Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Burnout arrives when every corner of our lives feels unstable, and we convince ourselves that working all the time is what will fix it.

The truth was, all of those tasks would take away from what had become my ultimate task, and the task of so many other millennials: working all the time. Where had I learned to work all the time? School. Why did I work all the time? Because I was terrified of not getting a job. Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined. I couldn’t shake the feeling of precariousness—that all that I’d worked for could just disappear—or reconcile it with an idea that had surrounded me since I was a child: that if I just worked hard enough, everything would pan out.

The risk shift also took the form of transferring the responsibility for training to the individual, rather than the employer. In the past, many companies would hire workers with or without college degrees and pay them as they trained them for a specific job. In a factory, someone hired as a packager could get trained up to inspector; a receptionist at an accounting firm could eventually get her CPA. A mining company, for example, would help fund engineering programs at local colleges, and create scholarships for students to attend them. They might not be doing the training themselves, but they were effectively paying for it—with the “risk” (e.g., the cost) falling on the company, not the worker.

While these professional middle-class boomers were by no means the majority—making up just 20 percent of the population—their proximity to levers of power and cultural visibility gave them, and the ideologies they embraced and propagated, outsize force. They were “the elite,” and as Ehrenreich argues, “an elite that is conscious of its status will defend that status, even if this means abandoning, in all but rhetoric, such stated values as democracy and fairness.”

Unlike earlier boomers, “they did not waste time ‘finding themselves’ or joining radical movements,” Ehrenreich writes. “They plunged directly into the economic mainstream, earning and spending with equal zest.” That “yuppy” was a play on Yippie—the name for one of the radical protest groups of the 1960s—was part of the point. The hippies had gone corporate.

It’s not as if these lower-class parents were “bad” parents—it’s just that the skills they cultivated in their children, including independence and imagination, are not the ones valued by the bourgeois workplace. To be valued there, you need plans, lengthy resumes, ease and confidence interacting with authority figures, and innate understandings of how the job ladder works.

But why did companies want to be so “lean”? Because it’d raise their stock value. And who was putting them on a starvation diet? Consultants.

It’s not that profits in and of themselves are morally bad. But the logic of the current market is that a refusal to increase profits, year after year, is a failure. A steady profit, or even a break-even proposition that yields nonfinancial dividends to a community, has no value to stockholders. This isn’t a knock against capitalism so much as this particular type of capitalism: one whose goal is creating short-term profits for people with no connection to the product or the laborers behind it; to award people who have seemingly no awareness of, let alone guilt about, what their investment dollars may have done to the livelihood and working conditions of another.

Again, it wasn’t always this way. Snapchat didn’t always alert you when someone was simply typing. News sites didn’t always send push alerts. Neither did apps for meditation, or Starbucks, or dating, or the New England Patriots, or learning Spanish, or the number matching game 2048.

My memory of childhood boredom is that it was always painful—something I was desperate to escape from. But now I find myself desperate to escape to it, and repeatedly foiled by the easy proximity of the phone.

And the compulsion is heightened for those of us who worked, job searched, or were laid off during the post-2008 recession: We’re desperate to show we’re worthy of a salaried job, and eager to demonstrate how much labor and engagement we’re willing to give in exchange for full-time employment

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.

Erik Klinenberg suggests that part of the decline in social ties is rooted in our preference for efficiency: He points to a study that found that a daycare that made pickup as seamless and quick as possible meant that the parents hardly got to know each other. But when you forced the parents to come inside, wait around, and pick up their kids at the same time, boom, social connections began to form14. But part of the problem, too, is a decline in social infrastructure: the spaces, public and private, from libraries to supper clubs and synagogues, that made it easy to cultivate informal, nonmonetary ties.

Do you know how to move without always moving forward?