Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

“The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression,” she writes. “Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed.” And now, right when we should be reaching our “peak earning years,” we’re faced with “an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.”

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.

The truth was, all of those tasks would take away from what had become my ultimate task, and the task of so many other millennials: working all the time. Where had I learned to work all the time? School. Why did I work all the time? Because I was terrified of not getting a job. Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined. 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.

“Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of physical or mental collapse as the result of overwork.1 Burnout is of a substantively different category than “exhaustion,” although the two conditions are related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.

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.

People patching together a retail job with unpredictable scheduling while driving Uber and arranging childcare have burnout. Startup workers with fancy catered lunches, free laundry service, and seventy-minute commutes have burnout. Academics teaching four adjunct classes and surviving on food stamps while trying to publish research to snag a tenure-track job have burnout. Freelance graphic artists operating on their own schedule without healthcare or paid time off have burnout.

In a way, it makes sense that millennials are feeling this phenomenon most acutely: Despite the fact that this generation is often portrayed as a bunch of underachieving college students, in actuality, we are currently living through some of the most erratic, anxiety-filled years of adulthood. According to Pew Research Center, the youngest millennials, born in 1996, will turn twenty-four in 2020. The oldest, born in 1981, will turn thirty-nine. And population projections suggest there are now more of us in the United States—73 million—than any other generation.4 We’re not seeking our first jobs, but trying to take the next steps, and confronting pay ceilings in the ones we have. We’re not just paying off our own student debt, but figuring out how to start saving for our young children. We’re balancing skyrocketing housing prices and childcare costs and health insurance premiums. And the promised security of adulthood never seems to arrive, no matter how hard we try to organize our lives, or tighten our already tight budgets.

Ironically, the most famous characterization of millennials is that we believe that everyone should get a medal, no matter how poorly they did in the race. And while we do, as a generation, struggle to shed the idea that we’re each unique and worthy in some way, talk to most millennials and the thing they’ll tell you about growing up isn’t that they conceived of themselves as special, but that “success,” broadly defined, was the most important thing in their world. You work hard to get into college, you work hard in college, you work hard in your job, and you’ll be a success. It’s a different sort of work ethic than “work the fields from dawn to dusk,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not work ethic.

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.

We’re the first generation since the Great Depression where many of us will find ourselves worse off than our parents. The overarching trend of upward mobility has finally reversed itself, smack dab into the prime earning years of our lives. We’re drowning in student debt—an estimated $37,000 per debtor—that’s permanently stunted our financial lives. We’re moving in greater numbers to some of the most expensive zip codes in the country, in search of the intense, high-profile job of our dreams. We’re saving far less and devoting far more of our monthly income to paying for childcare, rent or, if we’re lucky enough to somehow get the money for a down payment, a mortgage. The poorest among us are getting poorer, and those in the middle class are struggling to remain there.

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.

And then there’s the Great Recession. As an old millennial, I was already in grad school by the time the bank bailouts and the foreclosures started happening. But others finished high school or college and stepped right into the financial crisis, giving them little option than to do the thing for which our generation would later be roundly ridiculed: move back home. At the same time, tens of thousands of millennials watched their parents lose jobs, the homes they grew up in, their retirement savings—making it harder, if not impossible, to move back home. Some millennials’ experience of the recession was realizing how fortunate they were to have a safety net; others’ was realizing how far you can fall without one.

In writing that article, and this book, I haven’t cured anyone’s burnout, including my own. But one thing did become incredibly clear: 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.

“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. Other greatest hits: “Buck up, life is hard” and “I worked my tail off in the ’80s, and you don’t see me complaining about being burnt out.” These statements are variations of what I’ve come to understand as the boomer refrain: Stop whining, millennials—you don’t know what hard work is.

Amanda, who grew up in a suburb of Detroit, still struggles with unstructured free time. When she arrived at college in the early 2000s, she no longer had a chock-full schedule of activities around which to orient her life. “Any down time began to feel like I was being lazy and unproductive,” she recalls, “which in turn made me question my self-worth.” Today, if she’s not doing something, she feels like she’s wasting time.

Lily, who went to a prep school in New York, told me that she never even considered not going to college: “My oldest sister almost didn’t, and the narrative in the family was that she was in danger of failing at life and dooming herself.” That’s a common refrain amongst many millennials—especially amongst the middle class, or anyone who wanted to escape their town, or find something better than what their parents had. “It never occurred to me that college was optional,” Caroline, who graduated in 2000 from a high school near La Jolla, California, said, “or that my life would be worth living without a college degree.”

“When As are expected, there’s no way to exceed expectations,” Meghan, who grew up in the Portland suburbs, told me. “Physically, the pressure felt like a burning pain around my sternum. I once had a chest x-ray because of it. Now I know I have panic attacks, and I imagine that’s what it was . . . I threw up so much I inflamed the cartilage between my ribs.” It’s easy to see the message internalized during this process: The only route to success involves working to the point of—and then through—physical pain.

When she told her guidance counselor that she couldn’t afford college, they countered that it was “what you did,” and she could take out loans. “I was told that if I went to college, I would get a big fancy job and a nice paycheck,” she said. “That appealed to me because of my parents, who are divorced and never had very steady employment.”

“I had no idea what I was doing,” Ann told me. “No one in my family did. High school, which had pushed us to go to college so hard, did no real prep whatsoever. I showed up at college, started classes, and was rushed to the ER my first week when I thought I was having a heart attack.” It was a panic attack—the first diagnosis of anxiety issues that have never gone away, especially after she graduated with $56,000 in loans “right before the economy went to shit.” Today, Ann works at a nonprofit in New York, and is trying to throw as much money at her loans as possible. She’s never missed a payment, and has an 800 credit score—about as close to perfect as you can get. But when she thinks of burnout, she thinks about that student loan payment—over $500 a month, which means maybe they’ll be paid off by the time she’s forty-two—and how exhausted she is with paying for a mistake that was sold to her as a solution.

There are so many reasons for millennial burnout. But one of the hardest to acknowledge is the one that Ann faces down every day: that the thing you worked so hard for, the thing you sacrificed for and physically suffered for, isn’t happiness, or passion, or freedom. Maybe college provided choices, or got you out of your small town or a bad situation. But for the vast majority of millennials, getting a degree hasn’t yielded the middle-class stability that was promised to both us and our parents. It’s just the same thing it always was, even when it gets dressed up in the fancy robes of the education gospel: more work.

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

According to Indeed.com, between 2006 and 2013 there was a 2505 percent increase in jobs described using the words “ninja”; a 810 percent increase in “rock star,” and a 67 percent increase in “Jedi.”

Alarm, but also stability: For many families, a supplemental income was a godsend. But that stability was offset by the shame of the husband no longer being able to uniquely provide for his family, and all other manner of fragile masculinity manifestations. 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. Hence the “second shift,” a term popularized by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 1989 book of the same name, to describe the fact that these mothers were in fact pulling double shifts every day: one in the “formal” workplace, then another back at home.