Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Stress disintegrates the body, and can make it unsuitable for any other type of work. A stressful job isn’t just a route to burnout. It also traps you, creating a situation in which you can see no option other than to keep doing it.

According to one study, nearly all of the jobs “added” to the economy between 2005 and 2015 were “contingent” or “alternative” in some way.

Like a typical millennial, I was chuffed that they’d even publish them. I wanted an audience for my passion far more than I wanted to be paid.

When we look back on the period following the Great Recession, it will be remembered not as a time of great innovation, but of great exploitation, when tech companies reached “unicorn” status (valued over $1 billion) on the backs of employees they refused to even deign to label, let alone respect, as such.

In external messaging, Uber’s posture toward these men and women remained steady: The drivers were, in fact, a sort of customer. The app merely connected one set of customers, in need of rides, with another set of customers, willing to provide it.

The gig economy isn’t replacing the traditional economy. It’s propping it up in a way that convinces people it’s not broken.

assignment. In today’s economy, going freelance means internalizing the fact that you could and should always be working more.

Just as the work of teachers or mothers is devalued (or unvalued), jobs within the sharing economy aren’t figured as jobs at all—they’re attempts to monetize your hobby, to have fun conversations while driving around the city, to invite people into your home.

More and more freelancers, gig economy laborers, and temps are realizing that flexibility is meaningless without stability to accompany it.

Shitty work conditions produce burnout, but burnout—and the resultant inability, either through lack of energy or lack of resources, to resist exploitation—helps keep work shitty.

What these technologies do best is remind us of what we’re not doing: who’s hanging out without us, who’s working more than us, what news we’re not reading.

our generation has a relationship with digital technologies that, at least in this moment, is uniquely aggravating. Our young adult lives were profoundly shaped by them, but we also have distinct memories of what life was like before their existence.

why an object with services that we hate is engineered to keep making us feel like crap. In short: It makes money.

It’s an economy based on taking up residency in the interstitial moments of our lives but also through subtle, repeated disruption of the main events—so much so that Netflix’s CEO famously joked that the company’s main competitor is sleep.

It doesn’t matter if there’s always something new on the home screen each time we pick it up. What matters is that sometimes there’s something new and worth our time.

These days, “pull to refresh” isn’t really necessary—there’s technology that could automatically refresh your app—but it functions as a sort of slot machine lever, keeping the user engaged far beyond when they’d normally have clicked out of the app.

But without your attention—your repeated, compulsive attention—these apps would become worthless. Or, at the very least, far less valuable.

our reliance on our phones is a net loss: a loss of privacy, of attention, of autonomy. The winners are the companies that have so effectively exploited our drive for convenience, over and over again, for profit.

a shared delusion: that with my phone, I can multitask like a motherfucker, and be all things to everyone, including myself.

the forms of the internet that are particularly propellent for burnout: 1) millennial-oriented social media; 2) the news; 3) technologies that spread work into what remains of our nonwork lives.

The Instagram feed becomes a constant, low-key lecture on the ways in which you haven’t figured your shit out.

The millennial dream depicted on Instagram isn’t just desirable—it’s balanced, satisfied, and unaffiliated with burnout.

when we can’t find the satisfaction we’ve been told we should receive from a good, “fulfilling” job and a balanced personal life, the best way to convince ourselves is to illustrate it for others.

But there’s a reason I sometimes find myself scrolling through my own account as I fight that before-sleep anxiety: When I don’t feel connected to myself or my life, Instagram reminds me of who I’ve decided I am.

There is no “off the clock” when every hour is an opportunity for content generation, facilitated by smartphones that make every moment capturable and brandable.

Instagram provides such low-effort distraction, and is so effective in posturing as actual leisure, that we find ourselves there when we’d rather be elsewhere—deep in a book, talking with a friend, taking a walk, staring into space.

That’s how social media robs of us of the moments that could counterbalance our burnout. It distances us from actual experiences as we obsess over documenting them.

I want to never think of Instagram again, yet feel a deep mournfulness for what I’d lose if I were to abandon it.

it’s become so intertwined with my performance of self that I fear there’s no self without it.

“Everything might seem so normal,” she wrote, “then you unlock your phone and—bam—everything gets LOUD again.

the compulsive, serialized aspect of the contemporary news cycle, but also the constant frustration at never actually wrapping up the story.

dopamine makes “everything look significant”:

it all feels equally, desperately important to understand.

In practice, the Trump-directed news cycle has all the notes of a horribly plotted film: narrative threads continually dead end; punchlines fail to land or arrive at all; characters don’t develop and their actions have no consequences. It’s impossible to tell which plot points need to be remembered and which ones are meaningless. And, worst of all, there’s never any closure or catharsis. There are cliffhangers from week to week like a bad soap opera, but you never figure out what’s really going on, what’s really going to happen, who’ll be held responsible.

Consuming news makes it feel like you’re doing something, even if it’s just bearing witness.

bearing witness takes a toll—especially when the news is structured to emotionally aggravate more than educate.

it can provide a false illusion of p...

The world becomes work.

But all that digitally enabled flexibility really means digitally enabling more work—with fewer boundaries.

I work very hard to produce evidence that I’m constantly doing work instead of, well, actually doing work.

We’re performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve our job. Justifying to ourselves that writing for the internet is a vocation that deserves steady payment.

and and and and.

Deep down, millennials know the primary exacerbator of burnout isn’t really email, or Instagram, or a constant stream of news alerts. It’s the continuous failure to reach the impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves.

Confronted with generalized low work expectations, I don’t know what to do with myself. I feel itchy, unsettled—unable to give myself permission to work less, or even not work at all.

For millennials who’ve internalized the burnout mentality—that more work is always better, and that all time can and should be used to optimize oneself or one’s performance—“leisure” time is often fraught and rarely restful.

Part of our problem is that we work more. But the other problem is that the hours when we’re not technically working never feel free from optimization—either of the body, the mind, or one’s social status.

“Doctors can always be doctors, lawyers can always be lawyers, but I’ve made a living as part of this creative class, and I don’t know what that looks like in fifteen, thirty, fifty years.”

Since 1970, there’d been a steady, year-after-year increase in the amount of work Americans performed, and a dramatic decrease in average leisure time: down to just 16.5 hours a week.

The problem with this attitude is that working all the time doesn’t mean producing all the time, but it nonetheless creates a self-satisfying fiction of “productivity.”

“Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.”