Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Burnout is when you hit the wall—but instead of collapsing, or taking a rest, you scale the wall, and just keep going.

Burnout arrives when every corner of our lives feels unstable, and we convince ourselves that working all the time is what will fix it. It’s what happens when you feel that catastrophe could be around any corner and that there are no social safety nets to catch you. You keep doing all that’s asked, especially in your work, but the world around you recedes and dulls to gray. There’s just so little of you left.

We don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the little things when our basic needs are constantly threatened by endless precarity.

We keep going. We take what’s happening around us, flatten it, then divide it into small enough sections that we can endure it.

If we can just get through the summer, we’ll be okay. If we can just get through the week, we’ll be okay. If we can just get through the day, the afternoon, the hour.

It looks like work spreading into every corner of your life. It’s being asked to do more than you are able every day, and then waking up and being asked to do it again.

COVID-19 is the great clarifier. It clarifies what and who in your life matters, what things are needs and what are wants, who is thinking of others and who is thinking only of themselves. It has clarified that the workers dubbed “essential” are, in truth, treated as expendable, and it has made decades of systemic racism—and resultant vulnerability to the disease—indelible.

I’m talking about a different way of thinking about work, and personal value, and profit incentives—to champion the idea that each of us matter, and are actually essential and worthy of care and protection from precarity. Not because of our capacity to work, but simply because we are human, and deserving of basic dignity.

I get asked a lot if I’m hopeful about the future. Right now, it’s difficult to feel hopeful about much of anything. But what exhilarates me is how angry we are, in this moment, about these failures. It’s the root of solidarity, the power behind our political might. It’s on us to feel it, name it, harness it, and recognize it for what it is: a beginning.

My to-do list, specifically the bottom half of it, just kept recycling itself from one week to the next, a neat little stack of shame.

on the everyday stresses of “adulting”—a word adopted to describe the fear of doing or pride in completing tasks associated with our parents. As one piece put it, “The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being. Adulting therefore becomes a verb.” And part of adulting is getting the things done on the bottom half of your to-do list, even if they’re hard.

As I read, it became clear that there are actually three types of adulting tasks: 1) the kind that are annoying because you’ve never done them before (taxes, making friends outside the framework of school); 2) the kind that are annoying because they underline that being an adult means spending money on things that are no fun at all (vacuums, lawnmowers, razors); 3) the kind that are more than just annoying—they’re time-consuming and unnecessarily labyrinthian (finding a therapist, submitting medical reimbursement bills, canceling cable service, quitting your gym, consolidating your student loans, figuring out if and how to access state support programs).

Adulting—and, by extension, completing your to-do list—is hard, then, because living in the modern world is somehow both easier than it’s eve...

But my burnout was more than the accumulation of undone errands. If I was honest with myself—actually honest, in the sort of way that makes you feel uncomfortable—the errands were just the most tangible indication of a much larger affliction. Something wasn’t just wrong in my day-to-day. Something had been increasingly wrong for most of my adult life.

The truth was, all of those tasks would take away from what had become my ultimate task, and the task of so many other millennials: working all the time. Where had I learned to work all the time? School. Why did I work all the time? Because I was terrified of not getting a job. Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined. I couldn’t shake the feeling of precariousness—that all that I’d worked for could just disappear—or reconcile it with an idea that had surrounded me since I was a child: that if I just worked hard enough, everything would pan out.

“Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of physical or mental collapse as the result of overwork.1 Burnout is of a substantively different category than “exhaustion,” although the two conditions are related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.

“The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,”

Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”2 It’s the sensation of dull exhaustion that, even with sleep and vacation, never really leaves. It’s the knowledge that you’re just barely keeping your head above water,

Increasingly—and increasingly among millennials—burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.

And while we do, as a generation, struggle to shed the idea that we’re each unique and worthy in some way, talk to most millennials and the thing they’ll tell you about growing up isn’t that they conceived of themselves as special, but that “success,” broadly defined, was the most important thing in their world.

We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system—of American capitalism and meritocracy—or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken. We’re the first generation since the Great Depression where many of us will find ourselves worse off than our parents.

We’re also more anxious and more depressed. Most of us would rather read a book than stare at our phones, but we’re so tired that mindless scrolling is all we have energy to do.

It’s the overarching feeling that you’re trying to build a solid foundation on quicksand. It’s the feeling, as the sociologist Eric Klinenberg puts it, that “vulnerability is in the air.”5 Millennials live with the reality that we’re going to work forever, die before we pay off our student loans, potentially bankrupt our children with our care, or get wiped out in a global apocalypse. That might sound like hyperbole—but that’s the new normal, and the weight of living amidst that sort of emotional, physical, and financial precarity is staggering, especially when so many of the societal institutions that have previously provided guidance and stability, from the church to democracy, seem to be failing us.

