Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

The ever-broadening class divide isn’t just between the haves and the have-nots, or the productive and those facilitating their productiveness, but those who can protect a modicum of hours devoted to sleep and those who cannot.

In The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that a subsection of Americans have become increasingly concerned with expressing their class position through “cultural signifiers that convey their acquisition of knowledge and value system.”10 In other words, talking about, Instagramming, and otherwise broadcasting engagement with the sort of leisure activities, media products, and purchases that underline “elite” status.

It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon. You have to make sure others know that you are the type of person who makes that particular sort of productive, self-edifying, optimized use of your leisure time.

To be cultured is to be culturally omnivorous, no matter how much time it takes.

When people complain about “too much television,” this is part of what they’re complaining about: not that there’s an abundance of options, for all manner of tastes, available in the marketplace, but that the amount of consumption necessary to keep up in conversation just keeps growing.

Episodes, podcasts, even sporting events come to feel...

It doesn’t matter if you actually like any of these things, or even actually consume them in entirety, so much as signal, on social media and in person, that y...

It’s not enough just to hang out, after all: There has to be a purpose. The popularity of the book club isn’t just about people reading more. It’s also about needing a productive affixation to the simple desire to be with other people.

when this type of cultural consumption becomes the only way to buy a ticket into your aspirational class, it feels less like a choice, and more of an obligation: a form of unpaid labor.

Hobbies are evacuated of ambition; any “purpose” is secondary. They’re pleasure for pleasure’s sake. But when your entire life has been geared toward building value for college, hobbies feel like foreign, almost obscene dreams: Every activity must be a means to an end.

when the activity becomes a means to an end—whether profit or perfection or entrance into school—it loses its essential, and essentially restorative, quality.

we’re too tired to actually rest and restore ourselves.

But first and foremost, it’s an outgrowth of the fact that American society is still arranged as if every family has a caretaker who stays home, even as fewer and fewer families are arranged that way.

She is “free” to be pressured to be everything to everyone at all times, save herself.

patriarchy cloaked in the deceptive language of equality and progress.

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.

the societally compelled rhythms of a child’s day and year are incompatible with the rhythms of most parents’ working life.

the new standard, enforced by teachers and principals and parents and their peers, is that if a parent can’t alter their schedule in order to pick up and supervise their child after school, the understanding is that they’ll pay someone else, or some service, to do it for them.

More work outside of the home begat more work at home.

It’s not that poor parents don’t know what good parenting looks like. It’s that various forces make it unavailable to them.

The tacit agreement: Women could enter the workplace, but only if they fulfilled every other societal expectation. They could be ambitious, but still had to be nice; powerful, but still hot; hardworking, but still a good cook; multitasking, but still a conscientious housekeeper; a leader, but still feminine; a workaholic, but still a devoted parent.

To be clear, many of these expectations were foisted on boomer moms as well—but there was less of an expectation to perform and package all of those qualities online for mass consumption.

That’s one of the most noxious elements of patriarchal control: It turns the very women it subjugates into the primary enforcers of its ideology.

Better to cling to the torch of martyrdom with a white-knuckled death grip.”

Busy-ness, in other words, as a very certain sort of class.

It’s the millennial way: If the system is rigged against you, just try harder.

one of the most curious stats of the last forty years: Women with jobs spend just as much time parenting as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

The most bullshit thing is the constant never-enoughness.”

Men are not “naturally” bad at multitasking, for example. Men are conditioned not to have to be multitaskers; women are conditioned to be multitaskers. “Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective—what’s the power angle on this—often explains things,” the neuroscientist Lise Eliot tells Lockman. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.”

The mental load, as the French cartoonist Emma describes, is carried by the person in the family (almost always a woman) who takes on a role akin to “household management project leader.”

The load is so heavy, made more so by the fact that no matter how many tasks you finish, it never seems to get any lighter.

‘You should have asked’ phenomenon,”

“Men find ways of being so difficult that it’s not worth it,” the sociologist Lisa Wade explains.21 So many women reconcile themselves to accept the inequality.

“Only when one feels more deprived than other members of her reference group will she feel entitled to adamant protest.”

It’s not a question of whether fathers deserve leisure time; it’s that many regard that leisure time as a “right”—even as a mother’s leisure time dwindles to nothing.

Poor parents don’t “arrive” at burnout. They’ve never left it.

To fall in class status is to reverse the hard-earned upward mobility of your grandparents, your parents, or yourself. It feels abjectly un-American.

The transformation from “going to play” to “playdate” formalizes what was once a casual component of a child’s life. It moves from child directed (“I’m gonna go play over at Emily’s house”) to parent appointed, with expectations of parent-guided crafts, snacks, and socialization.

In this way, Mose argues, the playdate becomes a primary site of elite social class “reproduction”—even in a place as economically diverse as New York City.

Within this logic, spending time with the “wrong” kind of family is like exposure to a contagion, threatening to forever infect a child with the disease of downward mobility.

It’s labor, in other words, to prove to bourgeois white parents that your kid is worthy to associate with theirs.

On Big Little Lies—a show ostensibly about a murder, but actually about class maintenance—when

Little kids, after all, just think they’re going to a party—not a thinly veiled demonstration of class insecurity that makes every adult involved quietly hate themselves.

Relief from parenting burnout shouldn’t be a middle-class privilege.

Change the fundamental arrangement in which parenting occurs, and you’ll change the way parenting feels.

As Lockman very convincingly argues, one of the main ways to set a family up for enduring, equitable distribution of labor is when the non–birth parent takes significant leave, preferably alone.26 During that time, the labor that would otherwise stay invisible—including, most importantly, the labor of carrying the mental load—becomes visible.

one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received about how to actually reduce burnout: Think not just about how to reduce your own, but how your own actions are sparking and fanning burnout in others.

If you want to feel less exhausted, less resentful, less filled with unspeakable rage, less ground down to the thinnest, least likable version of yourself, then you have to act, vote, and advocate for solutions that will make life better not just for you, or people who look and speak and act like you and have families like yours—but for everyone.

Conclusion: Burn It Down

But did I choose to delay these things, or did societal realities make it difficult to do anything other than delay them?