Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear.

It might seem silly, but it’s a real and motivating fear: To fall in class status is to reverse the hard-earned upward mobility of your grandparents, your parents, or yourself. It feels abjectly un-American. Which is why so many parents drive themselves deeper into burnout to avoid it.

Big Little Lies is a melodrama, but its plot hinges on only slightly outsize versions of modern parenting anxieties.

I find myself returning to one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received about how to actually reduce burnout: Think not just about how to reduce your own, but how your own actions are sparking and fanning burnout in others.

If you want to feel less exhausted, less resentful, less filled with unspeakable rage, less ground down to the thinnest, least likable version of yourself, then you have to act, vote, and advocate for solutions that will make life better not just for you, or people who look and speak and act like you and have families like yours—but for everyone.

We don’t wait or opt against children because we love our careers so much more than we love babies. We just struggle to see how our society, in its current configuration, will allow us to do both without losing ourselves in the process. Women are already second-class citizens. When they become mothers, they only become more so—and have to work even harder to prove otherwise, or live in a way that refuses that fate.

We shouldn’t have to choose between excelling in work and thriving as individuals. We should feel good about listening to our bodies when they tell us, in every way they know how, that we should stop. Parenting

Which is why this project, from its original conception as an article to now, has never been about telling you what to do. I can’t fix you when it’s society that’s broken you.

Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But

We’re a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.