Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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. That might sound like hyperbole—but that’s the new normal, and the weight of living amidst that sort of emotional, physical, and financial precarity is staggering, especially when so many of the societal institutions that have previously provided guidance and stability, from the church to democracy, seem to be failing us.

our wars are not “great” ones, but they are deeply unpopular forever wars that drain our trust in government, fought by those in economic situations where the military is the only route to stability.

In truth, millennials are boomers’ worst nightmare because, in many cases, we were once their most well-intentioned dream.

the fact that boomers are, in many ways, responsible for us, both literally (as our parents, teachers, and coaches) and figuratively (creating the ideologies and economic environment that would shape us).

“Baby Boomers did that thing where you leave a single square of toilet paper on the roll and pretend it’s not your turn to change it, but with a whole society.”

But like so many contradictory ideological turns, it’s mind-boggling and yet readily understandable. Americans, after all, love the idea of the self-made, bootstrapping American whose success could be linked to dogged perseverance no matter the barriers. But the myth of the wholly self-made American, like all myths, relies on some sort of sustained willful ignorance—often perpetuated by those who’ve already benefited from them.

The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative, for example, has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up. The cult of the individual elides all the ways in which the individual’s hard work was able to take root and flourish because of federally implemented programs and policies, from the Homestead Act to the G.I. Bill—programs that often excluded people who were not white or male.

Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them. They helped elect leaders, like President Ronald Reagan, who promised to “protect” the middle class through tax cuts, even though Reagan’s policies, once put in practice, worked to defund many of the programs that had allowed the middle class to achieve that status in the first place.

I’ve had conversations with my mom about this time—and what it took, many years later, for her to develop a different, far less militaristic attitude toward work. It wasn’t her fault I reacted to our family’s economic anxiety in a way that would harden my resolve to avoid a similar situation in my own life. For example, I would not, and have still not, put myself in a situation where my career and financial well-being could be jeopardized through a breakup.

I attended grad school when I wanted to attend grad school; I was skeptical and remain so of the need for marriage. And I internalized that working all the time was the surest way to make yourself feel less panicked about the things you couldn’t control. This might feel like a logical coping mechanism, but as so many of the millennial generation can attest, it is rarely a healthy or manageable one.

Alexandra Robbins’s The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, was aspirational. Published in 2006, The Overachievers is compulsively readable—Robbins, who’s embedded herself in over half a dozen other “subcultures,” paints each of her subjects as complicated, compelling characters as they go through the heady process of applying for college.

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.

“One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think,” he said. “We could just retain information so much easier, and most importantly, we had great reading comprehension, which is 90 percent of school assignments. Once I got to college, I realized how little I really know about studying and effectively learning and thinking rather than just reading and knowing.”

And then there was the “resume padding,” as Tyler put it—which involved a lot of volunteering in the community. “We got so much credit from counselors for things like ‘Paint an old person’s house!’ or ‘Rake up leaves!’ when it was essentially me and my friends dicking off for a few hours on a Saturday morning,” Tyler explained. “I guess it just made me much more cynical once I realized that everyone, including adults, were pretty much bullshitting to make themselves look better. I didn’t really feel like I was making people’s lives better. I just felt like a teenager trying to pad his resume to get into college.”

Millennials, by contrast, have internalized the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all that childhood optimization: doing work you’re passionate about, which will naturally lead to other “better life outcomes.” 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.

When people follow a “calling,” money and compensation are positioned as secondary. The very idea of a “calling” stems from the early precepts of Protestantism, and the notion that every man can and should find a job through which they can best serve God. American Calvinists interpreted dedication to one’s calling—and the wealth and success that followed—as evidence of one’s status as elect. This interpretation was conducive to capitalism, the cultural theorist Max Weber argues, as it encouraged every worker to see their labor not just as broadly meaningful, but worthwhile, even sacred.

In The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change, Ellen Ruppel Shell points out that employers have even created algorithms that examine an application in order to discern “called” applicants from those simply “applying,” based on the understanding that “the former will happily tackle any task without argument or demand.”11

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the ...

programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security.

It doesn’t matter if they followed every piece of advice on how to mold themselves into an ideal job candidate, or that the system thrived on their seemingly infinite stores of ambition and labor. What matters is that they spent a decade or more of their lives working toward what they loved—and failed to reach the finish line. 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.

