Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Hobbies are evacuated of ambition; any “purpose” is secondary. They’re pleasure for pleasure’s sake. But when your entire life has been geared toward building value for college, hobbies feel like foreign, almost obscene dreams: Every activity must be a means to an end.

For many millennials, there’s a drive to make anything you dedicate yourself to as perfect as possible.

the idea that you should make money from the things that give you pleasure is societal. “I’ve learned a lot about the exploitation that that kind of mindset allows,” she told me, “and I don’t want the ‘pure’ love I have for my hobbies to be polluted by the false promise that I might be able to make some bucks from my efforts.

But why aren’t we hanging out with other people? Part of the problem is that the ability to easily coordinate schedules disintegrated alongside standardized working hours. If your schedule shifts from week to week—either due to algorithmic recalculations or your own inclination to stretch work hours—it can feel impossible to make plans or weekly commitments. Add in the increased pressure to arrange and supervise children’s activities, and your available hours become even more difficult to overlap with others’. No one wants to admit just how difficult it will be to actually make plans happen, so people declare their best intentions to meet up—for a drink, for a playdate, for dinner—and then cycle into an endless cycle of “that doesn’t work for me, could we do next week?” and last-minute cancellations.

But part of the problem, too, is a decline in social infrastructure: the spaces, public and private, from libraries to supper clubs and synagogues, that made it easy to cultivate informal, nonmonetary ties.

That’s what social infrastructure helps provide: a relief from endless planning and replanning.

Most of us have read all about the studies that show that volunteering makes you happier, that in-person conversation and laughter is more nourishing than digital communication, that time for contemplation, religious or otherwise, makes us feel more balanced and less anxious. We know that leisure, especially the sort that Putnam describes as foundational to social ties, makes us feel better. But for many people, just the idea of any of those activities seems to require an insurmountable expenditure of energy. In short, we’re too tired to actually rest and restore ourselves.

Laura, who lives in Chicago and works as a special ed teacher, never wants to see her friends, or date, or cook—she’s so tired, she just wants to melt into the couch. “But then I can’t focus on what I’m watching, and end up unfocused again, and not completely relaxing,” she explained. “Here I am telling you I don’t even relax right! I feel bad about feeling bad! But by the time I have leisure time, I just want to be alone!”

Being with our friends, the people who love and cherish us, is too unsettling to our schedules. But our schedules are our lives. And what are our lives without others?

We watch television, we smoke more weed and drink to force our bodies to relax, we elevate and celebrate introvert behavior with T-shirts that read SORRY I’M LATE / I’D RATHER BE AT HOME. We try to feel okay with the way things are. But what haunts me is the truth that what you do with your leisure time now, when it’s so rare and so overdetermined and so overladen with exhaustion, is not—at least not necessarily—what you would do if you had more of it. So many of our best intentions, our most curious and creative and compassionate selves, are right there, closer beneath the surface of our lives than we know. We simply need space, time, and rest to make them a reality.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a deeply compelling case for ignoring all of the impulses toward productivity and perfection that have come to imbue our lives, leisure, and otherwise. That means doing, well, nothing—at least nothing that is conceived of as value-making under capitalism. Odell describes the deep pleasures of learning the names of the flora and fauna in her local park. Learning their names means being able to actually notice them—see them, and spend time recognizing them, simply because they occupy the same space as us. They matter, and are valuable, simply because they are—not because they make us better workers, or more desirable partners, or more economically secure.

Caring for others, worshiping, singing, and talking, and hanging out with your own mind—all of it can be blissfully, radically unproductive. It matters because it nourishes you and others.

But distractions, Odell writes, “keep us from doing the things we want to do”—which then “accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live.” In this way, the “best, most alive parts” of ourselves are “paved over by a ruthless logic of use.”

A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with—the things you fill your life with—feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?

A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centered-ness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are. To e...

The “best” parents are the ones who give until there’s nothing left of themselves. And, worst of all, there’s little evidence that it actually makes kids’ lives better.

Today’s mothers are expected to gracefully manage and maintain a high-pressure job, her children, her relationship, her domestic space, and her body. She is “free” to be pressured to be everything to everyone at all times, save herself.

