Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Instagram provides such low-effort distraction, and is so effective in posturing as actual leisure, that we find ourselves there when we’d rather be elsewhere—deep in a book, talking with a friend, taking a walk, staring into space.

That’s how social media robs of us of the moments that could counterbalance our burnout. It distances us from actual experiences as we obsess over documenting them.

And perhaps most damagingly, it destroys opportunities for solitude: what Cal Newport, drawing on the definition of Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin, describes as the “subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”4 In other words, hanging out with your own mind and all the emotions and ideas that experience promises and threatens to unearth.

When you’re burnt out, sometimes the best you feel like you can do, as a responsible citizen with an open heart, is try to keep up with the news. But then the heavy, inescapable load of that same news burns you out even more: The world becomes work.

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.

But all that digitally enabled flexibility really means digitally enabling more work—with fewer boundaries. And Slack, like work email, makes workplace communication feel casual, even as participants internalize it as compulsory.

How do we demonstrate that we’re “in the office” when we’re in our sweatpants on the couch? I do it by dropping links to articles (to show that I’m reading), by commenting on other people’s links (to show that I’m reading Slack), and by participating in conversations (to show that I’m engaged). I work very hard to produce evidence that I’m constantly doing work instead of, well, actually doing work.

We’re performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve our job.

Digital technologies allow work to spread into the rest of our lives, but they also allow the rest of our lives to spread into work.

But that’s the reality of millennial, internet-ridden life: I need to be an insanely productive writer and be funny on Slack and post good links on Twitter and keep the house clean and cook a fun new recipe from Pinterest and track my exercise on MapMyRun and text my friends to ask questions about their growing children and check in with my mom and grow tomatoes in the backyard and enjoy Montana and Instagram myself enjoying Montana and shower and put on cute clothes for that thirty-minute video call with my coworkers and and and and.

The internet isn’t the root cause of our burnout. But its promise to “make our lives easier” is a profoundly broken one, responsible for the illusion that “doing it all” isn’t just possible, but mandatory.

Deep down, millennials know the primary exacerbator of burnout isn’t really email, or Instagram, or a constant stream of news alerts. It’s the continuous failure to reach the ...

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.

millennials, stereotyped as the most self-obsessed generation, have lost sight of what doing something simply for personal pleasure looks like.

It’s hard to recover from days spent laboring when your “time off” feels like work.

Amidst our current climate of economic precarity, the only way to create and maintain a semblance of order is to adhere to the gospel of productivity, whether blasting through your email to get to Inbox Zero or ignoring it altogether.

I have seen friends try to monetize, and I have seen friends succeed at monetizing, I have seen friends grow to hate or feel shackled by what once brought them joy.

But distractions, Odell writes, “keep us from doing the things we want to do”—which then “accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live.”

A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with—the things you fill your life with—feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it.

A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centered-ness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are. To emerge from burnout, and ultimately resist its return, is to remember as much.

You agree to split the weekend with your spouse, and he goes off golfing for seven hours and you are so filled with rage when he gets home that you don’t even care that tomorrow is ‘your day,’ because you have nothing planned and don’t know what you to do because there are no female hobbies that last seven hours.”

Golf

It breeds resentment and despair—particularly for women who placed stock in the idea of an equal partnership.

Today’s mothers are expected to gracefully manage and maintain a high-pressure job, her children, her relationship, her domestic space, and her body. She is “free” to be pressured to be everything to everyone at all times, save herself.

Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear. That’s true of the workplace, and that’s true of parenting. The common denominator amongst millennials, then, is that we’ve been inculcated with the idea of that failure—like our failure to find secure employment, or save enough money to buy a house, or stave off an avalanche of medical debt—can be chalked up to simply not trying hard enough.

Men participate in and reinforce these ideals, but the primary arbitrators of success or failure are other women. That’s one of the most noxious elements of patriarchal control: It turns the very women it subjugates into the primary enforcers of its ideology.

“From BUYING ALL THE THINGS to the tyranny of breastfeeding to the baby gaining weight, there are endless ways to feel guilty. I think we are quick to make it as hard as possible for ourselves instead of just living.”

It’s about showing status,” Burnett told Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed. “That if you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life.”12 Busy-ness, in other words, as a very certain sort of class.

Women with jobs spend just as much time parenting as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. The metaphor of the second shift isn’t a metaphor at all: They are doing two full-time jobs.13 And in order to make time for both of those jobs, they are sleeping less—and spending far, far less time on themselves, or their own leisure.

“role overload”: “the constant switching from one role to the next.”16 In five minutes, a mom can go from texting a friend who’s been struggling to chopping fruit for a kid’s snack to checking a recipe online to regulating a sibling argument in the next room to trying to listen to her partner tell her about their day at work.

Dads, by contrast, can find “enoughness” by aspiring to a level of involvement best summarized as “more than what their own fathers did.” That can run the spectrum from simply learning to change a diaper to taking on the role of full-time stay-at-home parent. On average, it still looks like 35 percent of the labor, even if the dads themselves don’t want to admit it: 41 percent of fathers believe their childcare responsibilities were “shared equally.”

Men are not “naturally” bad at multitasking, for example. Men are conditioned not to have to be multitaskers; women are conditioned to be multitaskers. “Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective—what’s the power angle on this—often explains things,” the neuroscientist Lise Eliot tells Lockman. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.”

But even men who do attempt to do their share of the household labor—switching off on bedtimes, taking on the laundry—still seldom carry what can feel like the heaviest burden of all: “the mental load.” The mental load, as the French cartoonist Emma describes, is carried by the person in the family (almost always a woman) who takes on a role akin to “household management project leader.”

When I’ve recounted that story, in person or online, some respond that the problem lies in viewing one partner (the mother) as the boss, and the other (the father) as an employee. It’s true: This is not an ideal scenario. But it’s what happens when one partner is reluctant, or actively refuses, to perform equal labor in the home.

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.

That’s an incredibly liberating thought: that what we’ve been taught is “just the way things are” doesn’t have to be. Just because we’ve reconciled ourselves to our current reality doesn’t mean it’s right. Because this is the truth, which becomes no less true if others have had to endure it: We shouldn’t have to choose between excelling in work and thriving as individuals. We should feel good about listening to our bodies when they tell us, in every way they know how, that we should stop. Parenting shouldn’t be a contest. Leisure shouldn’t be this scarce. Domestic labor shouldn’t even be close to this unequal. We shouldn’t be this worried, this terrified, this anxious about everything.