The fetishization of lovable work means that plain old jobs—non-ninja, non-Jedi jobs that might not be “cool” but that nonetheless offer magical powers like “stability” and “benefits”—come to feel undesirable. Within this logic, mailmen and electrician seem like our grandparents’ and parents’ jobs, the sorts of jobs with a definable start and ending, the sort of jobs that don’t subsume the worker’s identity. Maybe you don’t love it, or feel passion for installing air conditioning, but you don’t hate it. The hours are fair, the pay is decent, the training is feasible. And yet, these jobs are often coded, at least amongst the educated middle-class, as undesirable.

Millennials’ growing disillusionment with the “Do what you love” ethos, coupled with continued, steady demand for all of the unsexy services provided by those jobs, has given them a new sort of shine. 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.

When Emma looks back on the last ten years, she feels cynical but grateful. “It’s always been implied that if you fail to succeed, you aren’t passionate enough,” she said. “But I no longer invest in work emotionally. It isn’t worth it. I learned that every single person is expendable. None of it is fair or based on passion or merit. I don’t have the bandwidth to play that game.” When I hear stories like Emma’s, so similar to thousands of other millennials’, I realize all over again just how aggressively, and tirelessly, so many of us worked toward that dream job. Which is why it’s so difficult for millennials to fathom the most enduring criticism of our generation: that we’re spoiled, or lazy, or entitled. Millennials did not germinate the idea that ‘lovable work’ was the ideal, nor did we cultivate it. But we did have to deal with the reality of just how frail that idea became once exposed to the real world. When someone says

Entering into adulthood has always been about modifying expectations: of what it is and what it can provide. The difference with millennials, then, is that we’ve spent between five and twenty years doing the painful work of adjusting our expectations: recalibrating our parents’ and advisors’ very reassuring understanding of what the job market was with the realities of our own experience of it, but also arriving at a wholly utilitarian vision of what a job can and should be. For many of us, it took years in shitty jobs to understand ourselves as laborers, as workers, hungry for solidarity.

For many, including myself, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed about it: I settled for so little because I was certain that with enough hard work, things would be different. But you can only work as an “independent contractor” at a job paying minimum wage with no benefits while shouldering a $400-a-month loan payment—even if it’s in a field you’re “passionate” about—for so many years before realizing that something’s deeply wrong. 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.

But every day, the salariat continues its “drift,” as Standing puts it, into the precariat: full-time workers are laid off and replaced by independent contractors; the new “innovative” tech companies refuse to even categorize the bulk of their workforce as employees. Workers aren’t getting lazier, or worse at multitasking. We don’t lack grit or ambition. Instead, work is bad and getting worse, precarious and getting more so. But to understand how work got this shitty for so many requires a significant detour into the past—into the history of the temp, but also into the interlocking histories of consulting, private equity, and investment banking. We have to understand how the workplace “fissured”—that is, broke apart at its very foundation—and how the resultant instability has affected us all.

And then there’s the example of Toys “R” Us, a foundational brand to so many millennial childhoods. In 2005, Toys “R” Us was bought by a collection of private equity firms, which loaded the company with debt; by 2007, 97 percent of its profits were directed toward paying down the interest.9 In practice, that meant no time for innovation, or remodeling stores, or devising new strategies to compete with competitors. The private equity owners cut the fat, and then they cut down to the bone, and then, in 2017, the company went bankrupt. The stores were liquidated. Every employee was let go. “A lot of people assume Amazon or Walmart killed Toys “R” Us, but it was selling massive numbers of toys until the very end,” the anti-monopoly activist Matt Stoller writes. “What destroyed the company were financiers, and public

policies that allowed the divorcing of ownership from responsibility.”10

This isn’t a knock against capitalism so much as this particular type of capitalism: one whose goal is creating short-term profits for people with no connection to the product or the laborers behind it; to award people who have seemingly no awareness of, let alone guilt about, what their investment dollars may have done to the livelihood and working conditions of another.

This is the paradigm shift that’s so hard to confront: that in the current iteration of capitalism, fueled by Wall Street and private equity, the vast majority of employees do not benefit, in any way, from the profits that the company creates for its shareholders. In fact, those profits are often contingent upon workers suffering.

