Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

The overarching goal was to make yourself the most interesting, marketable version of yourself—even if just on paper.

If a situation presents a potential “risk” to overall resume value—drinking, having too many sleepovers, reporting a teacher for inappropriate behavior, even having sex—it should be avoided at all costs.

And then there’s the creeping disillusionment that none of it really mattered, not then, and not now.

none of us really learned how to think,”

“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 many millennials have internalized the idea that any job that does not require college is somehow inferior—and ended up overeducated, paying off loans for credentials they didn’t necessarily need.

It was this amorphous blob of an ambition, something to strive for without a map.”

“I had no idea what I was doing,” Ann told me. “No one in my family did. High school, which had pushed us to go to college so hard, did no real prep whatsoever.

how exhausted she is with paying for a mistake that was sold to her as a solution.

If a child is reared as capital, with the implicit goal of creating a “valuable” asset that will make enough money to obtain or sustain the parents’ middle class status, it would make sense that they have internalized that a high salary is the only thing that actually matters about a job.

The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon—and,

By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

But “lovable” jobs, at least in this moment, are visible jobs, jobs that add social and cultural cache, jobs where you work for yourself or with little direct supervision.

the rhetoric of “Do what you love” makes asking to be valued seem like the equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct.

Trying to find, cultivate, and keep your dream job, then, means eschewing solidarity for more work.

And a culture of overwork does not mean better work, or more productive work—it just means more time at work, which becomes a stand-in for devotion.

“hope labor”: “un- or under-compensated work, often performed in exchange for experience and exposure in hopes that future work will follow.”

The promise of hope labor is that if you can just make it in the door, it doesn’t matter how you or other hope laborers are treated. What matters is that there’s a chance that you’ll end up doing what you love, however poorly paid you will be.

academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex.

That’s what happens when we don’t talk about work as work, but as pursuing a passion. It makes quitting a job that relentlessly exploited you feel like giving up on yourself, instead of what it really is: advocating, for the first time in a long time, for your own needs.

The fetishization of lovable work means that plain old jobs—non-ninja, non-Jedi jobs that might not be “cool” but that nonetheless offer magical powers like “stability” and “benefits”—come to feel undesirable.

now her definition of a good job is “whatever pays the most and allows me to disconnect after five p.m.”

“Central to this myth of work-as-love is the notion that virtue (moral righteousness of character) and capital (money) are two sides of the same coin,” Tokumitsu explains. “Where there is wealth, there is hard work, and industriousness, and the individualistic dash of ingenuity that makes it possible.”

It isn’t worth it. I learned that every single person is expendable. None of it is fair or based on passion or merit. I don’t have the bandwidth to play that game.”

But as boomers were cultivating and optimizing their children for work, they were also further disassembling the sort of societal, economic, and workplace protections that could have made that life possible.

we believed that if opportunities didn’t arise, it was a personal problem. We acknowledged how competitive the market was, how much lower we’d set our standards, but we were also certain that if we just worked hard enough, we’d triumph—or

years. For many, including myself, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed about it: I settled for so little because I was certain that with enough hard work, things would be different.

the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.

“Those in the precariat have lives dominated by insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation,” Standing writes. “They are denizens rather than citizens, losing cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights built up over generations. Most importantly, the precariat is the first class in history expected to labour and work at a lower level than the schooling it typically requires. In an ever more unequal society, its relative deprivation is severe.”

“salariat”—the class of workers who are salaried, have agency within their jobs, and report feeling that their opinion counts within the company. But every day, the salariat continues its “drift,” as Standing puts it, into the precariat: full-time workers are laid off and replaced by independent contractors; the new “innovative” tech companies refuse to even categorize the bulk of their workforce as employees.

For companies attempting to downsize and shed labor costs, temps were cherished as “flexible,” but what they really were was disposable.

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.

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.

Companies used to employ the people who made work possible at all levels. The ramifications of this arrangement were huge: If you worked as a janitor at, say, 3M, you were entitled to the same benefits as my Granddad, who worked there as an accountant. Not the same salary—but the same pension structure, the same healthcare, the same stability.

But within what David Weil calls the “fissured workplace,” companies have become so devoted to their “core competencies” and brand maintenance that they’ve largely shed the responsibilities that accompany being a direct employer.

“The outsourcing trend killed those foot-in-door career paths.”

Labor law has not been updated to protect the new, highly fissured workplace in which there’s no recourse for the “sloughed” unionized employee.

Left to its own devices, capitalism is not benevolent.

Before the great risk shift, that prosperity trickled down to a huge percentage of the country through employee paychecks and benefits. Now the only way to share in that prosperity is to own stock.

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.

As more and more ex-consultants spread throughout corporate America, the employee-sloughing, core-competency-preserving, short-term-profits-at-all-costs ideology became commonplace.

Even though I know that sleep actually increases productivity, what I understand is that it decreases available working hours.

We might say we hate the idea of turning into them, but for many millennials, we robotize ourselves willingly in hopes of gaining that elusive stability we so desperately crave.

In sleep mode, you’re never actually off; you’re just waiting to be turned back on again.

“At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.”

Unlike the private offices that were once de rigeur, for most, open offices make actually completing work incredibly difficult, subject to constant interruptions or, if you put on headphones, suggestions that you’re a cold bitch—not much of a team player.

When there are so few options for stable employment, you don’t get to decide whether or not you want to be surveilled. You just figure out how to manage the suffering it creates.

close monitoring by supervisors “makes it difficult for us to think independently and act proactively” and “nearly impossible for us to make meaning of our work.”

In practice, though, it’s one more incursion of the workplace into the personal, and a normalization of a deeply dystopian idea: that a good worker is a worker who permits their company to monitor their movements.