Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

this was not the narrative that millennials—particularly white, middle-class millennials—were sold about themselves. 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 radical idea that each of us matter, and are actually essential and worthy of care and protection. Not because of our capacity to work, but simply because we are.

When my editor suggested I was burning out, I balked: Like other type-A overachievers, I didn’t hit walls, I worked around them. Burning out ran counter to everything that I had thus far understood about my ability to work, and my identity as a journalist. Yet even as I refused to call it burnout, there was evidence that something inside me was, well, broken: My to-do list, specifically the bottom half of it, just kept recycling itself from one week to the next, a neat little stack of shame.

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.

an idea that had surrounded me since I was a child: that if I just worked hard enough, everything would pan out.

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.

When you’re in the midst of burnout, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task—passing the final! finishing the massive work project!—never comes. “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,”

It’s the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot that happens to have bodily functions, which you do your very best to ignore. It’s the feeling that your mind, as Cohen puts it, has turned to ash.

We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system—of American capitalism and meritocracy—or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.

The only way to make it all work is to employ relentless focus—to never, ever stop moving. But at some point, something’s going to give.

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.

the common denominator between experiences remains the same: to “succeed,” as a millennial kid, at least according to middle-class societal standards, was to build yourself for burnout.

“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.”

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy. That pressure to achieve wouldn’t have existed without the notion that college, no matter the cost, would provide a path to middle-class prosperity and stability. But as millions of overeducated, underemployed, and student-debt-laden millennials will tell you, just because everyone around you believes in the gospel doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.

But the preparation for college taught us a valuable, lingering lesson: how to orient our entire lives around the idea that hard work brings success and fulfillment, no matter how many times we’re confronted with proof to the contrary.

Human capital is, in Malcolm Harris’s words, “the present value of a person’s future earnings, or a person’s imagined price at sale, if you could buy and sell free laborers—minus upkeep.”6 Crass as that might sound, it’s a clear-eyed look at what capitalism does to the humans who work within it.

If you’re a physical laborer, your primary value is rooted in your healthy, able body. If you’re a service worker, it’s your ability to perform a task with skill, precision, and efficiency. If you work in a creative field, it’s what your mind can produce—and how regularly it can produce it.

And as much as we like to believe in a society where a person’s value is found in the strength of their character, or the magnitude of their service and kindness to others, it’s difficult to even type that sentence without being confronted with how little it reflects our current reality.

our current “best practices” for achieving middle-class success: Build your resume, get into college, build your resume, get an internship, build your resume, make connections on LinkedIn, build your resume, pay your dues in a soul-sucking low-level position you’re told to be grateful for, build your resume, keep pushing, and eventually you’ll end up finding the perfect, stable, fulfilling, well-paying job that’ll guarantee a place in the middle class. Of course, any millennial will tell you that this path is arduous, difficult to find without connections and cultural knowledge, and the stable job at the end isn’t guaranteed.

“Middle-class parents started pushing their children to adopt adult-style, success-oriented behavior.” Instead of raising kids, so many parents, consciously and subconsciously, began raising resumes.

“When students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work.”

What you’re doing when practicing your times tables or taking a standardized test or writing an essay isn’t learning, but preparing yourself to work. This is an incredibly utilitarian view of education, implying that the ultimate goal of the system is to mold us into efficient workers, as opposed to preparing us to think, or to be good citizens.

I’ve found that there are three overarching categories of students: 1) those whose parents oriented their children’s lives entirely around college acceptance, like AP Frank’s; 2) those whose parents didn’t really have an understanding of the realities of the college application process, thus forcing the student to take the burden of self-development onto themselves; 3) those who found themselves somewhere between those two extremes, with their college desires and self-development supported by their parents, but not enforced, systematized, or militarized.

The tendency toward self-imposed resume-building became widespread in the ’90s, when millennials first hit high school, but it intensified over the course of the 2000s. One reason: technology that facilitated visualizing (and tracking) that competition in unprecedented ways.

It exhausted her so much that she developed trichotillomania, or chronic hair-pulling.

“I maintain to this day that high school was the hardest thing I did in my life.”