Granted, these fathers did perform more domestic work than their own fathers: Between 1965 and 2003, men’s portion of unpaid family work rose from under 20 percent to nearly 30 percent.3 But since 2003, that figure has remained stubbornly in place. Time-use studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics find that women who work for pay outside the home still shoulder 65 percent of childcare responsibilities.4 Fathers, in other words, have never even approached performing an equal amount of household labor.

The South Carolina woman was charged with a crime and had her child taken from her. And those differences had everything to do with race and class: The South Carolina mother is Black, and her child was at the park while she worked at McDonald’s. The professor is white, and, well, a professor. Everyone ostensibly has the right to figure out how to parent, so long as it doesn’t directly endanger the child. But in our current society, white middle-class people still set the standards around what sorts of parenting is best. Just because the rules make winning impossible doesn’t mean these parents can’t force everyone—themselves included—to play past the point of exhaustion.

Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear.

“Work hasn’t changed. Workplaces still act like everyone has a wife at home. Everyone should be the ideal worker and not have to leave to take care of a sick kid. If one family struggles to balance it all, it’s a personal problem. All these families with the same problem? That’s a social issue.”11

The tacit agreement: Women could enter the workplace, but only if they fulfilled every other societal expectation. They could be ambitious, but still had to be nice; powerful, but still hot; hardworking, but still a good cook; multitasking, but still a conscientious housekeeper; a leader, but still feminine; a workaholic, but still a devoted parent.

Dads, by contrast, can find “enoughness” by aspiring to a level of involvement best summarized as “more than what their own fathers did.” That can run the spectrum from simply learning to change a diaper to taking on the role of full-time stay-at-home parent. On average, it still looks like 35 percent of the labor, even if the dads themselves don’t want to admit it: 41 percent of fathers believe their childcare responsibilities were “shared equally.”17

Men are not “naturally” bad at multitasking, for example. Men are conditioned not to have to be multitaskers; women are conditioned to be multitaskers. “Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective—what’s the power angle on this—often explains things,” the neuroscientist Lise Eliot tells Lockman. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.”20

Which isn’t to entirely fault men: Like women, most have few models of truly equitable partnerships. Once patterns of caregiving (and “expertise” in that care) are established, it’s extremely difficult to alter them. But even men who do attempt to do their share of the household labor—switching off on bedtimes, taking on the laundry—still seldom carry what can feel like the heaviest burden of all: “the mental load.” The mental load, as the French cartoonist Emma describes, is carried by the person in the family (almost always a woman) who takes on a role akin to “household management project leader.”

The manager doesn’t just complete chores; they keep the entire household’s schedule in their minds. They’re ultimately responsible for the health of the family, the upkeep of the home and their own bodies, maintaining a sex life, cultivating an emotional bond with their children, overseeing aging parents’ care, making sure bills are paid and neighbors are greeted and someone’s home for a service call and holiday cards get in the mail and vacations are planned six months in advance and airline miles aren’t expiring and the dog’s get...

Even if I explicitly ask him to do something, I don’t know if it is selective incompetence or regular incompetence, but he does it wrong.”

“Men often tell me, ‘My wife gets on me all the time because I don’t vacuum, and I’m watching a baseball game, and she comes in and says, “At least you could vacuum.” So I do, and then she comes back and tells me I didn’t do it very thoroughly. So I just figure I won’t do it anymore.’ I say to them, ‘Well, that’s an interesting response! If I were your supervisor at work and I assigned you a report, and I wasn’t happy with what you turned in, and I told you so, would your reply be, “Well, then, I’ll never do that again!” ’ ?”

Jennifer’s husband, like many partners of those who work at home, viewed all domestic care as her “job.” But as Jennifer points out, it was a job that didn’t pay, that required her to be on call twenty-four/seven, and had no breaks. And if she asked for his help, or didn’t get something done, the assumption that she just wasn’t working hard enough hung there, unspoken, in the air. Was she taking naps while he was at work? Watching too much television? She felt untrusted and unvalued and, most of all, exhausted.

