Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

“an elite that is conscious of its status will defend that status, even if this means abandoning, in all but rhetoric, such stated values as democracy and fairness.”

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.

We post, therefore we are.

What if we don’t resign ourselves to working until we or the planet dies?

You can draw a crooked line between burnout, and the despair and existential crises that accompany it, and white nationalism, virulent online misogyny, and neofascism.