Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Yes, we’re screwed, but we’ve known we’re screwed for years.

Like the generations before us, we were raised on a diet of meritocracy and exceptionalism: that each of us was overflowing with potential and all we needed to activate it was hard work and dedication. If we worked hard, no matter our current station in life, we would find stability.

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being. Adulting therefore becomes a verb.”

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. So I made a reading list.

burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.

“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.

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.

ideas of what “preparation” for adulthood should look like—one of which, over the course of our millennial childhoods,

“succeed,” as a millennial kid, at least according to middle-class societal standards, was to build yourself for burnout.

which gave my childhood a feeling, if not reality, of unrestricted wildness.

there are elements of the lower- and working-class parenting that are incredibly valuable and largely absent from concerted cultivation. One of the most important: “natural growth,” or the conscious or unconscious allotment of un structured time, which allows children to cultivate curiosity, independence, and learn to negotiate peer dynamics on their own.

“natural growth” I experienced.

The stereotype of the oversurveilled, overprotected kid is that they grow up to be weak and lazy.

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.

Optimize yourself into a college-application robot.

But for the vast majority of millennials, getting a degree hasn’t yielded the middle-class stability that was promised to both us and our parents. It’s just the same thing it always was, even when it gets dressed up in the fancy robes of the education gospel: more work.

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.

Jobs don’t magically appear with a college education. The student loans taken out to pay for that college education can limit job choices—particularly when an entry-level salary in a field is too low to offset the minimum monthly payment and the cost of living.

“Your work is going to fill a larger part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work,” Jobs said. “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “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.”

It promotes a sort of class consciousness that so many employers have worked to negate, instead reframing “jobs” as “passions” and “workplaces” as “family.” And God forbid you talk about money with family.

When people follow a “calling,” money and compensation are positioned as secondary. The very idea of a “calling” stems from the early precepts of Protestantism, and the notion that every man can and should find a job through which they can best serve God.

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.

Millennials’ growing disillusionment with the “Do what you love” ethos, coupled with continued, steady demand for all of the unsexy services provided by those jobs, has given them a new sort of shine. Amongst my peers, I’ve noticed a generalized “come to Jesus” moment regarding job requirements and aspirations:

They no longer want their dream job—they just want a job that doesn’t underpay them, overwork them, and guilt them into not advocating for themselves. After all, doing what they love burnt them to a crisp. Now they’re just doing jobs—and fundamentally reorienting their relationship to work.

Growing up, she thought that a good job was something where you could make a lot of money, love what you do, and do good deeds; now her definition of a good job is “whatever pays the most and allows me to disconnect after five p.m.” It’s a trajectory that feels increasingly common amongst millennials: to find a way to do what you like just fine. Millions of millennials, regardless of class, were reared on lofty, romantic, bourgeois ideas of work.

A good job is one that doesn’t exploit you and that you don’t hate.

For decades, millennials have been told that we’re special—every one of us filled with potential. All we needed to do was work hard enough to transform that potential into a perfect life absent all the economic worries that defined our parents.

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

maintaining the understanding that workers who are treated as humans instead of disposable robots do indeed hold value.

“There is nothing better than getting to complete things on a regular basis.”

Shitty work conditions produce burnout, but burnout—and the resultant inability, either through lack of energy or lack of resources, to resist exploitation—helps keep work shitty.

So they softly urge, manipulate, and command it: through notifications, but also through gamification, which use game-like elements to draw you into otherwise very un-fun activities, like following my Delta Frequent Flyer progress.

But the social media platform most overtly responsible for burnout is Instagram.

what made Facebook truly interesting in the first place, that is, cute pics. But generating those cute, curated pics is exhausting.

The Instagram feed becomes a constant, low-key lecture on the ways in which you haven’t figured your shit out.

They form a personalized mosaic of the lives we’re not living, choices we’re not making, and they force a type of pernicious comparison cycle.

We all know that Instagram, like any other social media platform, isn’t “real.” It’s a curated version of life. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t judge ourselves against it.

the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. The millennial dream depicted on Instagram isn’t just desirable—it’s balanced, satisfied, and unaffiliated with burnout.

When I don’t feel connected to myself or my life, Instagram reminds me of who I’ve decided I am.

Recovering from burnout doesn’t mean extracting yourself from the world. It just means thinking a lot more actively, and carefully, about the way you’ve convinced yourself is the best way to interact with it.

Digital technologies allow work to spread into the rest of our lives, but they also allow the rest of our lives to spread into work.

Deep down, millennials know the primary exacerbator of burnout isn’t really email, or Instagram, or a constant stream of news alerts. It’s

To be cultured is to be culturally omnivorous, no matter how much time it takes.

It’s not enough just to hang out, after all: There has to be a purpose. The popularity of the book club isn’t just about people reading more. It’s also about needing a productive affixation to the simple desire to be with other people.

Hobbies are evacuated of ambition; any “purpose” is secondary. They’re pleasure for pleasure’s sake.

They understand that reading a book matters not because others know about it, but because you took pleasure in it.