Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

COVID-19 is the great clarifier. It clarifies what and who in your life matters, what things are needs and what are wants, who is thinking of others and who is thinking only of themselves.

I’m talking about a different way of thinking about work, and personal value, and profit incentives—to champion the idea that each of us matter, and are actually essential and worthy of care and protection from precarity. Not because of our capacity to work, but simply because we are human, and deserving of basic dignity.

But by that point, I wasn’t really feeling anything at all. Sleep didn’t help; neither did exercise. I got a massage and a facial and they were nice, but the effects were incredibly temporary. Reading sort of helped, but the reading that interested me most was politics-related, which just circled me back to the issues that had exhausted me.

It’s the feeling that your mind, as Cohen puts it, has turned to ash.

(In 1950, CEOs made about 20 times more than the regular employee; by 2013, they made more than 204 times more.)

“I have high career aspirations and my heart still beats to the rhythm of productivity,” she told me. “But I am also so very tired.”

Zookeepers are highly educated but poorly paid, with an average salary of $24,640 in 2002. The majority had to take on a second job in order to make ends meet.

Amongst my peers, I’ve noticed a generalized “come to Jesus” moment regarding job requirements and aspirations: 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. After all, doing what they love burnt them to a crisp. Now they’re just doing jobs—and fundamentally reorienting their relationship to work.

drawing on the definition of Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin, describes as the “subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”4 In other words, hanging out with your own mind and all the emotions and ideas that experience promises and threatens to unearth.

and with more anxiety. Slack thus becomes a way to LARP—Live Action Role Play—your job. “LARPing your job” was coined by the technology writer John Herrman, who, all the way back in 2015, predicted the ways in which Slack would screw with our conception of work: “Slack is where people make jokes and register their presence; it is where stories and editing and administrating are discussed as much for self-justification

I work very hard to produce evidence that I’m constantly doing work instead of, well, actually doing work.

think I was just exhausted, given no help, and blamed for any feelings of resentment in my life.”

We shouldn’t have to choose between excelling in work and thriving as individuals. We should feel good about listening to our bodies when they tell us, in every way they know how, that we should stop.