Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Burnout is when you hit the wall—but instead of collapsing, or taking a rest, you scale the wall, and just keep going.

For many millennials, articles like Lowrey’s feel less like a revelation than a confirmation: Yes, we’re screwed, but we’ve known that we’re screwed for years. Our generation has been indelibly shaped by precarity. We don’t expect jobs to last, or the companies that provide them, to last. So many of us live under storms of debt threatening to swallow us up at any moment.

For millions of people and communities in the United States and across the world, precarity has been a way of life for decades. To live in poverty, or to live as a refugee, is to be conditioned to it. The difference, then, is that 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.

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.

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.

There’s a pervasive feeling that despite some of the legitimate wonders of modern society, our potential has been capped. And yet we strive, because we know nothing else. For millennials, burnout is foundational: the best way to describe who we’ve been raised to be, how we interact with and think about the world, and our everyday experience thereof. And it isn’t an isolated experience. It’s our base temperature.

Before we can start fighting what is very much a structural battle, we first need to understand it as such. That might seem intimidating, but any easily implementable life hack or book promising to unfuck your life is just prolonging the problem. The only way to move forward is to create a vocabulary and a framework that allows us to see ourselves—and the systems that have contributed to our burnout—clearly.

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

“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.”

Boomers were anxious and overworked and deeply resentful of the critiques levied at them. The problem, and why it’s often hard to think of them charitably, is their inability to tap that experience in order to empathize with their own children’s generation.

The unique thing about the middle class, after all, is that middle-class-ness must be reproduced, reclaimed, with each generation.

the responsibility for the vast majority of training now falls on the worker—and even then is no assurance of a job. This shift happened so gradually that it’s hard to see how profound a change it is, and how much student debt has resulted from it, but it started, however quietly, as boomers came of age.

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.

no one wants to lose any of the hard-won benefits of that work. Which helps explain the popularity of the Personal Responsibility Crusade amongst both boomers and their parents: Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them.

The best way to the collective good, according to Reaganism, was through eagle-eyed focus on cultivation of me and mine, with little thought of how the reverberations of those actions would affect their children and grandchildren in the years to come.

Tracing the development of the student protest movement, the backlash against it, and the anxiety over the newly expanded and newly threatened stability of the middle class, she argues that boomers retreated from the liberalism of the ’60s into “a meaner, more selfish outlook, hostile to the aspirations of those less fortunate.”

“Talking about yuppies was a means to make sense of the eclipse of manufacturing and the rise of the financial, professional, and service industries,” Gottlieb explains. “Yuppies were a way to signify the growing inequality between the college-educated upper middle class and those who were being left behind.”

Navigating a baseline nervousness about your class position, and struggling to find a job that will allow you to try and maintain it—that was the boomer’s iteration of what we now know as burnout. They didn’t have cell phones or massive piles of student debt to exacerbate it, but they did have the fundamental unease, the psychological toll of dealing with everyday precarity.

Surrounded by perceived threats and growing uncertainty, middle-class boomers doubled down on what they could try to control: their children.

It’s not as if these lower-class parents were “bad” parents—it’s just that the skills they cultivated in their children, including independence and imagination, are not the ones valued by the bourgeois workplace.

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.

Every part of a child’s life, in other words, can be optimized to better prepare them for their eventual entry into the working world. They become mini-adults, with the attendant anxiety and expectations, years before adulthood hits.

Concerted cultivation is, at its heart, a middle-class practice. But over the last thirty years, its ideals have transcended class lines, becoming the foundation of “good parenting,” especially for those who’d fallen, or were anxious about falling, out of the middle class.

The anxiety over “stranger danger” was, in many ways, a displacement of other anxieties about the shifting understanding of family, of the increase in working mothers, of a weakening of community and the cohesion that accompanied it.

So many millennials end up defining themselves exclusively by their ability to work hard, and succeed, and play it safe—instead of their actual personal tastes, or their willingness to take risks, or experiment and even fail.

Boomer parents were worried about all the things parents are always worried about. But they were also deeply anxious about creating, sustaining, or “passing down” middle-class status amidst a period of widespread downward mobility—priming a generation of children to work, no matter the cost, until they achieved it.

in the world,” whether in academia, medicine, or the law, and the reality of the post-recession economy, is a major contributing factor to millennial burnout: If working hard to achieve those jobs can’t offer security, what can?

that’s the thing about the upper middle class: They rarely talk about money, at least not the precariousness of money. Not with each other, and rarely with their children. One of the behaviors of middle-class-ness, after all, is avoiding talking about the crude specifics of how it’s maintained—or masking them in the simple rhetoric of “hard work.”

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.

When one’s value depends on the capacity to work, people who are disabled or elderly, people who cannot labor full-time or who provide care in ways that aren’t paid at all or valued as highly—all become “less than” in the larger societal equation.

To be valuable in American society is to be able to work. Historically, more work, more toil, more commitment, more loyalty, more grit—all of that could make you more valuable. That’s the very foundation of the American Dream.

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.

the overarching narrative, internalized amongst these middle-class and middle-class–aspirational teens, was the same: Optimize yourself into a college-application robot.

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 d...

The desirability of “lovable” jobs is part of what makes them so unsustainable: So many people are competing for so few positions that compensation standards can be continuously lowered with little effect.

That’s the logic of “Do what you love” in action. Of course, no worker asks their employer to value them less, but the rhetoric of “Do what you love” makes asking to be valued seem like the equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct.

Advocating for a union means identifying oneself first and foremost as a laborer, in solidarity with other laborers. It promotes a sort of class consciousness that so many employers have worked to negate, instead reframing “jobs” as “passions” and “workplaces” as “family.” And God forbid you talk about money with family.

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.

When someone says millennials are lazy, I want to ask them: Which millennials? When someone says we’re entitled, I do ask them: Who taught us we should be able to do work that we love? We were told that college would be the way to a middle-class job. That wasn’t true. We were told that passion would eventually lead to profit, or at least a sustainable job where we were valued. That also wasn’t true.

adjuncts, independent contractors, freelancers, gig employees, or any other sort of “contingent” laborer make up a new, ever-expanding societal classification: the precariat.

As the theorist Guy Standing points out, the working class, at least how it’s remembered, had “long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionization and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features they were familiar with.”1 The precariat has almost none of those things.

the “salariat”—the class of workers who are salaried, have agency within their jobs, and report feeling that their opinion counts within the company.

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.

Because consultants had no investment in the firms themselves, their advice was in line with the aims of unfettered capitalism: How can companies make the most money, with the biggest profit margins, over the least amount of time? “The corporation, under the consultants’ helm, was no longer an enduring venture,” Hyman writes. “It became a momentary assemblage whose value was not in tomorrow’s progress but in today’s stock price.”

The logic behind downsizing, reorganizations, and sloughing full-time employees was ultimately straightforward: Trimming the company meant short-term profits; short term profits meant higher stock prices and satisfied stockholders; satisfied stockholders meant the CEO and board members got to keep their jobs, even as the remaining non-temp, non-outsourced workers at the company were given less and less in terms of benefits and pay increases.

It’s not that profits in and of themselves are morally bad. But the logic of the current market is that a refusal to increase profits, year after year, is a failure. A steady profit, or even a break-even proposition that yields nonfinancial dividends to a community, has no value to stockholders. 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.