Take the example of affordable, dependable childcare. It’s ridiculously stressful to find. If it’s dependable, it’s rarely affordable; if it’s affordable, it’s rarely dependable. The stress of childcare routinely prompts one parent to unwillingly quit a job they love; it prompts other parents to work far more hours than they’d prefer just to cover the costs.

There seems to be two interlocking, and deeply depressing reasons: Men still don’t value domestic labor as labor, and men predominate our legislative bodies and the vast majority of our corporations. They don’t treat contemporary parenting—its cost, or the burnout that accompanies it—as a problem, let alone a crisis, because they cannot, or refuse to, empathize with it. Whether or not these legislators identify as conservatives, or “pro-woman,” or even “feminist” doesn’t matter; what matters is that it has not become a legislative or corporate priority.

The causes are systemic. Which is why the solutions have to be holistic.

Lockman very convincingly argues, one of the main ways to set a family up for enduring, equitable distribution of labor is when the non–birth parent takes significant leave, preferably alone.26 During that time, the labor that would otherwise stay invisible—including, most importantly, the labor of carrying the mental load—becomes visible.

You can’t fix it with “self-care,” a concept originated by Audre Lorde to describe how to give oneself space to recover from the exhausting battle of fighting systemic oppression, then co-opted by privileged white women to grant permission to escape many of the standards and schedules they’ve (wittingly or not) helped perpetuate. You can make yourself (temporarily) feel better, but the world will still feel broken.

Think not just about how to reduce your own, but how your own actions are sparking and fanning burnout in others.

If you want to feel less exhausted, less resentful, less filled with unspeakable rage, less ground down to the thinnest, least likable version of yourself, then you have to act, vote, and advocate for solutions that will make life better not just for you, or people who look and speak and act like you and have families like yours—but for everyone.

I was already working myself into the ground, spreading myself thin, barely getting by. More work—without support, without accommodation, or understanding—felt like it would disintegrate me entirely.

But the current organization of our society—of school, of work, of the way gender intersects with both—turns children into mini–life bombs. Not them, exactly, so much as the expectations and financial and labor realities that accompany them.

I made the decision not to have children. I understand that some might call it selfish—and that self-indulgence has become the necessary way to frame self-preservation. But if our society continues to make life hostile for parents in general and mothers in particular, it’s a decision that more and more millennials will entertain.

you struggle mightily to convince yourself, after a long day of staring at your computer, that you have the energy to interact with anyone other than your pet on a personal level.

We don’t wait or opt against children because we love our careers so much more than we love babies. We just struggle to see how our society, in its current configuration, will allow us to do both without losing ourselves in the process. Women are already second-class citizens. When they become mothers, they only become more so—and have to work even harder to prove otherwise, or live in a way that refuses that fate.

We work harder for less, and blame our fatigue and precarity on our own failings instead of society’s. But refusal to address burnout has consequences—on the individual, of course, but also on our country as a whole.

There’s even a Japanese word—karoshi—to specifically describe death from overwork.

But with time, cracks in a nation’s most cherished ideological foundations—that hard work is rewarded, that the best succeed, that education is paramount, that things will work out—grow and become unwieldy.

Just because we’ve reconciled ourselves to our current reality doesn’t mean it’s right. Because this is the truth, which becomes no less true if others have had to endure it: We shouldn’t have to choose between excelling in work and thriving as individuals. We should feel good about listening to our bodies when they tell us, in every way they know how, that we should stop. Parenting shouldn’t be a contest. Leisure shouldn’t be this scarce. Domestic labor shouldn’t even be close to this unequal. We shouldn’t be this worried, this terrified, this anxious about everything.

Burnout has enveloped our current iteration of capitalism. It inflects and infects every interaction; it haunts every decision. It dulls and flattens us; it’s so familiar, we forget to be frightened by it.

So here’s what we can do. We can unite in our resistance to the way things are. We can refuse to blame ourselves for wide-scale societal failures, but also understand how fear of losing one’s already tenuous standing makes us overly protective of the privileges we do have. We can recognize that it’s not enough to try to make things better for our ourselves. We have to make things better for everyone. Which is why actual substantive change has to come from the public sector—and we must vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for it tirelessly.

Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We’re a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.