loan Default, and What Happens After,” Brookings Institute, June 21, 2018.
1. Hunter Schwartz, “Old Economy Steve Is a New Meme That Will Enrage Millennials Everywhere,” BuzzFeed, May 25, 2013.
2. Taylor Lorenz, “ ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations,” New York Times, January 15, 2020.
3. Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York Magazine, August 23, 1976.
4. Marc Levinson, An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 5.
5. Elliot Blair Smith and Phil Kuntz, “CEO Pay 1,795-to-1 Multiple of Wages Skirts U.S. Law,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 29, 2013.
6. Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (New York: Viking, 2018), 4.
7. Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), xiii.
8. Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 1.
9. Levinson, An Extraordinary Time.
10. Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 68–69.
11. Midge Decter, Liberal Parents, Radical Children (New York: Coward, McCann & Geohegan, 1975).
12. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling.
14. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift, 40.
16. Joseph C. Sternberg, The Theft of a Decade: How Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 72.
17. “Workplace Flexibility 2010: A Timeline of the Evolution of Retirement in the United States,” Georgetown University Law Center; “Employee Benefits Survey,” U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
18. Michael Hiltzik, “Two Rival Experts Agree—401(k) Plans Haven’t Helped You Save Enough for Retirement,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2019.
19. Maurice A. St. Pierre, “Reaganomics and Its Implications for African-American Family Life,” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 3 (1991): 325–40.
20. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 3.
21. Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 70.
22. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 10.
23. Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class (New York: Free Press, 1988).
24. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 210.
25. Dylan Gottlieb, “Yuppies: Young Urban Professionals and the Making of Postindustrial New York” (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, May 2020).
1. Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid,” Atlantic, April 2014.
2. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
3. Doepke and Zilibotti, Love, Money, Parenting, 14.
4. Newman, Falling from Grace, 229.
1. Alexandra Robbins, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids (New York: Hyperion, 2006).
2. “Percentage of the U.S. Population Who Have Completed Four Years of College or More from 1940 to 2018, by Gender,” Statista.com
3. “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2018,” United States Census Bureau, February 21, 2019.
4. Ellen Ruppel Shell, “College May Not Be Worth It Anymore,” New York Times, May 16, 2018.
5. W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
6. Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017).
1. Amanda Mull, “America’s Job Listings Have Gone Off the Deep End,” Atlantic, June 13, 2019.
3. Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love: And Others Lies About Success and Happiness (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), 7.
4. Sara Robinson, “Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity,” Alternet, March 13, 2012.
5. Tokumitsu, Do What You Love, 7.
7. “Great Recession, Great Recovery? Trends from the Current Population Survey,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2018.
8. Christopher Kurz, Geng Li, and Daniel J. Vine, “Are Millennials Different?” Finance and Economics Discussion Series, 2018.
9. Tokumitsu, Do What You Love, 88.
10. J. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery A. Thompson, “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-Edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work,” Administrative Science Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2009): 32–57.
11. Ellen Ruppell Shell, The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change (New York: Currency, 2018).
1. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 7.
5. David Weil, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 50.
8. Laurel Wamsley, “Denver Post Calls Out Its ‘Vulture’ Hedge Fund Owners in Searing Editorial,” NPR, April 9, 2018.
9. Tara Lachapelle, “Lessons Learned from the Downfall of Toys “R” Us,” Bloomberg Business, March 9, 2018.
10. Matt Stoller, “Why Private Equity Should Not Exist,” BIG, July 30, 2019.
11. Abha Bhattarai, “Private Equity’s Role in Retail Has Killed 1.3 Million Jobs, Study Says,” Washington Post, July 24, 2019.
12. Sarah Todd, “The Short but Destructive History of Mass Layoffs,” Quartz, July 12, 2019.
13. Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google’s Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees,” New York Times, May 28, 2019.
15. Weil, Fissured Workplace, 14.
16. “Survey Shows Two in Five Women in Fast-Food Industry Face Sexual Harassment on the Job,” National Partnership for Women and Families, October 5, 2016.
17. Weil, Fissured Workplace, 7.
18. Samantha Raphelson, “Advocates Push for Stronger Measures to Protect Hotel Workers from Sexual Harassment,” NPR, June 29, 2018.
19. “Hands Off, Pants On: Harassment in Chicago’s Hospitality Industry,” a report by Unite Here Local 1, July 2016.
20. The overturn is currently being appealed and the outcome is unknown at the time of this writing.
21. Weil, Fissured Workplace, 8.
23. Karen Zouwen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 3.
24. Louis Jacobson, “What Percentage of Americans Own Stocks,” Politifact, September 18, 2018.
25. Alex Rosenblat, Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
26. Zeynep Ton, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), viii.
8. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015.
9. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2014), 13.
10. Jia Tolentino, “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” The New Yorker, March 22, 2017.
11. Sarah Krouse, “The New Ways Your Boss Is Spying on You,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2019.
13. Ruppel Shell, The Job, 128.
14. Ceylan Yeginsu, “If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know (and Amazon Has a Patent for It).” New York Times, February 1, 2018.
15. Emily Guendelsberger, “I Was a Fast-Food Worker. Let Me Tell You About Burnout,” Vox, July 15, 2019.
16. “Key Findings from a Survey on Fast Food Worker Safety,” Hart Research Associates, March 16, 2015 (http://www.coshnetwork.org/sites/default/files/FastFood_Workplace_Safety_Poll_Memo.pdf).
