Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

I thought burnout was like a cold you catch and recover from—which is why I missed the diagnosis altogether. I had been a pile of embers, smoldering for months.

It’s the sensation of dull exhaustion that, even with sleep and vacation, never really leaves. It’s the knowledge that you’re just barely keeping your head above water, and even the slightest shift—a sickness, a busted car, a broken water heater—could sink you and your family. It’s the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot that happens to have bodily functions, which you do your very best to ignore.

For millennials, the predominant message of our upbringing was deceptively simple: All roads should lead to college, and from there, with more work, we’d find the American Dream, which might no longer include a picket fence, but certainly had a family, and financial security, and something like happiness as a result.

“You think you’re burnt out? Try surviving the Great Depression and World War II!” In the wake of the millennial burnout piece, that was the most common critique in my inbox. The sentiment usually came from boomers, who, somewhat ironically, had endured neither the Great Depression nor World War II.

Before the Great Depression, that was the American way: abject insecurity for the vast majority of the country. That’s what the Greatest Generation lived through; those are the stories that were passed down, with reverence rivaling any war story, to their boomer children. Which is why it can feel so mind-boggling that either generation would willingly return to that American way again.

The best way to the collective good, according to Reaganism, was through eagle-eyed focus on cultivation of me and mine, with little thought of how the reverberations of those actions would affect their children and grandchildren in the years to come. This notion developed into the only-kinda-joking argument that (white, middle-class) boomers are, at their heart, sociopaths: lacking in empathy, egotistical, with a high disregard for others.

Sharon Hays had described the phenomenon in her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. “In sum,” she wrote, “the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.”

“Risk management used to be a business practice,” Malcolm Harris writes in Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. “Now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.”

One of the behaviors of middle-class-ness, after all, is avoiding talking about the crude specifics of how it’s maintained—or masking them in the simple rhetoric of “hard work.”

To be valuable in American society is to be able to work.

American Calvinists interpreted dedication to one’s calling—and the wealth and success that followed—as evidence of one’s status as elect. This interpretation was conducive to capitalism, the cultural theorist Max Weber argues, as it encouraged every worker to see their labor not just as broadly meaningful, but worthwhile, even sacred.

Entire industries thrive on a surfeit of workers willing to ask for less in order to work more—so long as they can tell themselves and others that they have a job they “love.”

Outsourcing doesn’t keep employee wages steady. It doesn’t make employees’ work-life better. What it does do is increase the overall value of a company on the stock market, which benefits stockholders and those lucky enough to have a 401k—while depressing wages for those who’ve been outsourced.

Left to its own devices, capitalism is not benevolent. That’s hard for many Americans to hear or think about, having been raised to adulate capitalism, but the fact remains: If the goal is always growth at any cost, then employees, like machine parts, are exploitable, as long as the productivity continues to go up and the profit margins continue to rise.

To be “employed” today does not mean you have a good job, or a stable job, or a job that pays well enough to bring a family over the poverty line. There’s a startling disconnect between the ostensible health of the economy and the mental and physical health of those who power it. Which is why every time I hear unemployment numbers, I feel gaslit: like someone is telling us, over and over again, that what we know to be true is actually fiction.

Statements like that convince workers—and millennials in particular, who’ve had no other experience of the workplace—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.

You know who doesn’t need sleep? Robots. We might say we hate the idea of turning into them, but for many millennials, we robotize ourselves willingly in hopes of gaining that elusive stability we so desperately crave. That means increasingly ignoring our own needs, including biological ones. As theorist Jonathan Crary points out, even our “sleep” is increasingly a version of machines in “sleep mode” that’s not rest so much as “a deferred or diminished condition of operation and access.”9 In sleep mode, you’re never actually off; you’re just waiting to be turned back on again.

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. The same goes for all sorts of contingent labor:

22 The gig economy isn’t replacing the traditional economy. It’s propping it up in a way that convinces people it’s not broken. Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them. Any time that you do take off is tinged with regret or anxiousness that you could be working. That hour at a birthday party could be thirty dollars from Uber. That hour on a run could be spent pitching to new clients. That hour reading a book could be used to seek out another writing assignment. In today’s economy, going freelance means internalizing the fact that you could and should always be working more.

