Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

To be valuable in American society is to be able to work. Historically, more work, more toil, more commitment, more loyalty, more grit—all of that could make you more valuable. That’s the very foundation of the American Dream.

Most people I know even realize that whatever benefits the phone allows—Google Maps, Emergency Calling—are far outweighed by the distraction that accompanies it. We know this. We know our phones suck. We even know the apps on them were engineered to be addictive. We know that the utopian promises of technology—to make work more efficient, to make connections stronger, to make photos better and more shareable, to make the news more accessible, to make communication easier—have in fact created more work, more responsibility, more opportunities to fail like a failure.

Our phones became extensions of ourselves—and the primary means of organizing our lives.

For most of us, our lives now flow through our phones and the apps on them: They are the primary mediators of our errands, our travel, our work, our exercise, our organization, our memories, our connections, our finances, and our friendships. Which is why it’s so difficult to moderate our relationship with our phones, let alone disengage with them entirely. For so many of us, disengaging from our phone means disengaging from life.

When people talk about “the attention economy,” they’re talking about the buying and selling of our time: time we used to spend with our minds “turned off,” meandering on a walk, staring into space at a traffic light, those seventeen minutes before you fall asleep. It’s an economy based on taking up residency in the interstitial moments of our lives but also through subtle, repeated disruption of the main events—so much so that Netflix’s CEO famously joked that the company’s main competitor is sleep.

They’re regular anxieties, the type of worries that could pop up from looking at a magazine or a friend’s postcard. But on Instagram, they’re all jammed into one continuous line, piquing every corner of our potential anxiety. 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.

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.

when this type of cultural consumption becomes the only way to buy a ticket into your aspirational class, it feels less like a choice, and more of an obligation: a form of unpaid labor. Which explains why “relaxing” by engaging in these activities can feel so exhausting, so unfulfilling, so frustratingly unrestorative.

When people do find the time and mental space to cultivate a hobby, especially if you’re “good” at it, then pressure to monetize it begins to accumulate. If someone loves to bake and starts bringing her creations to parties, the only way we know how to really compliment them is to suggest, You could do this for money!

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.

Caring for others, worshiping, singing, and talking, and hanging out with your own mind—all of it can be blissfully, radically unproductive. It matters because it nourishes you and others. Full stop.

Contemporary parenting culture, meanwhile, is a particularly complicated and deceptive kind of difficult, made all the more so because its difficulty is so often denied or erased.

Just because women have been liberated from many of the explicit forms of subjugation and sexism that accompanied domestic life, other forms continue to thrive, sublimated into the ideologies of ideal contemporary womanhood. Today’s mothers are expected to gracefully manage and maintain a high-pressure job, her children, her relationship, her domestic space, and her body. She is “free” to be pressured to be everything to everyone at all times, save herself.

And how do you make men feel better about their masculinity? You assure them that nothing, really, will change: A woman might be working in the office eight hours a day, but she’ll still be feminine and put together, and dinner will still be served at the same time, and the kids won’t even notice a thing. In other words, she’ll still be a full-time housewife—even if she’s also a full-time worker outside the home.

When women began to move into the professional workplace, the resultant anxiety over “motherless” children and unkempt homes and feminized stay-at-home fathers had to be quelled in some way, lest a backlash erase whatever small progress had been made. The tacit agreement: Women could enter the workplace, but only if they fulfilled every other societal expectation. They could be ambitious, but still had to be nice; powerful, but still hot; hardworking, but still a good cook; multitasking, but still a conscientious housekeeper; a leader, but still feminine; a workaholic, but still a devoted parent. To be clear, many of these expectations were foisted on boomer moms as well—but there was less of an expectation to perform and package all of those qualities online for mass consumption.

The guiding logic of this scenario is, in many ways, well-intentioned—and reproduced in homes across the country that would reject the label of “traditional.” One parent stays home out of necessity; the other stays with their high-pressure, long-hour job, with the hope that it’ll one day pay dividends:

Middle-class parents can be outrageously (if subconsciously) snobby—but their fear of another family’s “poor” parenting habits is just another version of that same old class anxiety and instability. When a parent attempts to make connections with the “right” sort of families, what they’re really trying to do is build an insurance policy that their kid will maintain those bourgeois connections, habits, and familiarity for the rest of their lives. Within this logic, spending time with the “wrong” kind of family is like exposure to a contagion, threatening to forever infect a child with the disease of downward mobility.

Men still don’t value domestic labor as labor, and men predominate our legislative bodies and the vast majority of our corporations. They don’t treat contemporary parenting—its cost, or the burnout that accompanies it—as a problem, let alone a crisis, because they cannot, or refuse to, empathize with it. Whether or not these legislators identify as conservatives, or “pro-woman,” or even “feminist” doesn’t matter; what matters is that it has not become a legislative or corporate priority.

Parenting is never going to be free of worry, or comparison, or stress. But there can be significantly less of all of those things. To make that happen, we have to admit that it’s not enough to have progressive ideals about parenting. Our current iteration of patriarchal capitalism destroys those ideals, no matter how earnest or deeply held, and replaces them with their regressive opposite: dramatically unequal distribution of domestic labor, generalized undervaluing of women’s labor, and jobs engineered to favor those unburdened with primary childcare responsibilities.

Children used to be a labor necessity: a mouth to feed but one that also ameliorated the amount of work to be done. But contemporary parenting standards mean that children become the work. You must work outside the home to get enough money to pay for their concerted cultivation, but also all the actual labor of concerted cultivation itself.

What’s happened in Japan isn’t unique, but instructive: a clear signal that when a society ignores, incentivizes, demands, or otherwise standardizes burnout, it compromises itself.

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 shouldn’t be a contest. Leisure shouldn’t be this scarce. Domestic labor shouldn’t even be close to this unequal. We shouldn’t be this worried, this terrified, this anxious about everything.

So look at your life. At your thoughts about work. About your relationship to your kids. At your fears and your phone and your email account. Look squarely at your fatigue and remind yourself that there’s no app, or self-help book, or meal-planning scheme that can lift it. It is a symptom of living as a millennial in the world today.

We can unite in our resistance to the way things are. We can refuse to blame ourselves for wide-scale societal failures, but also understand how fear of losing one’s already tenuous standing makes us overly protective of the privileges we do have. We can recognize that it’s not enough to try to make things better for ourselves. We have to make things better for everyone. Which is why actual substantive change has to come from the public sector—and we must vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for it tirelessly.