It feels like it’s harder than ever to keep our lives—and our family’s lives—in order, financially solvent, and prepared for the future, especially as we’re asked to adhere to exacting, and often contradictory expectations. We should work hard but exude “work/life balance.” We should be incredibly attentive mothers, but not helicopter ones. We should engage in equal partnerships with our wives, but still maintain our masculinity. We should build our brands on social media, but live our lives authentically. We should be current, conversant, and opinionated about the breakneck news cycle, but somehow not let the reality of it affect our ability to do any of the above tasks.

An elementary school teacher in Alabama kept getting told that she was a “saint” for the work that she was doing, even though she has fewer and fewer resources to do her job. She quit this spring.

This 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.

It’s not just that boomers are old or uncool; every generation gets old and uncool. Boomers are increasingly positioned as hypocritical, unempathetic, completely unaware of just how easy they had it—the generational equivalent of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.

But the idea of a pension was not, and is not, extravagant. It’s premised on the idea that some of the profits you help produce for a company should go not to stockholders, or the CEO, but back to longtime workers, who would continue to receive a portion of their salary even after they retire. In essence, the worker committed years of their life to making the company profitable; the company then commits some extra years of its profits to the employee.

Only 38 percent of private sector workers actually enrolled in offered defined contribution plans. It’s difficult, after all, to force yourself to save for future security when your present feels so incredibly insecure.

This notion developed into the only-kinda-joking argument that (white, middle-class) boomers are, at their heart, sociopaths: lacking in empathy, egotistical, with a high disregard for others.

bourgeois workplace. To be valued there, you need plans, lengthy resumes, ease and confidence interacting with authority figures, and innate understandings of how the job ladder works. You need connections, and a willingness to multitask, and an eagerness to overschedule.

But the common denominator between experiences remains the same: to “succeed,” as a millennial kid, at least according to middle-class societal standards, was to build yourself for burnout.

As Rosin points out, “a common concern of parents these days is that children grow up too fast. But sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood.” Middle class kids become mini-adults earlier and earlier—but as the rise of “adulting” rhetoric makes clear, they’re not necessarily prepared for its realities. They’ve spent a ton of time with adults, and learned the external markings of performing adulthood, but lack the independence and strong sense of self that accompanies a less surveilled and protected childhood.

So many millennials end up defining themselves exclusively by their ability to work hard, and succeed, and play it safe—instead of their actual personal tastes, or their willingness to take risks, or experiment and even fail.

Put differently: What you’re doing when practicing your times tables or taking a standardized test or writing an essay isn’t learning, but preparing yourself to work. This is an incredibly utilitarian view of education, implying that the ultimate goal of the system is to mold us into efficient workers, as opposed to preparing us to think, or to be good citizens. And this utilitarian view matches how our current educational system operates, in which success hinges on a student’s ability to adhere to a narrow understanding of “successful” behaviors: getting good grades, performing well on standardized testing, behaving “appropriately” and deferentially toward teachers, establishing “normal” social bonds with peers, and being willing to participate in physical education.

It’s a classic case of a time-worn phenomenon: Once an elite experience is opened to many, it’s no longer elite, and another cordoned area is created to redraw the lines of distinction.

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.”

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.

Miya Tokumitsu, author of Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness, sees Jobs’s speech as a crystallization of the narrative of “lovable” work: that when you love what you do, not only does the “labor” behind it disappear, but your skill, your success, your happiness, and your wealth all grow exponentially because of it.

What you love becomes your work; your work becomes what you love. There is little delineation of the day (on the clock and off) or the self (work self versus “actual” self).

As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

The desirability of “lovable” jobs is part of what makes them so unsustainable: So many people are competing for so few positions that compensation standards can be continuously lowered with little effect. There’s always someone just as passionate to take your place. Benefits packages can be slashed or nonexistent; freelance rates can be lowered to the point of bare sustenance, especially in the arts.

Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”3

feeling personally passionate and fulfilled by work takes precedence over working conditions for the whole.5

And a culture of overwork does not mean better work, or more productive work—it just means more time at work, which becomes a stand-in for devotion.

Burnout occurs when all that devotion becomes untenable—but also when faith in doing what you love as the path to fulfillment, financial and otherwise, begins to falter. Still, it usually takes years, even decades, to lose a faith you’ve spent an equal amount of time internalizing.

I think jobs that are your ‘dream’ or your ‘passion’ consume too much of one’s identity outside of work hours in a way that can be so toxic. And I don’t want to lose my identity if I lose my job, you know?”

As Bunderson and Thompson point out, “If one feels hardwired for particular work and that destiny has led one to it, then rejecting that calling would be more than just an occupational choice; it would be a moral failure, a negligent abandonment of those who have need of one’s gifts, talents, and efforts.”10

A “calling,” in other words, is often an invitation for exploitation, whether you’re a zookeeper or a teacher or a pastor.

“When I quit teaching to work in tech—because I was literally starving!—I felt judged by my former colleagues.” If you left teaching, the idea was that you “couldn’t cut it” or were neglecting to make the work “about the students.” She felt like a traitor for not “not sucking it up.”