Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.

We should work hard but exude “work/life balance.” We should be incredibly attentive mothers, but not helicopter ones. We should engage in equal partnerships with our wives, but still maintain our masculinity. We should build our brands on social media, but live our lives authentically. We should be current, conversant, and opinionated about the breakneck news cycle, but somehow not let the reality of it affect our ability to do any of the above tasks. Trying to do all of that at once, with little support or safety net—that’s what makes millennials the burnout generation.

This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats. We gravitate toward those personal cures because they seem tenable, and promise that our lives can be recentered, and regrounded, with just a bit more discipline, a new app, a better email organization strategy, or a new approach to meal planning. But these are all merely Band-Aids on an open wound.

Boomers were anxious and overworked and deeply resentful of the critiques levied at them. The problem, and why it’s often hard to think of them charitably, is their inability to tap that experience in order to empathize with their own children’s generation.

But the myth of the wholly self-made American, like all myths, relies on some sort of sustained willful ignorance—often perpetuated by those who’ve already benefited from them. The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative, for example, has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up.

A metaphor stemming from an MLKJ speech.

But it’s easier—and more heroic—if the story of middle-class ascendency is all about individual hard work. And no one wants to lose any of the hard-won benefits of that work. Which helps explain the popularity of the Personal Responsibility Crusade amongst both boomers and their parents: Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them.

Not all boomers were yuppies—not even close—but thinking through the actions of the yuppies gives us a window into the larger anxieties of the boomer middle class. They took form over the course of the ’70s, metastasized in the ’80s, and became the base temperature of the ’90s.

Navigating a baseline nervousness about your class position, and struggling to find a job that will allow you to try and maintain it—that was the boomer’s iteration of what we now know as burnout. They didn’t have cell phones or massive piles of student debt to exacerbate it, but they did have the fundamental unease, the psychological toll of dealing with everyday precarity.

Examining boomers through the lens of economic history helps explain so much: about their voting habits, and their turn inward. But if you’re still wondering what this has to do with millennial burnout, think about it. Surrounded by perceived threats and growing uncertainty, middle-class boomers doubled down on what they could try to control: their children.

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.

Millennials, by contrast, have internalized the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all that childhood optimization: doing work you’re passionate about, which will naturally lead to other “better life outcomes.”

Of course, no worker asks their employer to value them less, but the rhetoric of “Do what you love” makes asking to be valued seem like the equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct. Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”

Advocating for a union means identifying oneself first and foremost as a laborer, in solidarity with other laborers. It promotes a sort of class consciousness that so many employers have worked to negate, instead reframing “jobs” as “passions” and “workplaces” as “family.” And God forbid you talk about money with family.

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.

Growing up, she thought that a good job was something where you could make a lot of money, love what you do, and do good deeds; now her definition of a good job is “whatever pays the most and allows me to disconnect after five p.m.” It’s a trajectory that feels increasingly common amongst millennials: to find a way to do what you like just fine.

But that’s the thing about American governmental intervention: When it’s effective, it’s enveloped in a narrative of “American ingenuity and hard work”; when it’s ineffective, it’s proof of the fundamentally immoral nature of government assistance.

Outsourcing to subcontractors is also a handy way to get rid of unions, which are generally viewed, through the consultant mindset, as impediments to profit. (If workers in general are impediments to profit, then workers with power definitely are.) The solution to the union problem is simple: lay off everyone employed by the company and, in time, through a subcontractor, hire back people to do the very same jobs, without benefits.

“What is clearly unique in the recent history of capitalism,” the Wall Street anthropologist Karen Ho explains, “is the complete divorce of what is perceived as the best interests of the corporation from the interests of most employees.”

But if you’re a freelancer, you’re familiar with the dark side of these “benefits.” The “freedom to set your own hours” also means the “freedom to pay for your own healthcare.”

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.

the majority of people driving or cleaning or renting their spare bedroom or clicking relentlessly on a mouse in the gig economy are doing it as a second or third job—a shitty job to supplement a different shitty job.22 The gig economy isn’t replacing the traditional economy. It’s propping it up in a way that convinces people it’s not broken.

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. Even calling these jobs “gigs,” with all the inherent connotation of brevity and enjoyability, elides their status as labor.

That’s how Instagram further blurs whatever boundaries remain between work and play. 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. Even when you’re somewhere without phone service—traveling internationally, in the woods, on the water—you can still take the picture and save it for later. Instagram’s photo compression system means that even the crappiest of internet signals can get the job done. And then you wait to see measurable approval of your life roll in.

“I don’t even think I’m financially motivated so much as motivated by the fear that I don’t have the tools or talent to carry me through the rest of my life,” she explained. “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.”

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.

It’s okay if you’re hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, will never buy a home, and are terrified of what a medical catastrophe could bring, so long as you can still blend in with higher incomes in a social setting.

Being with our friends, the people who love and cherish us, is too unsettling to our schedules. But our schedules are our lives. And what are our lives without others?

A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with—the things you fill your life with—feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire.

A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centered-ness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are. To emerge from burnout, and ultimately resist its return, is to remember as much.

Many women can list, in detail, the bevy of tasks, attitudes, and habits that accompany “good” motherhood—and then, in the same sentence, admit there are simply not enough hours in the day to even come close to doing them all. And yet women who can, try. It’s the millennial way: If the system is rigged against you, just try harder.

We can recognize that it’s not enough to try to make things better for our ourselves. We have to make things better for everyone. Which is why 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.