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.

each of us matter, and are actually essential and worthy of care and protection from precarity. Not because of our capacity to work, but simply because we are human, and deserving of basic dignity.

“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.”

an “occupational phenomenon,” resulting from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

In short, acknowledging someone else’s burnout does not diminish your own.

But the responsibility for the vast majority of training now falls on the worker—and even then is no assurance of a job. This shift happened so gradually that it’s hard to see how profound a change it is, and how much student debt has resulted from it, but it started, however quietly, as boomers came of age.

Bruce Gibney argues that boomers are also antisocial: not in the “doesn’t want to go to the party” connotation of the term, but in the “lacks consideration for others” way.

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

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.

“When teenagers inevitably look at themselves through the prism of our overachiever culture,” Robbins writes, “they often come to the conclusion that no matter how much they achieve, it will never be enough.”

Instead of raising kids, so many parents, consciously and subconsciously, began raising resumes.

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.

“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.”

“when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”

Burnout occurs when all that devotion becomes untenable—but also when faith in doing what you love as the path to fulfillment, financial and otherwise, begins to falter.

“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?”

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.

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.

It took burning out for many of us to arrive at this point. But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.

the stock market thrives on decisions that generally make work and life worse for the average laborer.

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.

But the social media platform most overtly responsible for burnout is Instagram.

The Instagram feed becomes a constant, low-key lecture on the ways in which you haven’t figured your shit out.

Recovering from burnout doesn’t mean extracting yourself from the world. It just means thinking a lot more actively, and carefully, about the way you’ve convinced yourself is the best way to interact with it.

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.