Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

So they hire multiple freelancers to do the work of a full-time staffer, which gives the company high-quality work, without the added responsibility to shoulder freelancers’ health benefits or ensure fair working conditions.

In an office job, you’re still getting paid for those five minutes it takes to make a cup of tea; when you’re freelancing, every minute you’re not working, you’re losing money.”

After reading this i feel suddenly grateful

from cell phones to Apple Watches, from Instagram to Slack, encourage our worst habits. They stymie our best-laid plans for self-preservation. They ransack our free time.

loss of privacy, of attention, of autonomy.

Kebanyakan main hp

millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life.

sometimes find myself scrolling through my own account as I fight that before-sleep anxiety: When I don’t feel connected to myself or my life, Instagram reminds me of who I’ve decided I am.

Benefit of instagram

It distances us from actual experiences as we obsess over documenting them.

Recovering from burnout doesn’t mean extracting yourself from the world. It just means thinking a lot more actively, and carefully, about the way you’ve convinced yourself is the best way to interact with it.

The internet isn’t the root cause of our burnout. But its promise to “make our lives easier” is a profoundly broken one, responsible for the illusion that “doing it all” isn’t just possible, but mandatory.

so is tweeting and Instagramming, because it contributes to her overall brand, which keeps her employed.

But if she tries to relax, hang out, read a book at the pool, it has serious ramifications on her mental health. At this point, Caroline fears she’s been working this way for so long that her attitude is too broken to ever be fixed.

leisure was the time to “do what you will,”

do for the pleasure

Do I read fiction because I love to read fiction, or to say that I have read fiction? These aren’t entirely new phenomena, but they help explain the prevalence of millennial burnout: It’s hard to recover from days spent laboring when your “time off” feels like work.

first, as productivity went up, the number of expected hours at work did indeed decrease. But starting in the 1970s, they began to rise again. Part of the reason was classic American capitalism. If you can make a hundred widgets in less time, that doesn’t mean everyone should work less—instead, they should work the same number of hours and make more widgets.

for most millennials I know, the only person “forcing” them to work long hours is themselves. Not because we’re masochists, but because we’ve internalized the idea that the only way to keep excelling at our jobs is to work all the time.

The problem with this attitude is that working all the time doesn’t mean producing all the time, but it nonetheless creates a self-satisfying fiction of “productivity.”

Rest doesn’t just make workers happier, but makes them more efficient when they’re actually on the job.

Today, 31 percent of full-time employees—and 56 percent of people with multiple jobs—work on the weekends.

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.

monetized hobby might be periodically enjoyable, but 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.

privileged ternyata punya hobi yg gak dimonetisasi

They understand that reading a book matters not because others know about it, but because you took pleasure in it. That attitude might sound simple, or maybe just obvious. But for so many millennials, it’s often feels impossible.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,

That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire.

seringkali dari miskonsepsi kita ttg kerja, keep up with productivity tanpa memaknai lebih dalam kalau istirahat itu penting!!

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

Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear.

Everyone should be the ideal worker and not have to leave to take care of a sick kid. If one family struggles to balance it all, it’s a personal problem. All these families with the same problem? That’s a social issue.”11

It’s about showing status,” Burnett told Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed. “That if you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life.”12 Busy-ness, in other words, as a very certain sort of class.

Upper-middle-class parents like Stephanie aren’t worried about covering basic financial expenses. They’re worried about downward mobility: If Stephanie’s kids don’t go to summer camp or get braces, will their chances of maintaining middle-class status go down?

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

grgr ini banyak parent yg burn out untuk menghindarinya

Leisure shouldn’t be this scarce.

Burnout has enveloped our current iteration of capitalism. It inflects and infects every interaction; it haunts every decision.

I can’t fix you when it’s society that’s broken you. Instead, I’ve tried to provide a lens for you to see yourself and the world around you clearly.

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.

beliau insist kalau kita make something better itu harusnya buat everyone