Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.

Left to its own devices, capitalism is not benevolent. That’s hard for many Americans to hear or think about, having been raised to adulate capitalism, but the fact remains: If the goal is always growth at any cost, then employees, like machine parts, are exploitable, as long as the productivity continues to go up and the profit margins continue to rise.

To be “employed” today does not mean you have a good job, or a stable job, or a job that pays well enough to bring a family over the poverty line. There’s a startling disconnect between the ostensible health of the economy and the mental and physical health of those who power it.

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 very building blocks of burnout.

free food isn’t just a benefit. It’s a strategy to incentivize overwork, and the practice, along with so many other tenets of overwork, came directly from the culture of Wall Street.

The ideology of overwork has become so pernicious, so pervasive, that we attribute its conditions to our own failures, our own ignorance of the right life hack that will suddenly make everything easier. That’s why books like Grit and Unf*ck Yourself and other titles with asterisks to blunt the profanity and the frustration have become such massive bestsellers: They suggest that the fix is right there, within our grasp. Because the problem, these books suggest, isn’t the current economic system, or the companies that exploit and profit from it. It’s us.

The willingness of workers to settle for these job conditions helped foster an even deeper fissuring of the workplace: first, by normalizing the low standards of the freelance economy; second, by “redefining” what it meant to be “employed.”

From the outside, freelancing seems like a dream: You work when you want to work; you’re ostensibly in control of your own destiny. But if you’re a freelancer, you’re familiar with the dark side of these “benefits.” The “freedom to set your own hours” also means the “freedom to pay for your own healthcare.”

Freelancing also means no employer-facilitated 401k, no employee match, and no subsidized or concerted means, other than the portion of your freelance checks that go to Social Security every month, to save for retirement. It often means hiring an accountant to deal with labyrinthian tax structures, and getting paid a flat fee for the end product or service, regardless of how many hours you put into it. It means complete independence, which in the current capitalist marketplace is another way of saying it means complete insecurity.

The dynamics and overarching philosophy of Silicon Valley create the perfect conditions for fissured workplaces.

Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them. Any time that you do take off is tinged with regret or anxiousness that you could be working.

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.

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. When we fail to do so, we don’t blame the broken tools. We blame ourselves. 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 impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves.

a word I heard over and over again as millennials told me about their relationship to leisure: It’s broken.

Instead of being easier on ourselves as parents, given all of shifts in expectations at work, and our increasingly fraught class position, and the massive amounts of debt we’ve incurred in order to maintain that class position—we allowed expectations to go up. More parenting options hasn’t been liberating; it’s become nauseatingly claustrophobic.

Middle-class parents can be outrageously (if subconsciously) snobby—but their fear of another family’s “poor” parenting habits is just another version of that same old class anxiety and instability. When a parent attempts to make connections with the “right” sort of families, what they’re really trying to do is build an insurance policy that their kid will maintain those bourgeois connections, habits, and familiarity for the rest of their lives. Within this logic, spending time with the “wrong” kind of family is like exposure to a contagion, threatening to forever infect a child with the disease of downward mobility.

Parenting is never going to be free of worry, or comparison, or stress. But there can be significantly less of all of those things. To make that happen, we have to admit that it’s not enough to have progressive ideals about parenting. Our current iteration of patriarchal capitalism destroys those ideals, no matter how earnest or deeply held, and replaces them with their regressive opposite: dramatically unequal distribution of domestic labor, generalized undervaluing of women’s labor, and jobs engineered to favor those unburdened with primary childcare responsibilities.

here’s what we can do. We can unite in our resistance to the way things are. We can refuse to blame ourselves for wide-scale societal failures, but also understand how fear of losing one’s already tenuous standing makes us overly protective of the privileges we do have. We can recognize that it’s not enough to try to make things better for ourselves. We have to make things better for everyone. Which is why actual substantive change has to come from the public sector—and we must vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for it tirelessly.

We don’t have to value ourselves and others by the amount of work that we do. We don’t have to resent our parents or grandparents for having it easier than us. We don’t have to submit to the idea that racism or sexism will be with us forever.

Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We’re a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.