Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

What matters is that they spent a decade or more of their lives working toward what they loved—and failed to reach the finish line. That’s what happens when we don’t talk about work as work, but as pursuing a passion. It makes quitting a job that relentlessly exploited you feel like giving up on yourself, instead of what it really is: advocating, for the first time in a long time, for your own needs.

The fetishization of lovable work means that plain old jobs—non-ninja, non-Jedi jobs that might not be “cool” but that nonetheless offer magical powers like “stability” and “benefits”—come to feel undesirable.

I’ve noticed a generalized “come to Jesus” moment regarding job requirements and aspirations: They no longer want their dream job—they just want a job that doesn’t underpay them, overwork them, and guilt them into not advocating for themselves. After all, doing what they love burnt them to a crisp. Now they’re just doing jobs—and fundamentally reorienting their relationship to work.

Growing up, she thought that a good job was something where you could make a lot of money, love what you do, and do good deeds; now her definition of a good job is “whatever pays the most and allows me to disconnect after five p.m.” It’s a trajectory that feels increasingly common amongst millennials: to find a way to do what you like just fine.

A good job is one that doesn’t exploit you and that you don’t hate.

“It’s always been implied that if you fail to succeed, you aren’t passionate enough,” she said. “But I no longer invest in work emotionally. It isn’t worth it. I learned that every single person is expendable. None of it is fair or based on passion or merit. I don’t have the bandwidth to play that game.”

When someone says millennials are lazy, I want to ask them: Which millennials? When someone says we’re entitled, I do ask them: Who taught us we should be able to do work that we love? We were told that college would be the way to a middle-class job. That wasn’t true. We were told that passion would eventually lead to profit, or at least a sustainable job where we were valued. That also wasn’t true.

But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.

When driving for Uber is framed as a voluntary side gig instead of a desperate attempt to supplement a dwindling teacher’s salary, then it’s all the easier to ignore the reality of the economic situation and the companies that take advantage of the workers they’ve failed.

You know who doesn’t need sleep? Robots. We might say we hate the idea of turning into them, but for many millennials, we robotize ourselves willingly in hopes of gaining that elusive stability we so desperately crave. That means increasingly ignoring our own needs, including biological ones.

I hope it’s clear at this point just how misguided that assertion is: No amount of hustle or sleeplessness can permanently bend a broken system to your benefit. Your value as a worker is always unstable. What’s deeply messed up, then, is that whatever value we do have is subject to continued optimization. And that optimization is achieved through ever-more noxious forms of employee surveillance.

Stress disintegrates the body, and can make it unsuitable for any other type of work. A stressful job isn’t just a route to burnout. It also traps you, creating a situation in which you can see no option other than to keep doing it.

According to one study, nearly all of the jobs “added” to the economy between 2005 and 2015 were “contingent” or “alternative” in some way.17 But for those desperate for work, especially millennials graduating into the post-recession market, these jobs nonetheless provided a much-needed paycheck, however meager—and the freelance and gig economy exploded. The willingness of workers to settle for these job conditions helped foster an even deeper fissuring of the workplace: first, by normalizing the low standards of the freelance economy; second, by “redefining” what it meant to be “employed.”

After all, actually hiring employees, even if you’re just paying minimum wage, is “expensive”—and requires the company to take on all sorts of responsibilities. When you’re a startup burning through millions in venture capital, the goal is growth, always growth, and responsibility is an impediment to growth. Uber solved the problem by calling their employees “customers” and by officially designating them as “independent contractors.” “Independence” meant those who drove for Uber could make their own schedule, had no real boss, and worked for themselves. But it also meant these pseudo-employees had no right to unionize, and Uber had no responsibility to train them or provide benefits. Gig economies lured workers with a promise of that independence—with work that could actually bend to fit our lives, our children’s schedules, our other responsibilities. This work was framed as particularly suitable for supposedly self-centered, picky, self-righteous millennials; as the gig economy grew in visibility, Forbes declared, “The 9 to 5 job may soon be a relic of the past, if millennials have their way.”21

the majority of people driving or cleaning or renting their spare bedroom or clicking relentlessly on a mouse in the gig economy are doing it as a second or third job—a shitty job to supplement a different shitty job.22 The gig economy isn’t replacing the traditional economy. It’s propping it up in a way that convinces people it’s not broken.

Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them. Any time that you do take off is tinged with regret or anxiousness that you could be working.

Nick, who does freelance stats analysis through Upwork, described the internalized pressure to be “working eternally and at all times”; Jane, a freelance writer, explains that “there is such a sense in freelancing that you are never doing enough—that you should be doing more, making more, hustling more—and that every failure you have (real or perceived) is entirely your fault. In an office job, you’re still getting paid for those five minutes it takes to make a cup of tea; when you’re freelancing, every minute you’re not working, you’re losing money.”

