Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.

When everyone in the workplace conceives of themselves as individual contractors in continuous competition, it creates conditions prime for burnout. One worker sets the bar for how early they can get into the office and how late they can stay; other workers try to meet or exceed it. Of course, the cumulative result of this atmosphere is rarely positive:

a culture of overwork does not mean better work, or more productive work—it just means more time at work, which becomes a stand-in for devotion.

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?”

Shitty work conditions produce burnout, but burnout—and the resultant inability, either through lack of energy or lack of resources, to resist exploitation—helps keep work shitty.

Part of our problem is that we work more. But the other problem is that the hours when we’re not technically working never feel free from optimization—either of the body, the mind, or one’s social status. The word leisure comes from the Latin licere, variously translated as “to be permitted or “or to be free.” Leisure, then, is time you are allowed to do what you’d like, free from the compunction to generate value. But when all hours can be theoretically converted to more work, the hours when you’re not working feel like a lost opportunity, or just an abject failure.

people feel guilty for taking time off: Someone has to do their work, so it’ll either be them drowning in a firehose of accumulated work when they return, or their coworkers simmering in resentment when they have to pull a double shift. 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.

In short, we’re too tired to actually rest and restore ourselves.

the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire.

school runs for just three quarters of the year and two thirds of the workday. In short, the societally compelled rhythms of a child’s day and year are incompatible with the rhythms of most parents’ working life.

Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear.

this project, from its original conception as an article to now, has never been about telling you what to do. I can’t fix you when it’s society that’s broken you. Instead, I’ve tried to provide a lens for you to see yourself and the world around you clearly. 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.