“Everything might seem so normal,” she wrote, “then you unlock your phone and—bam—everything gets LOUD again. You have almost certainly had this experience: You wake up in the morning or from a nap, or walk out of a movie, then check Facebook, Twitter, your texts to find people mid-thought, context-free, frozen in emotion, angry at Trump or the Trump people or the anti-Trump people or the media, angry and mocking at hypocrisy whose details aren’t yet clear to you, angry at how ineffectual someone is, or maybe they’re doing something even more indecipherable—it’s not anger, it’s just a meme or a quotation or a screenshot with ‘lol’ or ‘2017’ or just an emoji. The mystery begins: What happened? What has Trump done now?”

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.

Many of us still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.

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.

A monetized hobby might be periodically enjoyable, but when the activity becomes a means to an end—whether profit or perfection or entrance into school—it loses its essential, and essentially restorative, quality.

“You think you have it under control until something throws it all off and you have a breakdown,” Lisa, a mother of two from suburban Pennsylvania, told me. “You suddenly realize your kid’s shoes are two sizes too small, and you burst into tears: You’re a horrible mom who has abused her kid because you were caught up in the day-to-day. Toddlers never tell you when shoes are too tight. You agree to split the weekend with your spouse, and he goes off golfing for seven hours and you are so filled with rage when he gets home that you don’t even care that tomorrow is ‘your day,’ because you have nothing planned and don’t know what you to do because there are no female hobbies that last seven hours.”

Modern parenting has always in some way been about doubting your own competence. But never before has that doubt arrived with such force from so many vectors. Like all expectations, ideals, and ideologies, the question of who’s actually enforcing these parenting standards is a knotty one. No one likes them, and yet there they remain, providing a sort of informal parenting surveillance state, manifest in gossip and passive-aggressive Facebook comments and “well-intentioned” mom support group chatter.

Everyone ostensibly has the right to figure out how to parent, so long as it doesn’t directly endanger the child. But in our current society, white middle-class people still set the standards around what sorts of parenting is best. Just because the rules make winning impossible doesn’t mean these parents can’t force everyone—themselves included—to play past the point of exhaustion.

Men participate in and reinforce these ideals, but the primary arbitrators of success or failure are other women. That’s one of the most noxious elements of patriarchal control: It turns the very women it subjugates into the primary enforcers of its ideology.

As Michael Kimmel, author of Manhood in America, described to Lockman, men find all manner of ways to “opt out” of equal labor. “Men often tell me, ‘My wife gets on me all the time because I don’t vacuum, and I’m watching a baseball game, and she comes in and says, “At least you could vacuum.” So I do, and then she comes back and tells me I didn’t do it very thoroughly. So I just figure I won’t do it anymore.’ I say to them, ‘Well, that’s an interesting response! If I were your supervisor at work and I assigned you a report, and I wasn’t happy with what you turned in, and I told you so, would your reply be, “Well, then, I’ll never do that again!” ’ ?” When I’ve recounted that story, in person or online, some respond that the problem lies in viewing one partner (the mother) as the boss, and the other (the father) as an employee. It’s true: This is not an ideal scenario. But it’s what happens when one partner is reluctant, or actively refuses, to perform equal labor in the home.

Working mothers with preschool-aged children, for example, are 2.5 times more likely to be the one to get up with their kid in the middle of the night. Fathers of infants spend twice as much weekend time in “leisure” than mothers of infants.22 I’m reminded of a friend who, as the father of a newborn, spent at least one day of each fall weekend tailgating and attending a football game—and was indignant that his wife didn’t want him doing it on both Saturday and Sunday.

Children, themselves, aren’t social problems. Children are great. When I talked to parents about their burnout, I made sure to ask them, too, about what gives them great joy, and the answers were sublime. But the current organization of our society—of school, of work, of the way gender intersects with both—turns children into mini–life bombs. Not them, exactly, so much as the expectations and financial and labor realities that accompany them.

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.