Your workplace has probably already been “leaned” and you don’t even know it. Think about the person who cleans your work space. Or the people who work at the lunch counter, or handle payroll, or tend to the tasteful lawn outside, or provide customer service. Maybe you are one of those people. Chances are high that the people doing these jobs aren’t actually employed by the company that they outwardly seem to represent. It didn’t used to be this way. Companies used to employ the people who made work possible at all levels. The ramifications of this arrangement were huge: If you worked as a janitor at, say, 3M, you were entitled to the same benefits as my Granddad, who worked there as an accountant. Not the same salary—but the same pension structure, the same healthcare, the same stability. This was a massive equalizing force: You might not have the same earning potential, but you had the same protection from

risk—and, at least in some cases, an opportunity for advancement, which could include moving up and out of janitorial work altogether.

Which is why every time I hear unemployment numbers, I feel gaslit: like someone is telling us, over and over again, that what we know to be true is actually fiction. Same for every time I hear that the economy has never been stronger, and especially when I hear statements like that of the CEO who provides accounting services for Uber drivers: that the gig economy is a “lifestyle choice for millennials.”25 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. Maybe you are lazy. Maybe you should just work harder. Maybe work is constant drudgery for everyone. Maybe everyone makes do. Sure, your best friend is struggling, and your sister is struggling,

and your coworkers are struggling, but that’s only anecdotal evidence against the larger narrative that everything is great. This is how precarity becomes the status quo: We convince workers that poor conditions are normal; that rebelling against them is a symptom of generational entitlement; that free-market capitalism is what makes America great and this is free-market capitalism in action. It turns legitimate grievance, backed by a union or not, into “ungratefulness.” And it standardizes overwork and surveillance and stress and instability—the

Part of the problem is that these digital technologies, from cell phones to Apple Watches, from Instagram to Slack, encourage our worst habits. They stymie our best-laid plans for self-preservation. They ransack our free time. They make it increasingly impossible to do the things that actually ground us. They turn a run in the woods into an opportunity for self-optimization. They are the neediest and most selfish entity in every interaction I have with others. They compel us to frame experiences, as we are experiencing them, with future captions, and to conceive of travel as worthwhile only when documented for public consumption. They steal joy and solitude and leave only exhaustion and regret. I hate them and resent them and find it increasingly difficult to live without them.

What these technologies do best is remind us of what we’re not doing: who’s hanging out without us, who’s working more than us, what news we’re not reading. It refuses to allow our consciousness off the hook, in order to do the essential, protective, regenerative work of sublimating and repressing. Instead, it provides the opposite: a nonstop barrage of notifications and reminders and interactions. It brings every detail of our lives and others’ to the forefront in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. Of course we do more.

Like so many aspects of burnout, digital exhaustion isn’t unique to millennials. But our generation has a relationship with digital technologies that, at least in this moment, is uniquely aggravating. Our young adult lives were profoundly shaped by them, but we also have distinct memories of what life was like before their existence.

computers. Everything seemed to be changing, becoming easier or cheaper or simpler, but it still felt gradual. My original “smart” phone had a shit camera and took ten minutes to load a single email. I still listened to CDs in my apartment and in the car. I watched Netflix DVDs on my laptop. I blogged on WordPress. I knew people were out there with Blackberries, but that wasn’t yet my world. Slowly, and then seemingly all at once, all of that changed. The iPhone became available outside of AT&T. Netflix started streaming. So did Hulu and Amazon and HBO. Twitter took off and largely demolished the blogging world. Young millennials stopped using Facebook as their parents signed on. Instagram took off, and with it the mandate to aestheticize and package experiences for public consumption.

There’s a fair amount of shame affixed to this new reality: that those more connected to their phones are lesser people, or at least people with lesser wills. But the phone (or, more specifically, the apps on the phone) was engineered to first create a need, then fill that need in a way that would be impossible to re-create—all under the guise of productivity and efficiency. To succumb to its promises doesn’t mean you’re weak; it simply means you’re a human, frantically trying to complete everything required of you.