17. Sarah Kessler, Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), xii.
18. Rosenblat, Uberland, 5; 9.
19. Farhad Manjoo, “The Tech Industry Is Building a Vast Digital Underclass,” New York Times, July 26, 2019.
22. Aaron Smith, “The Gig Economy: Work, Online Selling, and Home Sharing,” Pew Research Center, November 17, 2016.
24. Ruppel Shell, The Job, 62.
25. Alex Rosenblat, “The Network Uber Drivers Built,” Fast Company, January 9, 2018.
27. Eric Johnson, “Full Q&A: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu and COO Christoper Payne on Recode Decode,” Recode, January 9, 2019.
1. Joanna Stern, “Cell Phone Users Check Phones 150x a Day and Other Fun Facts,” ABCNews, May 29, 2013; Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Generation X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials, Report Finds,” New York Times, January 27, 2017.
2. Rina Raphael, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: Sleep Is Our Competition,” Fast Company, November 6, 2017.
3. Paul Lewis, “Our Minds Can Be Highjacked,” Guardian, October 6, 2017.
4. Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019).
5. Katherine Miller, “President Trump and America’s National Nervous Breakdown,” BuzzFeed News, March 26, 2017.
6. Brad Stulberg, “Step Away from the 24-Hour News Cycle,” Outside, December 1, 2018.
7. Nick Stockton, “Who Cares About My Friends? I’m Missing the News!” Wired, September 2017.
8. Rani Molla, “The Productivity Pit: How Slack Is Ruining Work,” Recode, May 1, 2019.
9. John Herrman, “Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Really Want?” New York Times, July 1, 2019.
10. John Herrman, “Are You Just LARPing Your Job?” Awl, April 20, 2015.
1. “American Time Use Survey—2018,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 19, 2019.
2. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: BasicBooks, 1993), 66.
4. Anna Weiner, Uncanny Valley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).
5. Andrew Barnes, The Four-Day Week: How the Flexible Work Revolution Can Increase Productivity, Profitability, and Wellbeing, and Help Create a Sustainable Future (London: Piatkus, 2020), 2.
6. Bill Chappell, “4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers’ Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says,” NPR, November 4, 2019.
7. Robert Booth, “Four-Day Week: Trial Finds Lower Stress and Increased Productivity,” Guardian, February 19, 2019.
8. Ex Parte Newman, 9 Cal. 502 (Jan. 1, 1858).
9. Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (New York: Random House, 2010).
10. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
11. Noreen Malone, “The Skimm Brains,” Cut, October 28, 2018.
12. Kelsey Lawrence, “Why Won’t Millennials Join Country Clubs,” CityLab, July 2, 2018; “New NFPA Report Finds Significant Decline in Volunteer Firefighters,” National Volunteer Fire Council, April 16, 2019; Linda Poon, “Why Americans Stopped Volunteering,” CityLab, September 11, 2019.
13. Klinenberg, Palaces for the People, 18.
1. Gretchen Livingston, “About One-Third of U.S. Children Are Living with an Unmarried Parent,” Pew Research, April 27, 2018.
2. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 235.
3. Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership (New York: Harper, 2019), 16.
4. Table 10: Time Adults Spent in Primary Activities While Providing Childcare as a Secondary Activity by Sex, Age, and Day of Week, Average for the Combined Years 2014–18, Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t10.htm.
5. Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear (New York: Flatiron, 2018).
6. Elizabeth Chmurak, “The Rising Cost of Childcare Is Being Felt Across the Country,” NBC News, March 8, 2018.
7. Currid-Halkett, Sum of Small Things, 84.
9. Caitlin Daniel, “A Hidden Cost to Giving Kids Their Vegetables,” New York Times, February 16, 2016.
10. Conor Friedersdorf, “Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone in Park,” Atlantic, July 15, 2014.
11. Lockman, All the Rage, 15.
12. Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 45.
13. Claire Cane Miller, “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting,” New York Times, March 26, 2019.
14. See Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
17. “Raising Kids and Running a Household: How Working Parents Share the Load,” Pew Research Center, November 4, 2015.
18. Lockman, All the Rage, 25.
19. Claire Cane Miller, “Millennial Men Aren’t the Dads They Thought They’d Be,” New York Times, July 31, 2015.
20. Lockman, All the Rage, 90.
22. Lockman, All the Rage, 33.
23. Anadi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao, “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function,” Science 341, no. 6149 (2013): 976–80.
24. Malcolm Harris, “The Privatization of Childhood Play,” Pacific Standard, June 14, 2017.
25. Tamara R. Mose, The Playdate: Parents, Children, and the New Expectations of Play (New York; New York University Press, 2016), 144.
26. Lockman, All the Rage, 219.
1. Sam Sanders, “Less Sex, Fewer Babies: Blame the Internet and Career Priorities,” NPR, August 6, 2019.
2. Makiko Inoue and Megan Specia, “Young Worker Clocked 159 Hours of Overtime in a Month. Then She Died.” New York Times, October 5, 2017.
3. Motoko Rich, “A Japanese Politician Is Taking Paternity Leave. It’s a Big Deal,” New York Times, January 15, 2020.
4. Motoko Rich, “Japanese Working Mothers: Record Responsibilities, Little Help from Dad,” New York Times, February 2, 2019.
5. Tomoko Otake, “1 in 4 firms in Japan Say Workers Log over 80 Overtime Hours a Month,” Japan Times, October 7, 2016.
6. Philip Brasor, “Premium Friday Is Not About Taking a Holiday,” Japan Times, February 25, 2017.