Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

When you’re in the midst of burnout, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task—passing the final! finishing the massive work project!—never comes.

(In 1950, CEOs made about 20 times more than the regular employee; by 2013, they made more than 204 times more.)

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,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. “If you are born into the upper class, you can expect to remain there for life. Sadly, too, most of those born into the lower classes can expect to remain where they started out.”12 But the middle class is different. Its form of capital “must be renewed in each individual through fresh effort and commitment. In this class, no one escapes the requirements of self-discipline and self-directed labor; they are visited, in each generation, upon the young as they were upon the parents.”13 The son of a lawyer must work just as many years as his father did, for example, to sustain the same position in society.

Frank eventually got into Harvard, but before he left for school in the mid-2000s, he wrote a post on his blog: Weighted GPA: 4.83 SAT: 1570, 1600 SAT II Physics: 790, 800 SAT II Writing: 800 SAT II Math IIc: 800 Number of APs taken: 17 Number of 5s received: 16 Number of times I wish that my parents would see me as a person, not as a resume: 4 years = 365 days + 1 day for the leap year = 1461

College didn’t alleviate the economic anxiety of our parents. It didn’t even guarantee our position in the middle class, or, in many cases, actually prepare us for the job market. But the preparation for college taught us a valuable, lingering lesson: how to orient our entire lives around the idea that hard work brings success and fulfillment, no matter how many times we’re confronted with proof to the contrary.

In 1940, just 4 percent of American women aged twenty-five or older had bachelor’s degrees, and just 5.9 percent of men.2 Only 14 percent of the population had completed high school. (In 2018, 90.2 percent of the population over age twenty-five had completed high school, while 45.4 percent has an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.)

Which explains our current “best practices” for achieving middle-class success: Build your resume, get into college, build your resume, get an internship, build your resume, make connections on LinkedIn, build your resume, pay your dues in a soul-sucking low-level position you’re told to be grateful for, build your resume, keep pushing, and eventually you’ll end up finding the perfect, stable, fulfilling, well-paying job that’ll guarantee a place in the middle class. Of course, any millennial will tell you that this path is arduous, difficult to find without connections and cultural knowledge, and the stable job at the end isn’t guaranteed.

“Middle-class parents started pushing their children to adopt adult-style, success-oriented behavior.” Instead of raising kids, so many parents, consciously and subconsciously, began raising resumes.

“When As are expected, there’s no way to exceed expectations,”

“One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think,” he said. “We could just retain information so much easier, and most importantly, we had great reading comprehension, which is 90 percent of school assignments. Once I got to college, I realized how little I really know about studying and effectively learning and thinking rather than just reading and knowing.”

But as a college education became more and more standardized through the ’80s and ’90s, employers needed new means of differentiation and distinction. In practice, this means even more reliance on the perceived prestige of a college—but also a newfound demand for graduate degrees. 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.

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.

We were raised to work harder to find that promised perfect job, eager to perform what Kathleen Kuehn calls “hope labor”: “un- or under-compensated work, often performed in exchange for experience and exposure in hopes that future work will follow.”9 In other words, internships, fellowships, and other quasi jobs, many of which hold dubious value yet feel compulsory

If and when academics find themselves disillusioned with the system, that disillusionment is often accompanied by a sprawling and stubborn sense of shame. It doesn’t matter if they followed every piece of advice on how to mold themselves into an ideal job candidate, or that the system thrived on their seemingly infinite stores of ambition and labor. 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.

that if things feels shitty, then they’ve only got themselves to blame. Maybe you are lazy. Maybe you should just work harder. Maybe work is constant drudgery for everyone. Maybe everyone makes do. Sure, your best friend is struggling, and your sister is struggling, and your coworkers are struggling, but that’s only anecdotal evidence against the larger narrative that everything is great. This is how precarity becomes the status quo: We convince workers that poor conditions are normal; that rebelling against them is a symptom of generational entitlement; that free-market capitalism is what makes America great and this is free-market capitalism in action. It turns legitimate grievance, backed by a union or not, into “ungratefulness.” And it standardizes overwork and surveillance and stress and instability—the very building blocks of burnout.

Take the “open office,” which doubles as both a cost-cutting method and a way for everyone in the office to know what everyone else in the office is doing at a particular moment. Unlike the private offices that were once de rigeur, for most, open offices make actually completing work incredibly difficult, subject to constant interruptions or, if you put on headphones, suggestions that you’re a cold bitch—not much of a team player.

The internet isn’t the root cause of our burnout. But its promise to “make our lives easier” is a profoundly broken one, responsible for the illusion that “doing it all” isn’t just possible, but mandatory. When we fail to do so, we don’t blame the broken tools. We blame ourselves. 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.

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 emerge from burnout, and ultimately resist its return, is to remember as much.

“Instead of offering a legitimate show of community or problem solving, moms almost universally will try to one-up your source of parenting frustration with their own similar but clearly much worse struggles,” Lauren, who calls herself a “broke white college student” in the Pacific Northwest, explained. “We could easily offer each other an exchange of hosting playdates while one takes a few hours of alone time, but then we’d be admitting that we need help—and are clearly not up to the task of parenting. Better to cling to the torch of martyrdom with a white-knuckled death grip.”