Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Statements like that convince workers—and millennials in particular, who’ve had no other experience of the workplace—that if things feels shitty, then they’ve only got themselves to blame. Maybe you are lazy. Maybe you should just work harder. Maybe work is constant drudgery for everyone. Maybe everyone makes do. Sure, your best friend is struggling, and your sister is struggling, and your coworkers are struggling, but that’s only anecdotal evidence against the larger narrative that everything is great.

A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with—the things you fill your life with—feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?

For many families, a supplemental income was a godsend. But that stability was offset by the shame of the husband no longer being able to uniquely provide for his family, and all other manner of fragile masculinity manifestations. And how do you make men feel better about their masculinity? You assure them that nothing, really, will change: A woman might be working in the office eight hours a day, but she’ll still be feminine and put together, and dinner will still be served at the same time, and the kids won’t even notice a thing. In other words, she’ll still be a full-time housewife—even if she’s also a full-time worker outside the home. Hence the “second shift,” a term popularized by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 1989 book of the same name, to describe the fact that these mothers were in fact pulling double shifts every day: one in the “formal” workplace, then another back at home.