Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

“You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”

The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative, for example, has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up.

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.