Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

The overarching clarity offered by this pandemic is that it’s not any single generation that’s broken, or fucked, or failed. It’s the system itself.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of precariousness—that all that I’d worked for could just disappear—or reconcile it with an idea that had surrounded me since I was a child: that if I just worked hard enough, everything would pan out.

“The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”

Millennials live with the reality that we’re going to work forever, die before we pay off our student loans, potentially bankrupt our children with our care, or get wiped out in a global apocalypse. That might sound like hyperbole—but that’s the new normal, and the weight of living amidst that sort of emotional, physical, and financial precarity is staggering, especially when so many of the societal institutions that have previously provided guidance and stability, from the church to democracy, seem to be failing us.

This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.

Surrounded by perceived threats and growing uncertainty, middle-class boomers doubled down on what they could try to control: their children.

So many millennials end up defining themselves exclusively by their ability to work hard, and succeed, and play it safe—instead of their actual personal tastes, or their willingness to take risks, or experiment and even fail.

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.

The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon—and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

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.

But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.

But free food isn’t just a benefit. It’s a strategy to incentivize overwork, and the practice, along with so many other tenets of overwork, came directly from the culture of Wall Street.

Stress disintegrates the body, and can make it unsuitable for any other type of work. A stressful job isn’t just a route to burnout. It also traps you, creating a situation in which you can see no option other than to keep doing it.

But for me, I think the larger draw is a shared delusion: that with my phone, I can multitask like a motherfucker, and be all things to everyone, including myself.

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.

In our current setup, any attempt to draw clear lines around work and leisure, or to deal with one’s own burnout, means creating burnout in others. What feels like the only solution is also the least useful one: We just keep working more.