Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Lareau discerned a divide between parents who practiced what she called “concerted cultivation” and those, generally of lower-class status, who refused or didn’t have time to orient their lives entirely around children’s activities and future resume-building. 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 tenets of concerted cultivation will sound familiar, because they’re what have been represented, and tacitly agreed upon, as “good” parenting for the last three decades. The child’s schedule—beginning with naptimes and continuing through competitive dance, or music, or sports—takes precedence over the parent’s; the child’s well-being, and, more importantly, their future capacity for success, is paramount. Baby food should be homemade; toddler play should be enriching; private tutors should be enlisted if necessary.

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?

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 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.

As Amanda Mull pointed out in the Atlantic, that desperation took the form of the cool job ad, and spending more and more money on perfecting that ad (instead of, say, offering candidates better money, benefits, or flexibility1). According to Indeed.com, between 2006 and 2013 there was a 2505 percent increase in jobs described using the words “ninja”; a 810 percent increase in “rock star,” and a 67 percent increase in “Jedi.”

When a group of “passionate” workers do advocate for better pay and working conditions—by, say, joining a union—their devotion to their vocation is often called into question. (The exception are occupations that have been unionized for decades, like many firefighters and police officers.) 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.

Some historians trace the American cult of overwork to the hiring practices of post–World War II defense industries in the Santa Clara Valley of California. During the 1950s, these companies began recruiting scientists who were, as Sara Martin puts it in her 2012 history of overwork, “single-minded, socially awkward, emotionally detached, and blessed (or cursed) with a singular, unique, laser-like focus on some particular area of obsessive interest.”4

The very idea of a “calling” stems from the early precepts of Protestantism, and the notion that every man can and should find a job through which they can best serve God. American Calvinists interpreted dedication to one’s calling—and the wealth and success that followed—as evidence of one’s status as elect. This interpretation was conducive to capitalism, the cultural theorist Max Weber argues, as it encouraged every worker to see their labor not just as broadly meaningful, but worthwhile, even sacred.

“A lot of people assume Amazon or Walmart killed Toys “R” Us, but it was selling massive numbers of toys until the very end,” the anti-monopoly activist Matt Stoller writes. “What destroyed the company were financiers, and public policies that allowed the divorcing of ownership from responsibility.”

In 2019, a study compiled by six progressive nonprofits found that private equity firms had been responsible for over 1.3 million job losses over the last decade. At least one million jobs were later added back to the economy in some capacity, but that doesn’t negate the effect of layoffs, loss of benefits and promised pensions, and overall disruption, which, according to the study, disproportionally affected women and people of color.

Companies looking to cut labor costs can rely on temps, outsource to subcontractors, kill a union—but they can also outsource by sending labor overseas, especially to countries where labor is cheap, because regulation and other forms of labor laws are slight, nonexistent, or unenforced. That’s what Apple does—and why it directly employees only 63,000 of the 750,000 workers who manufacture, assemble, and sell Apple products across the world.21 Apple announced that trajectory back in 1993, with the publication of an essay entitled “The Changed Nature of Workers and Work” in the company magazine.

Over the last twenty years, the office with the good snacks and free lunch has become a cultural punchline: a way to highlight the absurdity of startup culture, or just the ridiculous perks millennials demand. But 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.

In 1926, increased mechanization and automation (and resultant productivity) meant that Henry Ford could announce a five-day workweek. In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would work only fifteen hours a week.

Following publication of Bowling Alone, several of Putnam’s critics embarked on their own research, looking to either counter or confirm Putnam’s claims. In 2011, they found significant decreases in both familial and nonfamilial networks—but nonfamilial most of all. “Americans’ social networks are collapsing inward,” Putnam wrote in his 2015 follow-up, Our Kids, “and now consist of fewer, denser, more homogenous, more familiar (and less nonkin) ties.”

That’s what social infrastructure helps provide: a relief from endless planning and replanning. The Lions, Eagles, Moose, or Elks Club meetings were like clockwork, and in a space—with parking!—that was always available. Same with church and Bible study, PEO and the Junior League, the NAACP and League of Women’s Voters. Their reliability was part of what made them easier to engage in.

It’s important to pause with that scenario—one that I’ve heard over and over, and that I’ve articulated myself. Being with our friends, the people who love and cherish us, is too unsettling to our schedules. But our schedules are our lives. And what are our lives without others?

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?

I can’t fix you when it’s society that’s broken you. Instead, I’ve tried to provide a lens for you to see yourself and the world around you clearly.