Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Burnout is when you hit the wall—but instead of collapsing, or taking a rest, you scale the wall, and just keep going.

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

there was evidence that something inside me was, well, broken: My to-do list, specifically the bottom half of it, just kept recycling itself from one week to the next, a neat little stack of shame.

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being. Adulting therefore becomes a verb.”

three types of adulting tasks: 1) the kind that are annoying because you’ve never done them before (taxes, making friends outside the framework of school); 2) the kind that are annoying because they underline that being an adult means spending money on things that are no fun at all (vacuums, lawnmowers, razors); 3) the kind that are more than just annoying—they’re time-consuming and unnecessarily labyrinthian (finding a therapist, submitting medical reimbursement bills, canceling cable service, quitting your gym, consolidating your student loans, figuring out if and how to access state support programs).

Every day, we all have a list of things that need to get done, places where our mental energy must be allocated first. But that energy is finite, and when you keep trying to pretend that it isn’t—that’s when burnout arrives.

Why this is SO familiar:")

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 were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system—of American capitalism and meritocracy—or

there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.

We should build our brands on social media, but live our lives authentically.

Trying to do all of that at once, with little support or safety net—that’s what makes millennials the burnout generation.

Burnout, after all, is a symptom of living in our modern capitalist society.

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.

Boomers are increasingly positioned as hypocritical, unempathetic, completely unaware of just how easy they had it—the

To understand millennial burnout, then, we have to understand what shaped—and, in many cases, burnt out—the boomers that made us.

Parentig syle ernyata bisa ngeshape burn out jg ya

whose generation had weathered the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II, these boomers were simply ungrateful. They’d been given the keys to the American Dream but failed to cultivate any sort of work ethic, or the sort of deferred gratification that would allow them to pass their middle-class status down to the next generation.

In essence, the worker committed years of their life to making the company profitable; the company then commits some extra years of its profits to the employee.

esensi pensiun

(white, middle-class) boomers are, at their heart, sociopaths: lacking in empathy, egotistical, with a high disregard for others.

they broke the social contract

“As an adult, I’ve realized I get stressed when I’m not doing something,” Caitlin says. “I feel guilty just relaxing. Even in college, I found myself needing to take eighteen to nineteen units a semester, have a campus job, join clubs, volunteer, work on the plays and musicals, and I’d still feel like I wasn’t doing enough.”

WHY THIS SOUNDS SO FAMILIAR ternyata karna dari kecil udah didedikasikan buat ikut ini itu, kyk aku dulu bimbel waktu sd, terus pulang sekolah ke tpa buat ngaji, jadi ampe dewasa pun masih kebawa-bawa parenting style sih pengaruh besar, apalagi dari childhood itu persiapan buat pendewasaan gitu jadinya ya kyk ke mindset gitu guys..

how parenting, and the expectations of childhood that attend it, changed across the socioeconomic spectrum.

bad stereotype of the millennial existence: overscheduled, overprivileged, and, one can easily imagine in the years to come, deeply burnt out.

knowing “what it takes to make music” was important. “I didn’t think about the other benefits, such as the discipline to remember to practice, or the importance of learning to play in public,”

“helicopter parenting,” which could also just be described as more parenting, and particularly more time spent with children, especially during the afterschool and weekend times when those children were previously on their own.

“the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.”

Weaknesses Of helicopter pareting

“a common concern of parents these days is that children grow up too fast. But sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood.”

They’ve spent a ton of time with adults, and learned the external markings of performing adulthood,

overprotected kid is that they grow up to be weak and lazy.

“Any down time began to feel like I was being lazy and unproductive,” she recalls, “which in turn made me question my self-worth.”

major contributing factor to millennial burnout: If working hard to achieve those jobs can’t offer security, what can?

Makanya pada insist anaknya jadi pns karna secure job

the preparation for college taught us a valuable, lingering lesson: how to orient our entire lives around the idea that hard work brings success and fulfillment, no matter how many times we’re confronted with proof to the contrary.

“One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think,” he said. “We could just retain information so much easier,

that the thing you worked so hard for, the thing you sacrificed for and physically suffered for, isn’t happiness, or passion, or freedom.

One caused of burning out

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.”

“lovable” work: that when you love what you do, not only does the “labor” behind it disappear, but your skill, your success, your happiness, and your wealth all grow exponentially because of it.

“when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”

culture of overwork does not mean better work, or more productive work—it just means more time at work, which becomes a stand-in for devotion.

internships are about connections and, above all else, the willingness and ability to work for little to nothing.

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.

Millennials’ growing disillusionment with the “Do what you love” ethos,

They no longer want their dream job—they just want a job that doesn’t underpay them, overwork them, and guilt them into not advocating for themselves.

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.

A good job is one that doesn’t exploit you and that you don’t hate.

“I worked above and beyond, putting every drop of energy I had into being the most enthusiastic, invested employee,” she said. “But the new leadership did not like me, no matter how hard I tried.”

Gaji sama fasilitas itu menarik org buat apply tapi style pemimpin sama partner kerja decide org stay ato resign

Trimming the company meant short-term profits; short term profits meant higher stock prices and satisfied stockholders; satisfied stockholders meant the CEO and board members got to keep their jobs, even as the remaining non-temp, non-outsourced workers at the company were given less and less in terms of benefits and pay increases.

“jobs with decent pay, decent benefits, and stable work schedules,”

job security and satisfaction—a work scenario that doesn’t cause burnout but helps protect against it.

But free food isn’t just a benefit. It’s a strategy to incentivize overwork, and the practice, along with so many other tenets of overwork, came directly from the culture of Wall Street.

the more surveilled—and less trusted—you feel, the less productive you are.

Lebih nervous

And then there’s the trackers. In order to decrease health insurance premiums, more

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.