Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.