Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.

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.

It’s difficult, after all, to force yourself to save for future security when your present feels so incredibly insecure.

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

Middle class kids become mini-adults earlier and earlier—but as the rise of “adulting” rhetoric makes clear, they’re not necessarily prepared for its realities. They’ve spent a ton of time with adults, and learned the external markings of performing adulthood, but lack the independence and strong sense of self that accompanies a less surveilled and protected childhood.

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.

“We could just retain information so much easier, and most importantly, we had great reading comprehension, which is 90 percent of school assignments. Once I got to college, I realized how little I really know about studying and effectively learning and thinking rather than just reading and knowing.”

Millennials, by contrast, have internalized the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all that childhood optimization: doing work you’re passionate about, which will naturally lead to other “better life outcomes.”

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.

When everyone in the workplace conceives of themselves as individual contractors in continuous competition, it creates conditions prime for burnout.

“I’ve always wanted my work to be my whole life, but now I feel like a good job is something that doesn’t require me to work more than forty hours on a regular basis, and with duties that feel challenging and interesting while still doable. I don’t want a ‘cool’ job anymore, because I think jobs that are your ‘dream’ or your ‘passion’ consume too much of one’s identity outside of work hours in a way that can be so toxic. And I don’t want to lose my identity if I lose my job, you know?”

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. 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.

“We were supposed to accept the status quo because we were doing good,” Erin recalls. “When I quit teaching to work in tech—because I was literally starving!—I felt judged by my former colleagues.” If you left teaching, the idea was that you “couldn’t cut it” or were neglecting to make the work “about the students.” She felt like a traitor for not “not sucking it up.”

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.

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.

For many, including myself, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed about it: I settled for so little because I was certain that with enough hard work, things would be different.

“They are denizens rather than citizens, losing cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights built up over generations. Most importantly, the precariat is the first class in history expected to labour and work at a lower level than the schooling it typically requires. In an ever more unequal society, its relative deprivation is severe.”2 They are angry at and are anxious about the broken promises of the American Dream, but they keep grinding to try to position themselves closer to it.

Take the example of a cleaning company. They’re competing with dozens of other cleaning companies to provide services for Cool Startup. Cool Startup will likely choose the cleaning company with the lowest bid—and the lowest bid comes from the company that pays its workers the least. Now, the owners of Cool Startup might never have deigned to pay its own employee so little—that would be bad PR!—but when services are subcontracted out, it can feign ignorance of the entire pay structure.

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. It turns legitimate grievance, backed by a union or not, into “ungratefulness.” And it standardizes overwork and surveillance and stress and instability—the very building blocks of burnout.

When we look back on the period following the Great Recession, it will be remembered not as a time of great innovation, but of great exploitation, when tech companies reached “unicorn” status (valued over $1 billion) on the backs of employees they refused to even deign to label, let alone respect, as such.

“The person who works for himself works for a tyrant—you are only as good as your last job and your performance. You are constantly being evaluated and graded. Having to worry so much about where the next bit of bread is coming from means people losing control over their lives.”

But there’s a reason I sometimes find myself scrolling through my own account as I fight that before-sleep anxiety: When I don’t feel connected to myself or my life, Instagram reminds me of who I’ve decided I am.

“I don’t want to take a break. The internet is doing exactly what it’s supposed to: give me all the information, all the time. And I want to hold that fire hose of information right up to my face and gulp down as much as I can. I just don’t want to feel bad about it.”

The internet isn’t the root cause of our burnout. But its promise to “make our lives easier” is a profoundly broken one, responsible for the illusion that “doing it all” isn’t just possible, but mandatory. When we fail to do so, we don’t blame the broken tools. We blame ourselves. Deep down, millennials know the primary exacerbator of burnout isn’t really email, or Instagram, or a constant stream of news alerts. It’s the continuous failure to reach the impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves.

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

A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centered-ness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are. To emerge from burnout, and ultimately resist its return, is to remember as much.