But the people it’s most poised to take advantage of in the immediate future are those who have no other options—and those, like millennials and Gen Z, who don’t realize there’s any other way. Which underlines the current conundrum: Shitty work conditions produce burnout, but burnout—and the resultant inability, either through lack of energy or lack of resources, to resist exploitation—helps keep work shitty. Significant legislation to updates labor laws to respond to current workplace realities can and will help. But so will solidarity: an old-fashioned word that simply means consensus, amongst a wide variety of people of like mind, that resistance is possible.

We know our phones suck. We even know the apps on them were engineered to be addictive. We know that the utopian promises of technology—to make work more efficient, to make connections stronger, to make photos better and more shareable, to make the news more accessible, to make communication easier—have in fact created more work, more responsibility, more opportunities to fail like a failure.

Which is why it’s so difficult to moderate our relationship with our phones, let alone disengage with them entirely. For so many of us, disengaging from our phone means disengaging from life. There’s a fair amount of shame affixed to this new reality: that those more connected to their phones are lesser people, or at least people with lesser wills. But the phone (or, more specifically, the apps on the phone) was engineered to first create a need, then fill that need in a way that would be impossible to re-create—all under the guise of productivity and efficiency. To succumb to its promises doesn’t mean you’re weak; it simply means you’re a human, frantically trying to complete everything required of you.

When people talk about “the attention economy,” they’re talking about the buying and selling of our time: time we used to spend with our minds “turned off,” meandering on a walk, staring into space at a traffic light, those seventeen minutes before you fall asleep. It’s an economy based on taking up residency in the interstitial moments of our lives but also through subtle, repeated disruption of the main events—so much so that Netflix’s CEO famously joked that the company’s main competitor is sleep.2

Dozens of studies and articles confirm what we already intuitively understand: Checking social media, at least when you find something positive or interesting, releases a small amount of dopamine, the pleasure-seeking chemical in our brain. Our brain loves dopamine, so it keeps seeking it out, addicted to the possibility of incremental changes: new photos, new likes, new comments—what the man who engineered the Like button calls “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure.”3 The same principle applies to our phones, generally: It doesn’t matter if there’s always something new on the home screen each time we pick it up. What matters is that sometimes there’s something new and worth our time.

News sites didn’t always send push alerts. Neither did apps for meditation, or Starbucks, or dating, or the New England Patriots, or learning Spanish, or the number matching game 2048. Sephora didn’t alert you when you were close to a store, and Google didn’t ask you to rate your subway trip after you finished it. But without your attention—your repeated, compulsive attention—these apps would become worthless. Or, at the very least, far less valuable. So they softly urge, manipulate, and command it: through notifications, but also through gamification, which use game-like elements to draw you into otherwise very un-fun activities, like following my Delta Frequent Flyer progress.

That’s how phones root themselves in our lives: not through one app or five, but via a whole maelstrom of assault on our attention. The user is the ostensible benefactor of all this technological advancement, but our reliance on our phones is a net loss: a loss of privacy, of attention, of autonomy. The winners are the companies that have so effectively exploited our drive for convenience, over and over again, for profit.

I am the rat pushing the lever to feed myself poison that tastes, ever so briefly, like candy.

Getting rid of the pushes and email alerts might stop the notifications, but the behaviors themselves have already been internalized. You can delete an app, like I deleted Twitter, and still figure out other ways to access it. You can put your phone on airplane mode after eight p.m., which I do, and still find your tendencies unchecked at eight a.m.

Why is the allure so strong? The dopamine explanation is part of it, for sure. But for me, I think the larger draw is a shared delusion: that with my phone, I can multitask like a motherfucker, and be all things to everyone, including myself. It’s not the shiny black rectangle that’s beguiling; it’s the idea that your life could be so ruthlessly, beautifully efficient, seamless, under control, that makes it appealing.

But on Instagram, they’re all jammed into one continuous line, piquing every corner of our potential anxiety. They form a personalized mosaic of the lives we’re not living, choices we’re not making, and they force a type of pernicious comparison cycle. Each photo is just one in a tall stack of evidence, posted over months and years, pointing to how others are living the millennial dream: working at a cool job but not working too much; hanging out with a fun and supportive partner; if desired, raising cute and not cloying kids; taking unique vacations and making time for interesting hobbies.

The millennial dream depicted on Instagram isn’t just desirable—it’s balanced, satisfied, and unaffiliated with burnout.

But there’s a reason I sometimes find myself scrolling through my own account as I fight that before-sleep anxiety: When I don’t feel connected to myself or my life, Instagram reminds me of who I’ve decided I am.

