Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

The pandemic didn’t create burnout. It just made it undeniable.

Maybe all we need to act on that feeling is an irrefutable pivot point: an opportunity not just for reflection, but to build a different design, a different way of life, from the rubble and clarity brought forth by this pandemic.

The overarching clarity offered by this pandemic is that it’s not any single generation that’s broken, or fucked, or failed. It’s the system itself.

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,”

It’s the sensation of dull exhaustion that, even with sleep and vacation, never really leaves.

It’s the knowledge that you’re just barely keeping your head above water, and even the slightest shift—a sickness, a busted car, a broken water heater—could sink you and your family.

It’s the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot that happens to have bodily funct...

burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.

And the promised security of adulthood never seems to arrive, no matter how hard we try to organize our lives, or tighten our already tight budgets.

there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.

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.

any easily implementable life hack or book promising to unfuck your life is just prolonging the problem.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

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

Its form of capital “must be renewed in each individual through fresh effort and commitment. In this class, no one escapes the requirements of self-discipline and self-directed labor; they are visited, in each generation, upon the young as they were upon the parents.”

risk sharing, be it in the form of robust funding for higher education or company-run pensions, was presumptuous, and indulgent, and unnecessary.

safety nets make people lazy, or ungrateful, or self-indulgent—and are thus, at their heart, un-American.

The risk shift also took the form of transferring the responsibility for training to the individual, rather than the employer.

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.

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

If you plan well and start saving when you first started working, theoretically you should be fine. But you might also end up living Social Security check to Social Security check, even after a lifetime of hard work.

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.

boomers retreated from the liberalism of the ’60s into “a meaner, more selfish outlook, hostile to the aspirations of those less fortunate.”20 They broke the “social contract” that, according to the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, had defined the postwar period, “and decided to look out for themselves: they invested more in their education and individual success, while deeming social protection less important.”

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

to “succeed,” as a millennial kid, at least according to middle-class societal standards, was to build yourself for burnout.

concerted cultivation

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.

She was preparing me for adult life, but specifically preparing me for middle class, professional, cultured adult life.

For all of the anxiety, “crimes against children” did not, in fact, spike in the early ’80s, and since the early ’90s, they’ve actually been in decline.

“In sum,” she wrote, “the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.”

“natural growth,” or the conscious or unconscious allotment of un structured time, which allows children to cultivate curiosity, independence, and learn to negotiate peer dynamics on their own.

“Risk management used to be a business practice,” Malcolm Harris writes in Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. “Now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.”

sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood.”

Middle class kids become mini-adults earlier and earlier—but as the rise of “adulting” rhetoric makes clear, they’re not necessarily prepared for its realities.

They’ve spent a ton of time with adults, and learned the external markings of performing adulthood, but lack the independence and strong sense of self that accompani...

Maya calls those tendencies—which she still practices, in slightly modified form—“insanely anal teacher’s pet behaviors,” but they could also be called preparation for the upwardly mobile workplace.

The laziest millennials I know are the ones who’ve been saved from the consequences, economic or otherwise, of every mistake they’ve made.

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 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?

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.”

“Downward mobility is not merely a matter of accepting a menial job, enduring the loss of stability, or witnessing with dismay the evaporation of one’s hold on material comfort; it is also a broken covenant,” she writes. “It is so profound a reversal of middle-class expectations that it calls into question the assumptions on which their lives have been predicated.”

But the preparation for college taught us a valuable, lingering lesson: how to orient our entire lives around the idea that hard work brings success and fulfillment, no matter how many times we’re confronted with proof to the contrary.

Like the machines we work with, our worth is measured in our ability to create value for those who employ us.

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.

Instead of raising kids, so many parents, consciously and subconsciously, began raising resumes.

the building of human capital was not overt, or even conscious.

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.