When people complain about “too much television,” this is part of what they’re complaining about: not that there’s an abundance of options, for all manner of tastes, available in the marketplace, but that the amount of consumption necessary to keep up in conversation just keeps growing. Episodes,

podcasts, even sporting events come to feel like checklists. It doesn’t matter if you actually like any of these things, or even actually consume them in entirety, so much as signal, on social media and in person, that you are the type of person who consumes them. And when you only have so much time to dedicate to leisure, there’s a constant demand to make the very best use your time, consuming the products and engaging in leisure that most effectively demonstrates your status as a cultural omnivore. You open (and then aspirationally save for later) dozens of articles recommended by others. You buy some yarn and a how-to-knit book, and never cast a stitch. You start a book, then wonder if you should be reading that other, cooler book. You dabble, and then you look over your shoulder—or scroll your Instagram—for something better.

As Currid-Halkett points out, this practice transcends actual income levels—adjunct professors with PhDs barely making ends meet often consume and broadcast the same aspirational class materials as Ivy-League-educated lawyers. It obscures the sort of economic stability a degree can actually provide, but provides a different sort of class salve: It’s okay if you’re hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, will never buy a home, and are terrified of what a medical catastrophe could bring, so long as you can still blend in with higher incomes in a social setting. In a profile of Michael Barbaro, the host of The Daily—the massively popular New York Times podcast, and a perfect example of aspirational consumption—producer Jenna Weiss-Berman pinpoints the show’s appeal: “You listen to The Daily and you’re better equipped to speak at a dinner party,” she explained. “And that’s all you really want.” We love to think that our cultural and leisure tastes are, to some extent, “natural”—I sign up for this triathlon, I watch this show, I download this podcast because I like it!—but every choice is muddled by our understanding of what it says about us, and the conversations from which we’ll ...

Hobbies are evacuated of ambition; any “purpose” is secondary. They’re pleasure for pleasure’s sake. But when your entire life has been geared toward building value for college, hobbies feel like foreign, almost obscene dreams: Every activity must be a means to an end. Growing up, my partner only read books for class, only sang when in choirs that would look good on his resume, only participated in rowing because the best colleges wanted a sport. It wasn’t until he hit his thirties and we moved to Montana that he finally found the space to try to figure out what he actually liked doing instead of what he should do to add value to himself. Today, he describes the process as “fraught with guilt and self-doubt.”

Back in 2000, the book Bowling Alone, written by the political scientist Robert Putnam, argued that American participation in groups, clubs, and organizations—religious, cultural, or otherwise—had precipitously dropped, as had the “social cohesion” that sprang from regular participation in them. Putnam’s findings were controversial and contested, and many argued that community had simply shifted locations: maybe no one was going to bowling league, but they were hanging out online (in AOL chatrooms, on message boards) instead. Twenty years later, and our burnout levels, like our political and cultural polarization, speak to the prescience of Putnam’s findings.

they found significant decreases in both familial and nonfamilial networks—but nonfamilial most of all. “Americans’ social networks are collapsing inward,” Putnam wrote in his 2015 follow-up, Our Kids, “and now consist of fewer, denser, more homogenous, more familiar (and less nonkin) ties.”13

chose to join a gaming group because there was a set meeting time every week, always at the same place. “Otherwise my friends and I only play like once a month,” she said, “because it just takes so much effort to find a time and place that works.” That’s what social infrastructure helps provide: a relief from endless planning and replanning.

The Lions, Eagles, Moose, or Elks Club meetings were like clockwork, and in a space—with parking!—that was always available. Same with church and Bible study, PEO and the Junior League, the NAACP and League of Women’s Voters. Their reliability was part of what made them easier to engage in.

It’s important to pause with that scenario—one that I’ve heard over and over, and that I’ve articulated myself. Being with our friends, the people who love and cherish us, is too unsettling to our schedules. But our schedules are our lives. And what are our lives without others?

We watch television, we smoke more weed and drink to force our bodies to relax, we elevate and celebrate introvert behavior with T-shirts that read SORRY I’M LATE / I’D RATHER BE AT HOME. We try to feel okay with the way things are. But what haunts me is the truth that what you do with your leisure time now, when it’s so rare and so overdetermined and so overladen with exhaustion, is not—at least not necessarily—what you would do if you had more of it. So many of our best intentions, our most curious and creative and compassionate selves, are right there, closer beneath the surface of our lives than we know. We simply need space, time, and rest to make them a reality.

If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?