And then there’s the creeping disillusionment that none of it really mattered, not then, and not now.

many millennials have internalized the idea that any job that does not require college is somehow inferior—and ended up overeducated, paying off loans for credentials they didn’t necessarily need.

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.

Gig work, even doing something you love, barely pays the bills. Your high school and college resume, no matter how robust, can still be a nearly valueless currency. Most of the time, all that passion will get you is permission to be paid very little.

Miya Tokumitsu, author of Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness, sees Jobs’s speech as a crystallization of the narrative of “lovable” work: that when you love what you do, not only does the “labor” behind it disappear, but your skill, your success, your happiness, and your wealth all grow exponentially because of it.

What you love becomes your work; your work becomes what you love. There is little delineation of the day (on the clock and off) or the self (work self versus “actual” self). There is just one long Möbius strip of a person pouring their entire self into a “lovable” job, with the expectation that doing so will bring both happiness and financial stability.

Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “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.”

she’s radically recalibrated her understanding of what a job can and should be to her. “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.

“Millennials got bodied in the downturn,” Annie Lowrey wrote in the Atlantic. They “graduated into the worst job market in eighty years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple of years living in their parents’ basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages.” The extent of the effects of this timing is only now coming into focus: A 2018 report issued by the Federal Reserve, for example, found that “millennials are less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young, with lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth.”

Amongst my peers, I’ve noticed a generalized “come to Jesus” moment regarding job requirements and aspirations: 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.

Millions of millennials, regardless of class, were reared on lofty, romantic, bourgeois ideas of work. Eschewing those ideas means embracing ones that have never disappeared for many working-class employees: A good job is one that doesn’t exploit you and that you don’t hate.

“Central to this myth of work-as-love is the notion that virtue (moral righteousness of character) and capital (money) are two sides of the same coin,” Tokumitsu explains. “Where there is wealth, there is hard work, and industriousness, and the individualistic dash of ingenuity that makes it possible.” Where there is not wealth, this logic suggests, there is not hard work, or industriousness, or the individualistic dash of ingenuity. And even though this correlation has been disproven countless times, its persistence in cultural conditioning is the reason people work harder, work for less, work under shitty conditions.

But as boomers were cultivating and optimizing their children for work, they were also further disassembling the sort of societal, economic, and workplace protections that could have made that life possible. They didn’t spoil us so much as destroy the likelihood of our ever obtaining what they had promised all that hard work was for.

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.

As Jia Tolentino pointed out in The New Yorker, “At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.”

Any time that you do take off is tinged with regret or anxiousness that you could be working. That hour at a birthday party could be thirty dollars from Uber. That hour on a run could be spent pitching to new clients. That hour reading a book could be used to seek out another writing assignment. In today’s economy, going freelance means internalizing the fact that you could and should always be working more.

“there is such a sense in freelancing that you are never doing enough—that you should be doing more, making more, hustling more—and that every failure you have (real or perceived) is entirely your fault.

“The person who works for himself works for a tyrant—you are only as good as your last job and your performance. You are constantly being evaluated and graded. Having to worry so much about where the next bit of bread is coming from means people losing control over their lives.”

It’s not the gig economy after all; it’s the always-frantically-seeking-the-next-gig economy.

More and more freelancers, gig economy laborers, and temps are realizing that flexibility is meaningless without stability to accompany it.

We convince ourselves that the internet makes us better, more efficient, right about to really start killing it.

For millennials, Facebook shaped (and messed up) many of our social lives when we were in our teens and twenties. But these days, most millennials I know have largely abandoned it. Facebook is toxic, Facebook is political—and the knowledge of the ways the company has exploited our personal information is too difficult to ignore. Most of my millennial friends have started using it almost exclusively for the groups:

LinkedIn is Twitter for people with MBAs. But the social media platform most overtly responsible for burnout is Instagram.

Posting on social media is a means of narrativizing our own lives: We’re telling ourselves what our lives are like. And when we can’t find the satisfaction we’ve been told we should receive from a good, “fulfilling” job and a balanced personal life, the best way to convince ourselves is to illustrate it for others.