Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.