Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

It wouldn’t matter how hard you worked or for how long, how much you devoted yourself to your job, how much you cared. You’d find yourself back in that lonely, panicky place, wondering all over again how the road map set out for you—promising that if you do this, and you’ll arrive at this—could’ve proven so very wrong.

Few millennials are surprised. We don’t expect jobs, 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.

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.

All of these high-effort, low-gratification tasks seemed equally impossible.

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being. Adulting therefore becomes a verb.”

Every day, we all have a list of things that need to get done, places where our mental energy must be allocated first. But that energy is finite, and when you keep trying to pretend that it isn’t—that’s when burnout arrives.

The truth was, all of those tasks would take away from what had become my ultimate task, and the task of so many other millennials: working all the time. Where had I learned to work all the time? School. Why did I work all the time? Because I was terrified of not getting a job. Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of precariousness—that all that I’d worked for could just disappear—or reconcile it with an idea that had surrounded me since I was a child: that if I just worked hard enough, everything would pan out.

“The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”

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.

Only 39 percent of millennials have a college degree.

Tiana Clark, who wrote a piece on the specifics of Black burnout in response to my own: “No matter the movement or era,” she wrote, “being burned out has been the steady state of black people in this country for hundreds of years.”

remember the first-generation Chinese immigrant who messaged me after the piece, telling me that she never heard the words “anxiety” or “depression” in her home growing up. “I heard the terms 吃苦(‘eating bitterness’) and性情(‘heart feeling’) as both my parents felt the depression that is common for newcomers to Canada, struggling to find stable work in a society that places white folks above all others,” she explained.

This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.

It could mean an hourly wage high enough to support a middle-class lifestyle, what was colloquially known as the “family wage.”

Or, as stipulated by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, getting paid overtime if your workweek exceeded forty-four hours, which helped prevent overwork, simply because it was more expensive for the company.

But when these boomers began to protest segregation, or patriarchal norms, or American engagement in Vietnam, or even just the perceived conformity of the suburban existence, they were labeled as ungrateful and spoiled.

The unique thing about the middle class, after all, is that middle-class-ness must be reproduced, reclaimed, with each generation. “In other classes, membership is transmitted by simple inheritance,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. “If you are born into the upper class, you can expect to remain there for life. Sadly, too, most of those born into the lower classes can expect to remain where they started out.”

Unemployment hit 8.5 percent in 1975, as American jobs began their slow migration overseas, where corporations could pay less (and avoid unions) to manufacture similar products.

In The Great Risk Shift, Hacker maps the concurrent development of the “Personal Responsibility Crusade,” or the increasingly popular idea, articulated in various forms across culture and society, evident in the tax code and reigning economic thought, that “government should get out of the way and let people succeed or fail on their own.”

In 1980, 46 percent of private-sector workers were covered by a pension plan. In 2019, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

Between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, the number of English majors declined by nearly 50 percent, as did those majoring in social sciences. During the same period, business majors doubled.

“As an adult, I’ve realized I get stressed when I’m not doing something,” Caitlin says. “I feel guilty just relaxing.

The stereotype of the oversurveilled, overprotected kid is that they grow up to be weak and lazy. But in my experience,

the millennial trait of “laziness” has a lot more to do with economic security—either the family’s actual security, or total insulation from precarity as a child or in adulthood.

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.

“The adage ‘You will have to work twice as hard for half of the results’ really resonated with me,”

As we’ll see, the disconnect between the seemingly “most secure jobs 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?

But 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.

Divorced women were some of the most affected—if understudied—by this trend. Pre-divorce, the men in these families had been the primary or only breadwinner. Post-divorce, mothers “made do” with 29 to 39 percent of the income they had before.

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.

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.

In 1940, just 4 percent of American women aged twenty-five or older had bachelor’s degrees, and just 5.9 percent of men.2 Only 14 percent of the population had completed high school. (In 2018, 90.2 percent of the population over age twenty-five had completed high school, while 45.4 percent has an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.)

In Kids These Days, Harris points out how the obsession with building value—that is, building resumes—intersected with the tenets of concerted cultivation. Pickup games, for example, became organized, year-round league sports—a potential line, somewhere down the road, on a resume.

Put differently: What you’re doing when practicing your times tables or taking a standardized test or writing an essay isn’t learning, but preparing yourself to work. This is an incredibly utilitarian view of education, implying that the ultimate goal of the system is to mold us into efficient workers, as opposed to preparing us to think, or to be good citizens. And this utilitarian view matches how our current educational system operates, in which success hinges on a student’s ability to adhere to a narrow understanding of “successful” behaviors: getting good grades, performing well on standardized testing, behaving “appropriately” and deferentially toward teachers, establishing “normal” social bonds with peers, and being willing to participate in physical education.

“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 rathe...

“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.

But as a college education became more and more standardized through the ’80s and ’90s, employers needed new means of differentiation and distinction. In practice, this means even more reliance on the perceived prestige of a college—but also a newfound demand for graduate degrees. It’s a classic case of a time-worn phenomenon:

Do What You Love and You’ll Still Work Every Day for the Rest of Your Life

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.