Whether or not you explicitly conceive of Instagram in this way—as a window unto others’ balanced lives; as an opportunity to portray your own—even casual users find themselves resentful of the place it comes to occupy in their minds. Open the app and discover a dose of newness—and, if you posted yourself, an opportunity to see each and every person who’s liked the latest slice of your life, who’s watched your story, who’s messaged you a torrent of 100s in affirmation. It’s quietly thrilling, at least until you think about just how little has changed since the last time you opened the app.

Which explains the twinned pleasure and pain of social media, the sharp contrast between our draw to it and the continually unsatisfying experience of actually being on it. Instagram provides such low-effort distraction, and is so effective in posturing as actual leisure, that we find ourselves there when we’d rather be elsewhere—deep in a book, talking with a friend, taking a walk, staring into space.

That’s how social media robs of us of the moments that could counterbalance our burnout. It distances us from actual experiences as we obsess over documenting them. It turns us into needless multitaskers.

hanging out with your own mind and all the emotions and ideas that experience promises and threatens to unearth.

We’re not reading this information because we’re curious; we’re reading it because we’re desperately, continuously confused—and each click promises something approximating meaning.

Of course, bearing witness takes a toll—especially when the news is structured to emotionally aggravate more than educate. Plus, as Brad Stulberg argues in a piece about breaking digital addiction, it can provide a false illusion of participation: “Instead of worrying about illness you can exercise,” he points out. “Instead of despairing about the political situation and making comments on Facebook you can contact your elected officials. Instead of feeling awful for people in unfortunate circumstances you can volunteer.”6 All of this is true. But those are options for people who aren’t already so exhausted by the rest of their lives, people with the wherewithal for proactiveness instead of the reactive, frantic Band-Aid-applying approach so many of us have settled into. When you’re burnt out, sometimes the best you feel like you can do, as a responsible citizen with an open heart, is try to keep up with the news. But then the heavy, inescapable load of that same news burns you out even more: The world becomes work.

Recovering from burnout doesn’t mean extracting yourself from the world. It just means thinking a lot more actively, and carefully, about the way you’ve convinced yourself is the best way to interact with it.

But all that digitally enabled flexibility really means digitally enabling more work—with fewer boundaries.

Deep down, millennials know the primary exacerbator of burnout isn’t really email, or Instagram, or a constant stream of news alerts. It’s the continuous failure to reach the impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves.

Part of our problem is that we work more. But the other problem is that the hours when we’re not technically working never feel free from optimization—either of the body, the mind, or one’s social status. The word leisure comes from the Latin licere, variously translated as “to be permitted or “or to be free.” Leisure, then, is time you are allowed to do what you’d like, free from the compunction to generate value. But when all hours can be theoretically converted to more work, the hours when you’re not working feel like a lost opportunity, or just an abject failure.

Historically, leisure was the time to “do what you will,” the eight hours of the day not spent on working or resting. People cultivated hobbies, anything from walking aimlessly to constructing model airplanes. What mattered is that it wasn’t done to make yourself a more desirable match, to declare your societal status, or make some extra money on the side. It was done for pleasure. Which is again why it’s so ironic that millennials, stereotyped as the most self-obsessed generation, have lost sight of what doing something simply for personal pleasure looks like.

It’s hard to recover from days spent laboring when your “time off” feels like work.

Some office cultures demand self-sacrificing presentism: Last one out of the office “wins.” But for most millennials I know, the only person “forcing” them to work long hours is themselves. Not because we’re masochists, but because we’ve internalized the idea that the only way to keep excelling at our jobs is to work all the time. The problem with this attitude is that working all the time doesn’t mean producing all the time, but it nonetheless creates a self-satisfying fiction of “productivity.”

better work is almost always achieved through less work.

institute a four-day workweek wherein every employee would be paid the same, so long as they continued to reach their previous productivity goals, just in 80 percent of the time. At the end of a two-month-long trial, they found that productivity had risen 20 percent—while “work-life balance” satisfaction scores rose from 54 percent to 78 percent. In 2019, a similar trial at Microsoft Japan resulted in a 40 percent rise in productivity.6 Rest doesn’t just make workers happier, but makes them more efficient when they’re actually on the job.7

Each of us has become, in our individual ways, essential.

In our current setup, any attempt to draw clear lines around work and leisure, or to deal with one’s own burnout, means creating burnout in others. What feels like the only solution is also the least useful one: We just keep working more.

When people complain about “too much television,” this is part of what they’re complaining about: not that there’s an abundance of options, for all manner of tastes, available in the marketplace, but that the amount of consumption necessary to keep up in conversation just keeps growing.

every choice is muddled by our understanding of what it says about us, and the conversations from which we’ll be excluded if we opt out.

But when this type of cultural consumption becomes the only way to buy a ticket into your aspirational class, it feels less like a choice, and more of an obligation: a form of unpaid labor. Which explains why “relaxing” by engaging in these activities can feel so exhausting, so unfulfilling, so frustratingly unrestorative.