Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

They made parenting work. More work, endless work, compounding work.

contemporary parenting standards mean that children become the work.

But the current organization of our society—of school, of work, of the way gender intersects with both—turns children into mini–life bombs. Not them, exactly, so much as the expectations and financial and labor realities that accompany them.

We don’t glom to dating apps because they make dating better, but because they make it optimizable: a line item we can attend to for five minutes between tasks.

We don’t have less sex because we’re less sexual; we have less sex because we’re exhausted.

But with time, cracks in a nation’s most cherished ideological foundations—that hard work is rewarded, that the best succeed, that education is paramount, that things will work out—grow and become unwieldy. In America, we’ve attempted to fill those cracks with the quick fix of more work: more emails, more kids’ activities, more social media posts. We keep going, past the point of exhaustion, because what would happen if we didn’t?

Just because we’ve reconciled ourselves to our current reality doesn’t mean it’s right.

You can draw a crooked line between burnout, and the despair and existential crises that accompany it, and white nationalism, virulent online misogyny, and neofascism.

Desperation drives people to decisions that in the moment make some sort of sense and promise some sort of relief. Just because they’re inexcusable doesn’t mean they’re not explainable.

All of those ideas were compelling, and interesting, and deeply unhelpful. Just another way, in the end, for me to fail myself and the world.

I can’t fix you when it’s society that’s broken you.

We can refuse to blame ourselves for wide-scale societal failures, but also understand how fear of losing one’s already tenuous standing makes us overly protective of the privileges we do have.

actual substantive change has to come from the public sector—and we must vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for it tirelessly.

Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We’re a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.