Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.