Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.

I managed the dread and sadness and exhaustion because that’s what we do: We keep going. We take what’s happening around us, flatten it, then divide it into small enough sections that we can endure it. So we told ourselves: 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 is the constant, unspeakable fear for the health of your family and your community. 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.

I felt underwhelmed by vacations—or, more precisely, like vacation was just another thing to get through on my to-do list.

“The old alchemical dream was changing base metal into gold,” Wolfe wrote. “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!)”

The unique thing about the middle class, after all, is that middle-class-ness must be reproduced, reclaimed, with each generation. “In other classes, membership is transmitted by simple inheritance,”

In 1980, 46 percent of private-sector workers were covered by a pension plan. In 2019, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

It’s not that profits in and of themselves are morally bad. But the logic of the current market is that a refusal to increase profits, year after year, is a failure. A steady profit, or even a break-even proposition that yields nonfinancial dividends to a community, has no value to stockholders. This isn’t a knock against capitalism so much as this particular type of capitalism: one whose goal is creating short-term profits for people with no connection to the product or the laborers behind it; to award people who have seemingly no awareness of, let alone guilt about, what their investment dollars may have done to the livelihood and working conditions of another.

They compel us to frame experiences, as we are experiencing them, with future captions, and to conceive of travel as worthwhile only when documented for public consumption. They steal joy and solitude and leave only exhaustion and regret.

In practice, the Trump-directed news cycle has all the notes of a horribly plotted film: narrative threads continually dead end; punchlines fail to land or arrive at all; characters don’t develop and their actions have no consequences. It’s impossible to tell which plot points need to be remembered and which ones are meaningless. And, worst of all, there’s never any closure or catharsis. There are cliffhangers from week to week like a bad soap opera, but you never figure out what’s really going on, what’s really going to happen, who’ll be held responsible.

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.